Dr. Kakani Katija, Principal Engineer, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)
Posted on August 26th, 2017
Where Engineering Meets Science
When Kakani asked her engineer grandfather what direction she should explore in her education, he replied, “well, civil engineering is about concrete, and that can get boring. So, aerospace seems like a good idea.”
And so began an incredible journey from championship figure skating to groundbreaking discoveries of our oceans and how much we have to learn from larvaceans. Larvaceans, our featured chordate, are a vital part of the food web. Through Dr. Kakani Katija’s research we have learned just how pervasive plastics are in our oceans.
“Really, I want to develop tools that will help science discovery explode.”
- Dr. Kakani Katija
Dr. Micheli is a marine ecologist and conservation biologist. Fio, as she is known to students and colleagues, is Italian. Her career path wasn’t a straight line. At college in Florence she studied animal behavior, but after graduating, she took a job collecting intertidal animals for a nature documentary. Fio loved working in the rocky intertidal. This project launched her into marine science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and then went to the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, in Santa Barbara, for a post doc. She never went back to live in Italy.
Going Places in the Deep Sea! 
Dr. John Pearse has spent a lifetime studying the reproductive biology and ecology of sea stars and sea urchins. His doctoral work involved exploring the biology of marine invertebrates in the Antarctic, where he overwintered in 1961 then returned with his own students repeatedly in the 1980s. They found that the abundant and ecologically important Antarctic cushion star spawns in mid-winter to produce long-lived pelagic larvae that feed on bacteria and phytoplankton in the summer. Dr. Pearse has also conducted research in the Red Sea and tropical Pacific.
Dr. Crissy Huffard’s broad research interests are to understand how marine animals live their daily lives to survive and reproduce in changing environments. She has worked primarily with cephalopods, doing her Ph.D. research on octopus behavior. Passionate about the ocean, Dr. Huffard worked for several years in marine conservation with Conservation International Indonesia, and as a consultant with the World Wildlife Fund in Washington DC
Dr. Kristi Curry Rogers studies dinosaur evolution and paleobiology, which means she spends a lot of time out in the field looking for dinosaur fossils — from Montana to Madagascar. She is a vertebrate paleontologist and currently Assistant Professor in Geology and Biology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. When Dr. Curry Rogers is not in the field, she does research on the fossils she discovered in the field. In particular, she looks at the how fast some of the largest dinosaurs grew by looking closely at microscopic slices of fossilized bones (