So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye...

Postdocs Ben Ward and Pierre Rampal head to Europe/ Scandinavia

Ben, who came to MIT in May 2009, has been developing and applying mathematical models to look into ways that basic species properties give rise to large-scale patterns in the oceans. With the goal of improving our understanding of how marine ecosystems work, he is especially interested in how they might change through time. You can read more about recent work in Biophysical Aspects of Resource Acquisition and Competition in Algal Mixotrophs at the Darwin website.

Ben is leaving to join the Environmental Research and Teaching Institute - Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris where he will be working on understanding the role of predation in shaping marine communities and the part it plays in global nutrient cycling.

Pierre, who came to MIT in 2010, has been working on a couple of problems involving Arctic sea ice. The first concerned volume loss, as seen by the AR4 IPCC models, and its recent acceleration as observed from satellite and in-situ measurements. You can read about this work in the MIT news article  On Thin Ice. The second was a comparison of Arctic sea ice types: (old) perennial ice versus (young) seasonal ice. Focussing on their observed respective temporal evolution in both extent and volume, Pierre developed a new piece of MITgcm code to track these quantities throughout a simulation to closely reproduce observed behaviors.

Pierre leaves us for a Scientist position at the Nansen Center (NERSC) in Bergen, Norway where he will be working in the ocean/sea ice forecast team led by Laurent Bertino. He is looking foward to working on the completeion of a new sea ice rheology which will allow tracking of the mechanical state of sea ice cover over short periods of time (or order a week or so), especially the density of cracks in strategic small areas located along the typical shipping routes.

Ben, who worked with Mick Follows and the Darwin team, commented that his best MIT experience was "constant exposure of new ideas in the group". Pierre, who worked with Patrick Heimbach, expressed similar sentiments, adding how much he valued discussion time with other postdocs as well as Patrick's willingness to allow him to work freely, especially when his research led him to collaborate with researchers beyond MIT, in particular sea ice observationalist, Ron Kwok at JPL, an institution with which Heimbach is intimately connected through ECCO2.