Melissa Omand at TEDxURI 2021
A Sea of Minions and the Carbon Cycle
Advancements in ocean technology will enable us to observe the ocean interior (the ‘twilight zone’) on vast scales. Melissa Omand, Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, describes her plan to release hundreds of tiny glass robots as deep ocean sentinels, tracking the vertical transport of carbon from the surface to the deep sea.
Melissa Omand
Assistant Professor
As an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Oceanography, Melissa studies transport and sequestration of carbon in the ocean. She focuses on a process called the ‘biological pump’ – determining the fate of carbon that derives from biological sources such as phytoplankton. Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Melissa received her Bachelors of Science degree in Physics from the University of Guelph in 2004. She completed her Doctorate in Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University or San Diego (2011), and her postdoctoral work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She joined the faculty at URI in January 2015.