Charles R. Greene, Jr., Ph.D. (President and Principal Scientist) has S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in EE from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has worked on underwater acoustics research and engineering since 1959. Much of his earlier work was supported by the U.S. Navy and involved underwater noise and acoustic transmission loss experiments in the Arctic Ocean. Since 1980, he has worked with biologists studying the behavior of whales and fish exposed to industrial noise. In 1983 he founded Greeneridge Sciences to continue bioacoustics work. In 1995 he completed a project for the U.S. Minerals Management Service involving four field seasons at Barrow, Alaska, studying the influence of industrial sounds on migrating arctic whales in springtime. During that project and also during an earlier (1980-84) project for MMS, he provided and operated underwater sound sources that could be used to test the responses of bowhead whales. For four years beginning in 1996 he measured and described the pulsed sounds of airgun arrays operated in the Beaufort Sea during seismic surveys for hydrocarbon deposits. In support of this effort, he has developed and used autonomous seafloor recorders to store sound data for up to three weeks continuously during seismic surveys and bowhead whale migration. He is currently responsible for measuring the industrial sounds in air and underwater associated with the Northstar Development offshore near Prudhoe Bay and for monitoring acoustically the locations of calling bowhead whales passing Northstar during their fall migration. Dr. Greene is the author of three chapters on physical acoustics in the book Marine Mammals and Noise published by Academic Press in 1995. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and serves on their Medals and Awards Committee. He is a member of NOAA Fisheries' panel of experts on noise standards for marine mammal exposure. Download curriculum vitae (PDF, 142 KB).

William C. Burgess, Ph.D. (Senior Research Engineer) designed the first microprocessor-based acoustic recording tag for marine wildlife in 1994. He created the first commercial acoustic recording tags, the Acousonde™ and its predecessor the Bioacoustic Probe™, leading the industrial design, writing the software operating systems, and designing all analog and digital electronics. These instruments have been used by over sixteen marine research and engineering organizations located in the United States and abroad, not only for the study of protected species but also for marine geophysics, underwater vehicle development, officer training, and the monitoring of offshore oil production facilities. Dr. Burgess’ technical background includes geophysical remote sensing with low-frequency radio, bioacoustics, audio-frequency signal processing, and both hardware and software systems architecture. His field experience includes over seven months at remote sites in Antarctica, northern Québec, and the Alaskan Arctic, and over four months at sea on research vessels in Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico waters. He has acquired and analyzed acoustic data from jet aircraft, rockets, missiles, vessels, airguns, and pile drivers, and collaborated on the analysis of acoustic and kinematic data recorded by his tags on whales, seals, and sharks. Dr. Burgess received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and conducted ocean acoustic research under postdoctoral scholarships at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). He is a member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, the Society for Marine Mammalogy, and the American Geophysical Union, and chaired special sessions on animal-bioacoustics instrumentation at ASA conferences in 2000 and 2005. Download curriculum vitae (PDF, 100 KB).

Susanna B. Blackwell, Ph.D. (Senior Scientist) received a Licence ès Sciences in Zoology from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and her graduate degree in Biology from the University of California Santa Cruz.  She has held postdoctoral positions at UCSC, the University of Stockholm and Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, in all cases working with large marine vertebrates — northern and southern elephant seals, bottlenose dolphins, Baltic grey seals, Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna and albacore tuna.  She has been involved in the design and manufacture of several types of seal data loggers, recording parameters such as depth, temperature, heart rate, swim speed, activity levels, bioluminescence and sound as a function of time.  Her field experience has brought her from rodent trapping in alpine meadows to acoustic tracking of tuna in the Pacific Ocean, and acoustic monitoring for bowhead whales in the Alaskan Arctic.  She joined Greeneridge in May 2000 and has since collected and analyzed acoustic data on man-made sounds in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to assess their range and impact on marine mammals.  She is a member of the Acoustical Society of America, the Society for Marine Mammalogy and the Society for Bioluminescence and Chemiluminescence. Download curriculum vitae (PDF, 49 KB).

Katherine H. Kim, Ph.D. (Senior Research Scientist) received her B.S. in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, the latter in a joint program of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Electrical Engineering. She specialized in research problems in underwater acoustics and signal processing as a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceangraphy and then as a senior scientist at Heat, Light, & Sound Research, La Jolla, California. Her background includes work in adaptive and robust signal processing methods for detection and localization of ocean acoustic signals, covariance estimation and source motion effects on adaptive array processing and matched field processing, investigations into acoustic pressure sensitivities to uncertainties in 3-D sound speed fields, ocean reverberation modeling, underwater acoustic communications, and ocean engineering. Dr. Kim has extensive sea-going experience and holds advanced SCUBA and coastal cruising certifications. Her current research areas involve the passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammals and the acoustic propagation associated with their vocalizations, ranging from a variety of dolphin in the Pacific Ocean to sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico to bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean. Since joining Greeneridge in June 2008, Dr. Kim has collected and analyzed acoustic data in the Alaskan Arctic to model and measure anthropogenic and bowhead whale sounds. She is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE. Download curriculum vitae (PDF, 88 KB).

John Brandon, Ph.D. (Marine Stock Assessment Scientist) provides modeling and statistical support to personnel within the LGL Group and directly to clients. He has worked on developing mark-recapture abundance estimates from photo-identification data, including for the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale and the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas (BCB) stock of bowhead whales. His field assignments have included vessel-based and aerial surveys for marine mammals and seabirds. John's experience as a fisheries scientist began with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service in 1998. There he assisted with research on dolphin populations that have been affected by the tuna fisheries in the eastern tropical Pacific. In 2003, he started graduate studies at the University of Washington, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences under the tutelage of Prof. André Punt. His doctoral studies focused on quantifying uncertainty and incorporating environmental stochasticity in Bayesian stock assessments of marine mammals. John has presented much of this work as an Invited Participant to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission, in the context of ensuring the sustainability of aboriginal whaling catch quotas for BCB bowhead and eastern North Pacific gray whales. In his dissertation, John developed methods for incorporating environmental data into population dynamics models and applied those methods to test the robustness of management strategies given a range of forecasts of future environmental conditions. John is proficient in several programming languages, including: Fortran, AD Model Builder, Visual Basic and R/S-Plus. Additionally, he has practice with WinBUGS and Stock Synthesis software packages. John is experienced with likelihood and Bayesian approaches, and has applied model-selection and averaging techniques as alternatives to standard hypothesis testing. In addition to his work on modeling and assessments, John has served as a marine species observer on numerous aerial and ship-based research surveys including the Yangtze River in China, the South China Sea, the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the eastern Tropical Pacific, the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, and the Arctic Ocean.