Video: Jules Jaffe's photonic tools explore the secrets of the ocean
His underwater tools include cameras and sensors, and he uses them to unlock the mysteries of life in the ocean.
Jules Jaffe is a research oceanographer in the Marine Physical Laboratory of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. The Jaffe Underwater Imaging Laboratory develops innovative tools for exploring the ocean.
In the video, Jaffe talks about several of his lab's projects, including the OmniCam -- an omnidirectional, high-resolution, high-speed, underwater imaging system designed to record the ambient light field in the open ocean. In addition to its use in light-field measurment, the Omnicam system has applications in wide field-of-view surveys of coastal ocean environments such as reefs and kelp forests.
Another project involves studying the ocean's complex processes with swarms of inexpensive, miniaturized robotic floats that travel with currents, sense the environment and report their findings.
Jaffe received his PhD in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley, in biophysics. He is a Fellow of the American Acoustical Society and a past recipient of a National Science Foundation Creativity Award. He has been at Scripps since 1988, and was previously an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He was interviewed in his lab in August 2010.
