I am a Physical Oceanographer, currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. My education was in Physics & Math (B.Sc., Tel aviv University), Applied Physics (M.Sc, Weizmann Institiute of Science), and Atmospheric & Oceanic Science (Ph.D., UCLA).

I got interested in Oceanography in the last year of my B.Sc., due to an email invitation to a course in Physical Oceanography. The Syllabus, to my surprise at the time, made it sound like physics techniques and concepts such as wave dispersion relations, instabilities, and more, can be applied to research questions regarding even the largest scales of the oceans. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked. Admittedly, part of the draw was the exotic course location, a "private" patch of the Gulf of Eilat coastline.  

For my MSc thesis research, with Professor Eli Tziperman, I studied how nonlinear air-sea interaction might conspire to force intraseasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere through wave-wave resonance. The project fit well my outlook at the time, using tools I knew mainly from my classical (and modern) physics studies, without very much prior background in atmosphere and ocean topics proper yet.

For my PhD research, with Professors Jim McWilliams and Andrew Stewart, I shifted my focus from the atmospehre to the ocean. My PhD research began with fairly idealized study of instability of boundary currents. Its motivation, elucidation of the mechanisms of boundary current leakiness, led to my main PhD project: realistic high-resolution numerical modeling of the Deep Western Boundary Current and analysis of its leakiness dynamics within the model and in observations. Other numerical ocean modeling projects are described in the "Research" tab. 

As I expanded my toolkit during my PhD, I also got invloved in coastal observations and research within the UCLA Marine Operations team, with its "tiny" (28 feet/9 m long) but armed to the teeth (in oceanographic instumentation) research vessel, the Kodiac. Much of the work invloved honing the Kodiac instrumentation and data acquisition methods, and iteratively testing them in practice trips within the Santa Monica Bay. This all payed out in preparing us for a successfull 3-week long observational campaign in the Lousisiana Bight region in 2017 (SPLASH), in which we investigated density current dynamics, among other themes.

My postdoctoral work, with Andrew Stewart at UCLA, and with Andy Hogg at ANU, invloves the ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation again, but this time in the Southern Ocean. We aim to apply an investigation of theoretical (and empirical) aspects of deep circulation near topography, to the development of a practical technique for the monitoring of aspects of the deep Southern Ocean MOC component through satellite observations.

I am excited about this opportunity in my postdoctoral research to develop a practical product while trying to answer basic science questions. Subsequently, the technique would be used to acquire knowledge of deep MOC variability and dynamics. This work combines my prior interests in the overturning ocean circulation pathways and dynamics, and in topographic effects.