What is your background and what are you studying/working on now?
I did my undergrad in oceanography at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, in Ensenada, Mexico, which is about two hours south of San Diego. That was a five year degree and after that I worked for a year as a research assistant at CICESE (Centro de Investigacion Cientifica y de Educacion Superior de Ensenada) in the physical oceanography department which is what made me want to continue doing physical oceanography. I did my PhD at Oregon State with Kipp Sherman and then I moved to Taiwan and did almost two years on a fellowship over there, working primarily with coastal models. Now I’m in MOD and here I’m looking at temperature and salinity variability along isopycnals, how they’re changing with time and how they relate to mixing depending on what physical features are present.

What keeps you excited and interested in working in the field of oceanography?
That’s a very interesting question, I go back and forth with this a lot. When you’re doing a lot of writing this often comes up. I think there are two main things though. Curiosity is the first one, I just love figuring out how nature works. The ocean is not static, it has so many different processes going on and they all influence climate and us humans and I just love to discover all of that. The second thing is contributing to the human understanding of our planet. It can be hard sometimes when you’re working with something that is so detailed, which a lot of us in MOD do, to find the meaning and motivation for it, what’s the bigger picture? But when you reframe it in terms of contributing a piece of the puzzle of collective human knowledge of our planet, how it changes with climate and how we can mitigate that, it makes more sense. I am starting to think about the third step of this too, which would be how to use our improved understanding to help people impacted by a changing climate which is something that feels very meaningful to me and keeps me excited.

When you were a kid, did you expect to be a scientist?
When I was a kid I wanted to be a biologist. I used to go to the San Diego Zoo as a child and absolutely loved it. I saw myself as a zookeeper and I wanted to do something related to biology. That’s how I ended up in oceanography, thinking it was really marine biology (which it is not really) and here we are…

Were there any particular things from your childhood that drew you to study the ocean?
My parents took me to the ocean a lot as a kid and I think I always felt very comfortable in and around the ocean because of that. We often went to the aquarium and the ocean have always just felt familiar and a big part of my life. Though what made me particularly interested in marine sciences was high school teacher of mine who was an oceanographer. She taught biology and geography and always included a lot of the oceans in her classes which opened my eyes to this being something you could study at university.

What skills or abilities do you think are useful when thinking about going into oceanography in graduate school or working as an oceanographer?
What comes to mind right away, which is probably reflective of where I am in my own life at the moment, is storytelling. Being able to construct a story. I think we are generally good at investigating why’s and hypotheses, but putting it in a compelling way is hard. And it may seem like “soft science”, but I truly believe that there’s an art to being able to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, even in a scientific journal, and to be able to capture your audience and convince them of something. That is a useful skill I wish I had started working on earlier in my academic career. And then of course there are more “hard skills” like coding, you can rarely get too much of that, and good communication skills are really important too.

What does a typical work-day look like for you?
Oh, that really depends on what kind of mood I’m in. My ideal typical day would be to wake up and have some coffee. I like to read something first thing in my day that puts me in the mood for science, something that inspires me and gets me thinking about what I’m doing. What that is depends on what project I’m working on, but I have a list of papers I’m working my way through. Then, if I’m in a writing mode, I’d like to put in at least one hour of writing in early on. Sometimes when I have some flow that means I write a whole page or two, and sometimes that means I have to fight to even get two sentences on paper, but it’s about being consistent, although I’m not always good at being consistent.

Then I try to dedicate some time to look at data. There’s a lot of organizing of data that needs to happen before you can even start making figures and think about science questions. I also spend a lot of time thinking about structuring data in general. How do we store it efficiently, where, how to make it accessible to people et cetera. Emails unfortunately take up some time each day too. Looking for opportunities after I’m done with this postdoc here at Scripps is also something I do on some days. Meetings, seminars, and socializing with colleagues is something I try to do most weeks too. It’s important to not forget about the social aspect of academic work which can sometimes be quite lonely when you’re sat there in front of your computer most of the time.

Alejandra Sanchez-Rios, Devon Northcott and Jen MacKinnon doing fieldwork in the North Atlantic.

What drew you to work at Scripps?
Well, I knew Jen MacKinnon from past fieldwork and conferences, and I really liked the projects she was involved in but I did not see a post-doc position in the MOD lab advertised at the time. Long story short, I ended up applying for a postdoc position at SIO that was more in the realm of atmospheric sciences. Many things factored in there, including that I wanted to be close to home since my parents live in Tijuana and I had lived far away (Oregon and Taiwan) for many years. During the interview process the person I was supposed to work with said that I looked like a good match for the MOD group with my background in observations as well as models of rapid dynamical processes. I set up a meeting with Jen and we talked and I was so excited about the kind of work that happens in MOD. With the help of Jen we wrote a proposal to work together and I applied for a fellowship at UCSD. I got it and here we are.

Is there a particular scientist or person that inspires you?
That is a very good question. I think I’ve been very lucky with my advisors which have all been very inspiring people that have pushed me in a very good way to be better. They’ve all understood me and seen me in a very human way which I’ve appreciated.

Big picture inspiration though, there are some activists/writers that are doing amazing work in general. One is Loretta J. Ross. She works in reproductive rights justice, and even though she does nothing related to oceanography she started the discussion about intersectionality that made me really start to understand how different things are connected, how you can’t devaluate any part of the equation because they’re all in balance. That also helps remind me when I’m doing science that nothing is completely objective that nothing is unrelated, the human part is as important as the scientific part. That grounds me as an oceanographer, to never let go of the whole picture and stay in my bubble of “oh, the only thing that matters is geostrophy” or whatever. I highly recommend reading some of Ross’ work, she’s able to be vulnerable and share her story but still be very much in an academic setting.

Anna Savage and Alejandra doing fieldwork aboard the R/V Armstrong 2021.

Do you have a fun fact that you'd like to share that not everyone knows about you?
Well, a pretty fun fact is that by pure luck and coincidence I ended up, on my first oceanographic cruise ever, getting to go down in HOV Alvin [a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution submersible]. My advisor at the time had a lot of time booked in ALVIN so he managed to take all his students down and I think it was on my 22nd birthday that I got the gift of going down 300m below the surface of the ocean.

Text and photos by Kerstin Bergentz