Working at sea aboard the R/V Sikuliaq off the Oregon Coast (Winter, 2019). Photo credit: Mark Farley (HMSC-OSU).

Christian Briseño-Avena, Ph.D., is an ocean-going biological oceanographer & plankton ecologist studying zooplankton physical-biological interactions at a wide range of temporal and spatial scales and levels of organization (individual, population, ecosystem) with the aid of state-of-the-art methods (optical and acoustical). Dr. Briseño-Avena joined the Prairie Lab and the Department of Environmental and Ocean Sciences (EOSC) in the summer of 2019 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where he has been conducting research on marine snow-copepod interactions using laboratory-based experiments and he is an instructor of record  in the department.

“If there is magic in this planet, it is contained in water… Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future”.

Loren Eiseley (1907-1977)

“Si existe magia en este planeta, está contenida en el agua… su sustancia alcanza todos los rincones; abarca el pasado y prepara el futuro.”  [Translation my own]

Dr. Briseño-Avena has conducted research in a wide variety of oceanographic regions, ranging from the North Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Eastern Tropical Pacific, and along different sections of the California Current. Briseño-Avena’s M.S. and Ph.D. works allowed him to explore underwater imaging and active acoustics as tools to understand the three-dimensional distributions of plankton in situ and how they interact with their ever-moving environment. As a Postdoctoral Scholar at Hatfield Marine Science Center, Oregon State University (HMSC-OSU), Christian collaborated with an interdisciplinary team, the CONsortium for COastal River Dominated Ecosystems (CONCORDE) studying the physical-biological processes of the river-dominated ecosystem of the Mississippi Bight, in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. While at HMSC-OSU, Christian lead the development and implementation of image processing pipelines in collaboration with the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB), to be used in current and future lab projects using the In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS).