Kelly
Benoit-Bird
Oregon State University

I am an Associate Professor of Biological Oceanography at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. I think that I first became interested in aquatic life as a child on the many fishing trips I took with my father in the waters near our New England home. I earned a BS in Aquatic Biology at Brown University and a PhD in Zoology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

My research focus is pelagic ecology with an emphasis on applying acoustical techniques to animals in the ocean ranging in size from zooplankton to sperm whales. A major concentration of my research is predator-prey interactions. For example, some recent projects have included Hawaiian spinner dolphins foraging on deep sea fish, sperm whales feeding on squid, and sardines feeding on copepods and krill. I consider myself a community ecologist seeking to determine how animals are distributed in three-dimensional space over time in the ocean, how they got that way, and what the consequences of those patterns are. These questions have important implications for understanding ecosystem processes, fisheries and their management, chemical and nutrient cycling in the ocean, endangered species, and mitigation of human activities.