Lessons from the deep: engineering biosensors, workflows, and visualizations for communication and collaboration in comparative medicine and climate science | Jessica Kendall-Bar

Abstract: Effective conservation and management relies on an in-depth understanding of the health of marine ecosystems. Dr. Kendall-Bar’s interdisciplinary approach combines engineering, visualization, and computation to study ocean resilience in terms of the extreme physiology and behavior of marine animals, establishing eco-physiological baselines to track over time in the face of climate change. This seminar and chalk talk will review her work to create innovative tools to detect, visualize, and analyze the physiology and behavior of animals in extreme environments that showcase their biological resilience to oxygen and sleep deprivation. From individuals to ecosystems, Kendall-Bar conducts multidisciplinary physiological studies that combine basic and applied science with potential to advance conservation and comparative medicine. This seminar reviews Kendall-Bar’s dissertation research on sleep in seals and presents some current and ongoing projects to combine high-performance computing, automation, and visualization to assess diving physiology in human freedivers, epilepsy in sea lions, and cardiac performance in some of the largest (blue whales) and smallest (emperor penguins) divers. Kendall-Bar’s newest projects involve novel data visualizations and science communication to inform research as well as international policy in domains ranging from marine mammal conservation to traditional ecological knowledge and coral reef restoration.

 

Bio: Dr. Jessica Kendall-Bar is a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. Her research combines engineering, data science, ecology, and visualization to measure behavior and physiology of marine animals amidst a changing climate. For her dissertation, she developed a non-invasive system to record and visualize the first recordings of marine mammal sleep at sea published in Science. She is an award-winning scientist, artist, and science communicator who designs data visualization courses, large-scale exhibits, immersive analytical tools, and decision support tools. Her data visualizations, published in local news outlets, The New York Times and The Atlantic, have informed international policy in domains ranging from marine mammal conservation to coral reef restoration.