Dr. William Kuperman has been selected as the 2011 recipient the Walter Munk Award for Distinguished Research in Oceanography Related to Sound and the Sea. Since 1993, The Oceanography Society has presented this award to recognize:
- Significant original contributions to the understanding of physical ocean processes related to sound in the sea;
- Significant original contributions to the application of acoustic methods to that understanding; and/or
- Outstanding service that fosters research in ocean science and instrumentation contributing to the above.
Dr. Kuperman is a Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the University of California San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Dr Kuperman's achievements were noted in a letter supporting his nomination:
"Bill Kuperman is at the forefront of a revolution in our understanding of wave scattering physics. This revolution is changing such diverse fields as medical imaging, seismology and oceanography. Practitioners now use chaotic scattering fields as coherent lenses and random noises as coherent sources. Complex propagation environments that once confounded the interpretation of received signals are now are said to "enrich their information content". Bill and colleagues have discovered how to extract this information and are opening new avenues for the remote sensing of the ocean. For oceanographers, the benefits of this revolution are just emerging."
The Munk Award will be presented to Dr. Kuperman during the 162nd Meeting of Acoustical Society of America in San Diego, CA (31 October – 4 November 2011), and he will also be recognized during the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt Lake City, UT (February 20 – 24, 2012).
Dr. Kuperman joins the list of distinguished prior recipients of the Walter Munk Award:
- 2009: James F. Lynch, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA
- 2006: Peter F. Worcester, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA
- 2003: H. Thomas Rossby, Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, USA
- 2001: Robert C. Spindel, Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington, USA
- 1999: Robert Pinkel, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA
- 1997: Stephen A. Thorpe, Southampton Oceanography Centre, UK
- 1996: Leonid M. Brekhovskikh, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia
- 1994: David M. Farmer, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Canada
- 1993: Walter Munk, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA
The Oceanography Society was founded in 1988 to disseminate knowledge of oceanography and its application through research and education, to promote communication among oceanographers, and to provide a constituency for consensus-building across all the disciplines of the field.
Contact:
Jennifer Ramarui
Executive Director
The Oceanography Society
jenny@tos.org
Tel: 301-251-7708