After six years of building cameras, chasing fish, and writing more calibration code than I care to admit, it’s time. I’ll be defending my Ph.D. thesis on Thursday, November 19, 2026.

  • Title: Designing for Citizen Science: Fish Length Measurement with Commercial Off-the-Shelf Hardware
  • When: Thursday, November 19, 2026, at 1:00 PM Pacific
  • Where: Henry Booker Room, Jacobs Hall, UC San Diego
  • Remote: On Zoom. Email me for the link.

The defense is open to the public, so please come, in person or online.

The Short Version

Collecting fisheries data is difficult at scale. My thesis argues that this can be improved by developing systems for fish length measurements using tools that citizen scientists already own.

Knowing how big fish are tells us how old they are and whether a population is replacing itself, but most of that data comes from programs that need a trained scientist on hand to measure each fish. That’s expensive, and it leaves much of the world’s ocean unassessed. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of anglers and millions of divers are already out where the data is needed, carrying phones and cameras.

Through FishSense with Engineers for Exploration, I’ve worked on putting those tools to use:

  • FishSense Mobile measures fish on deck with the depth sensor already in a phone.
  • FishSense Lite measures fish underwater with a consumer dive camera and a dive laser. REEF volunteers used it to collect lengths paired with species on their own, with no scientist present.
  • Calibrating with commodity items replaces specialized calibration gear with bricks at home and a dive slate at the dive site.
  • Automating a system built for people tackles the hours of manual labeling each dive used to need, and what it takes to trust the machine that replaces it.

Thank You

My advisors, Professor Curt Schurgers and Professor Ryan Kastner, made all of this possible. My committee, Professor Nick Antipa, Professor Nikolay Atanasov, and Professor Brice Semmens, gave their time and feedback. Everyone in Engineers for Exploration who has touched FishSense, and the divers and scientists who took our cameras into the water, made the work real. And my wife and our three cats put up with me through all of it.

I hope to see you there!