Sutherland joins OPP as Program Director for Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences

Dave is a native North Carolinian, growing up near Raleigh and going to school on the beach in Wilmington. He’s lived and worked on all the U.S. coastlines and currently resides in Eugene, Oregon, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon. Although he loves the mountains and coast that make Oregon wild, he misses the N.C. beaches that you can actually swim in!

Dave is trained as a physical oceanographer and received his Ph.D. from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program, working on subpolar North Atlantic circulation around Greenland. Since then, he has moved close to shore and focuses on estuarine and coastal circulation. In particular, a large part of his research over the past decade has been examining ice-ocean interactions in fjords with marine-terminating glaciers, including systems in Greenland, southeast Alaska, and the western Antarctic Peninsula. He has collaborated with glaciologists, biologists, and climate modelers to understand the coupled processes between the ocean and ice. Dave uses a combination of in situ observations (i.e., collected via ship or subsurface moorings) and numerical simulations in his studies of ice-ocean interactions.