Dr. Kaitlin Frasier (Principal Investigator)

Dr. Kaitlin Frasier is an Assistant Researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Principal investigator of the Scripps Machine Listening Laboratory. As an observational oceanographer, her research focuses on understanding oceanographic and ecosystem baselines, discerning event impacts, and quantifying spatial and temporal trends. Her observational strategy of choice is passive acoustic recording, coupled with machine learning-based and traditional computational acoustic analytical methodologies. Her aims are to maximize the variety and detail of information that can be extracted from underwater passive acoustic recordings, not only by documenting the occurrence of signals themselves but also by inferring environmental parameters or source behaviors based on signal distortions imposed by propagation through the ocean medium. Her research involves the collection and analysis of long duration, broadband, spatially-distributed passive acoustic recording datasets collected through a robust deep mooring field program. Dr. Frasier is particularly interested in the synthesis of observations across platforms to understand large-scale spatiotemporal patterns and trends in ambient noise and ecological activity, as well as direct/indirect effects of ocean variability, climate change and human activities through sound.