Emmanouil Tentzeris
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
As the ocean warms, the animals living in it shift where and how abundantly they occur, from single-celled plankton to whales. Tracking those shifts requires tools that can watch the ocean continuously and cheaply.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
environmental DNA
eDNA
passive acoustic monitoring
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Adapt a low-cost, open-source drifting logger that is ballasted to follow a target water density, overcoming the cost and payload limits of existing autonomous ocean observing platforms.
- Develop and benchmark compact, low-power in-situ sensors that detect species-specific environmental DNA (eDNA), the genetic material animals shed into seawater, during a drift mission.
- Build directional soundscape processing methods using hydrophone array processing and machine learning to localize individual sound sources in three dimensions and estimate seal density and distribution.
- Test whether combining species-specific seal calls with eDNA detections of seals, fish and copepods, plus dissolved oxygen and temperature records, improves estimates of coastal food-web abundance over space and time compared with single measurements.
More about the research
Two clues are available: animals make sounds that reveal their presence, and they constantly shed DNA into the water, called environmental DNA (eDNA), whose concentration reflects how many animals were nearby and how recently.
Why it matters
Coastal managers and ocean scientists need affordable ways to monitor how marine food webs respond to a changing climate. Low-cost drifting systems that simultaneously detect animal sounds and environmental DNA could provide better abundance and distribution data for species such as seals, fish and copepods, and could inform ecosystem models and management decisions without disturbing the animals being observed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Thomas Siderius
Portland State University, OR·Engineering
Adapt a low-cost, open-source drifting logger that is weighted to follow a set water density. The goal is to sample a target ocean depth while carrying more sensors than existing drifters.
Leigh Torres
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Test how temperature affects krill (Nyctiphanes australis) metabolic rate, energy requirements and body condition through controlled experiments measuring bioenergetic and biochemical responses.
Erin Meyer-Gutbrod
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether North Atlantic right whales leave or stay at feeding sites based on measurable prey-density thresholds, using an individual movement model built from repeated sightings of identified whales.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
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