Kate Stafford

University of Washington, School of Oceanography

Dr Kate Stafford is a Principal Oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab and affiliate Associate Professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle.  Kate has BAs in French Literature and Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and degrees in Wildlife Science (MS) and Oceanography (PhD) from Oregon State University. She is one of the founding members of the Scholarly Union for Bio-Physical Arctic Research and co-chair of the Southern Ocean Research Partnership Blue and Fin Whale Acoustics project. Before going to graduate school, she lived as a Fulbright scholar for a year in Paris studying Medieval French Literature. Kate's research focuses on using passive acoustic monitoring to examine migratory movements, geographic variation and physical drivers of marine mammals, particularly large whales. She has worked all over the world from the tropics to the poles, and is fortunate enough to have seen (and recorded) blue whales in every ocean in which they occur.  Kate’s current research focuses on the changing acoustic environment of the Arctic and how changes, from sea ice declines to increasing industrial human use, may be influencing subarctic and Arctic marine mammals. Kate is an Air Force brat who was born in Tachikawa, Japan, and hasn’t stopped traveling since. November, 2017

Kate's activities in Sitka