Warren Fox

Executive Director

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Ocean scientists from six U.S. and two Taiwanese institutions aboard R/V Thomas G. Thompson, having departed Guam at the end of January 2025, spent a part of their one-month research cruise following a small vortex, crossing back and forth with the ship through the swirling currents.

Swarms of small, inexpensive buoyancy-controlled floats are a critical technology to study the melting retreat of LeConte Glacier, Alaska. Researchers designed observational campaigns using the unique capability of μFloats to target and ride the multilayer circulation in LeConte Bay, become entrained in the glacier's buoyant discharge plume, all while their movements are tracked acoustically.

In spring 2025 a research team riding snow machines hauled scientific instruments out on to the sea ice locked to the coastline of Utqiagvik, Alaska, to establish a new observing system. Their goal: work with the local community to better forecast sea ice breakout events.

Working alongside their NOAA collaborators aboard R/V Shimada, APL-UW investigators are testing artificial intelligence methods and a ship-to-cloud data processing pipeline against traditional methods to identify Pacific hake aggregations in acoustic data.

The science and engineering team that designed and built the Multi-Sensor Towbody (MuST) platform are now demonstrating its capabilities in performance tests for the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command and the Army Corps of Engineers. During 10 days of surveying near the Florida Keys this past spring, MuST, now designated Technology Readiness Level 7, searched for hazardous objects buried in seafloor sediments.

Major milestones were achieved in the past year by an investigative team at the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound and their multi-institutional collaborators who developed ultrasonic therapies to treat kidney stones. Results of several successful clinical trials have been published and the spin-out company commercializing the University inventions has received medical device clearance from the Food and Drug Administration.

Investigators at the Laboratory's Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound (CIMU) have disrupted medical treatments by harnessing the power of acoustic energy delivered inside the human body. Now, a multidisciplinary team centered at CIMU is developing a manufacturing technique they call SonicBond based on well-known high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) technology.

APL-UW scientists teach, advise, and mentor scores of students every year. They range from summer interns, to undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in over a dozen disciplines, to postdoctoral scholars whose career interests align with the Laboratory's areas of expertise. Many are entrained into their advisor's sponsored research projects, where they gain research experiences beyond the classroom and build professional support networks.