New Faculty Spotlight: Mark R. Patterson
Mark R. Patterson joins the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a joint appointment in Marine and Environmental Sciences in the College of Science, during Fall 2013 as Professor. Dr. Patterson directs the Field Robotics Laboratory at the Marine Science Center in Nahant. He develops Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (free-swimming robots) and methods to use them for environmental monitoring and homeland security applications. Dr. Patterson co-founded the first company to market AUV technology and this former commercial design is now owned and developed by Northeastern University. For his work with AUV technology, he received the Lockheed Martin Award for Excellence in Ocean Science and Engineering. He currently collaborates in the areas of counter-terrorism for port and harbor security, developing methods for coordinating swarms of AUVs, and machine learning and signal processing to automatically recognize objects or conditions of interest underwater. He received his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Biology from Harvard University, where he combined biomechanics, environmental fluid mechanics, and sensor development to investigate the chemical engineering of mass transfer in marine organisms. He continues to work in the area of environmental fluid mechanics and global change biology on coral reefs. For this research, he has spent 87 days living and working on the bottom of the ocean in underwater laboratories.