Jessica Lacy Accepts Position as Research Oceanographer in the Western Coastal and Marine Geology Team


		Search all stories:

	Home \|\| Sections: Fieldwork \| Research \| Outreach \| Meetings \| Awards \| Staff & Center News \| Publications \|\| Archives

Jessica Lacy Accepts Position as Research Oceanographer in the Western Coastal and Marine Geology Team

By Sam Johnson
May 2007

in this issue:

previous story | next story

Above: Jessie Lacy on the shore of Shaw Island in the San Juan Islands, Puget Sound, Washington. The red flag and buoy behind her are attached to one of her instrumented frames in a seagrass meadow. [larger version]

I am pleased to announce that Jessica Lacy has accepted our offer to be a Research Oceanographer in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Western Coastal and Marine Geology Team. In this position, Jessie will continue to provide the team with her broad expertise in sediment and contaminant transport, especially in estuarine, wetland, and coastal environments.

Jessie received a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Humboldt State University, an M.S. in Water Science from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. Her dissertation, titled "Circulation and Transport in a Semi-Enclosed Estuarine Subembayment," focused on the hydrodynamics of Honker Bay (part of northern San Francisco Bay). Between degrees, Jessie worked for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (Wetlands Division), the California State and Regional (San Francisco Bay) Water Boards, and the USGS Water Resources Discipline office in Sacramento, California.

Jessie took a postdoctoral position with the USGS Western Coastal and Marine Geology Team in 2001 to work on coastal-erosion problems in southwestern Washington. She then stayed with the USGS on a term appointment to work on the Puget Sound and Coastal Evolution Modeling projects. She currently leads the Puget Sound Beach and Nearshore Sediment Dynamics task, in which much of her individual work concentrates on the interaction between aquatic vegetation and hydrodynamics. For this effort, Jessie has developed new instrument frames and data-analysis techniques to collect data in and around seagrass meadows, which provide critical fish-spawning and nursery habitat (for example, see Sound Waves article, "Eelgrass in Puget Sound—a New Study of Flow, Sediment Transport, and Zostera marina"). Jessie is also leader of the Wave Boundary Layer Scale task in the Coastal Evolution Modeling Project. As part of that task, she is the principal investigator in an Office of Naval Research-funded project on ripple evolution, an effort that follows up her work with Dave Rubin using a large-scale flume in Japan (see Sound Waves article, "Making Waves and Ripples in a Giant Flume in Japan").

Jessie also serves as a member of the science panel for the Elkhorn Slough National Estuary Research Reserve Tidal Wetland Project and is a former member of the science team for the South [San Francisco] Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project and the technical group for Envisioning the Future of the Gulf Coast. In these roles, she has helped establish and prioritize research objectives involving the functions, fate, and restoration of wetlands. Jessie is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Estuarine Research Federation, and the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography. We look forward to her continued contributions to USGS coastal and marine research.