Dr. Janet Campbell wears many "hats" in her scientific career. She is the director of the Center of Excellence for Coastal Ocean Observation and Analysis (COOA) at the University of New Hampshire. She also leads the Bio-Optical Oceanography Group, an informal team of research scientists and graduate students within the Ocean Process Analysis Laboratory that is part of the larger Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space. Bio-optical oceanography is an emerging field of ocean science that concerns the interaction of light with marine organisms and biogeochemical processes. This multidisciplinary field combines the physics of radiative transfer, the biology of photosynthesis, phytoplankton ecology, and the photochemistry of materials found in the sea. It is also the basis for ocean color remote sensing, which is the focus of the group's NASA-funded research projects.

Janet reports that she spends most of her time these days on administrative work such as strategic planning, writing proposals and analyzing budgets. She also enjoys advising graduate students whose research involves remote sensing. During her career, she has had numerous grants and projects supported by NASA, ranging from predicting the probability that a Mars Lander would tip over to evaluating the accuracy of remote chlorophyll maps made by the present day ocean color satellite sensors (MODIS and SeaWiFS).

Photo: Janet describes her original concept map to her science peers on the first day of the workshop.