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DART Buoys: From the Drawing Board to the Deep Seas

Video with Chris Meinig, Director of Engineering, NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory,
December 11, 2007

I've been a NOAA scientist for 19 years now and in 2000, there was a job opportunity available for director of engineering, so I applied for that position and I've been director of engineering at PMEL since that time. I feel to be extremely fortunate to be director of engineering at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab because there's such a good synthesis of science and engineering here. We'll work shoulder to shoulder with the researchers to make sure that we have the priorities set for exactly what we're trying to solve within a given budget. At that point, the engineers will understand the priorities, they'll understand the budget, and they'll understand the timetables. From that point forward, we can go out and present some options, look at some instrumentation solutions, perhaps build prototypes and we'll take that back to the researcher and then make sure we meet the milestones that we're looking to meet. And then we'll start local field tests, and then we'll start some ocean tests to make sure that the instrumentation is going to survive.

So one of the great advantages of working in a federal research laboratory as an engineer is that you can actually focus on building instrumentation that's going to serve the people. You're not looking a producing a product that's necessarily going to make money for the next quarter or result in profits down the road. In this case, you can really take all your energy and focus on the best solution for the problem that you're working on. Now that could be DART in this case, or it might be ocean acidification, or it might be some real challenging problem that's coming up in a natural phenomenon that we have not observed yet.

But there is a very great sense of satisfaction that we get in the team here of developing these things, knowing that our systems could be used to potentially save lives and property and the systems are out there working for people every day.