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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.Â
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