Faculty Spotlight on David Lindo Atichati

 

Originally from Barcelona, Spain, he became enraptured with the ocean when he spent the weekends of his childhood running with his dad on the Mediterranean shores. He frequently wondered why the ocean moved the way it does.

 

He received a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 2012, after having completed doctoral courses and all the research for his doctoral dissertation at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami, from 2009 to 2012. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Miami and received a postdoctoral award at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 2015. He was hired as tenure track assistant professor at the Department of Engineering and Environmental Sciences of the College of Staten Island in fall 2015, and joined the doctoral faculty of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center in 2016. He is also a Guest Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Research Associate at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of the American Museum of Natural History. 

 

His intellectual contributions to the field include generatingcomputational tools to detect and track ocean eddies, and to understand how they affect the distribution of larval-fish ecosystems and marine contaminants in the ocean. The results of his research have been published in journals such as Ocean Modeling, Environmental Science and Technology, and Deep-Sea Research. His last findings quantify the variability of eddies in the North Pacific and the consequences for larval fish connectivity in Hawaii; model the dispersal of organic contaminants in estuaries that support aquaculture; and predict the fate and transport of plumes of hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of these results were featured in AAAS News. His most recent noteworthy publications are:

 

2019 Lindo-Atichati, D, P Montero, R Rodil, J Benito Quintana, M Miro; Modeling dispersal of UV filters in estuaries. Environmental Science & Technology.  

2019 Seijo-Ellis G,D Lindo-Atichati D, Salmun H; Vertical Structure of the Water Column at the Virgin Islands Shelf Breack and Trough. Journal of Marine Sciences and Engineering. 7, 74. 

2018 Hu, A.M, and D. Lindo-Atichati,: Experimental equations of seawater salinity and desalination capacity to assess seawater irrigation. Science of the Total Environment.  
2017 Lindo-Atichati, D., M. Curcic, C. B. Paris, and P. M. Buston, 2016: Description of surface transport in the region of the Belizean Barrier Reef based on observations and alternative high-resolution models. Ocean Modelling, 106, 74-89.  

(DDoctoral Student, M Masters Student)

 

 

Lindo-Atichati is a passionate professor who received the 2016 Award of Excellence in Scholarship and Teaching at CUNY. He frequently engages in outreach initiatives both at CUNY and at the American Museum of Natural History. For example, he was one of the stakeholders of the hackathon ‘Hack the Ocean’ (2018) and the hackathon ‘Hack the Solar System’ (2019), in which more than 100 computer scientists spent 24 hours at the museum solving computational challenges related to fluid dynamics. Also at the museum, he is the mentor scientist of the Helen Fellows, a program that consists of a one-year residency addressed to post-baccalaureate women in Earth Sciences to be immersed in computational scientific research at the American Museum of Natural History.

 

He enjoys teaching and regularly co-teaches the doctoral course Earth Systems I at the Graduate Center. In spring 2019, he has been selected through a competition open to all CUNY faculty to co-teach a new Graduate Center course titled Climate Change and Discursive Frames with Prof. José del Valle from the Department of Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures. The aim of that course is to examine how the knowledge contained in scientific literature on climate change is discursively framed, how it becomes reframed as it travels to the social spaces where public opinion is negotiated, and how those linguistic and textual strategies shape and are shaped by the specific geopolitical and social positions of the different stake-holders. That course is generating a new teaching and learning space for interdisciplinary encounters between the environmental and social sciences, blurring the boundaries between both disciplines, and enabling the emergence of a new transdisciplinary area.