Study of the geology and physics of the nearshore marine environment. Areas of current research include: influx of terrestrial waters into the marine environment, coastal currents, estuarine dynamics, air-sea interaction, waves, and tides.
Biogeochemical cycling and export fluxes of nutrients. Global climate change in past and present day environments. Utilization of cosmogenic and uranium series radioisotopes to study ecological processes. Development of new analytical techniques.
Marine biogeochemistry, Marine nitrogen cycle, Nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes, Molecular microbial ecology, Dissolved gases (N 2 , O 2 , Ar) as tracers of oceanic physical and biological processes, Trace gas production (N 2 O) in marine environments, Chemosynthetic deep-sea ecosystems, Oxygen minimum zones.
Dean holds his Ph.D. in Integrative Conservation and Geography, M.S. in Ecology, and B.S. in Marine Sciences. As a broadly trained geographer, he applies an integrative approach to work across multiple ways of knowing socio-environmental challenges. He draws on political ecology, hazards geography, environmental justice studies, and critical race theory to examine landscapes as socio-natural assemblages.
Microbes interact among themselves and with the physical world. They respond to environmental changes in ways that shape the physical world in turn. I develop, apply, and integrate novel methods in microbial ecology and geochemistry to study these intricate relationships found in marine environments.
Dr. Porter’s research interests include exploring and expanding the increasingly important roles that technology and technological innovations play in monitoring, assessing, modeling and managing our coastal environmental resources and associated environmental and public health issues. Dr. Porter focuses on the use of the tools of Geographic Information Sciences (GISciences) to develop and apply spatial models to study the impacts of anthropogenic and physiographic influences to coastal resources.
Shoreline evolution; nearshore and beach processes; surf-zone and continental shelf sediment transport; wave-current interaction; sediment re-suspension; hydrodynamic and turbulence measurements in the field and laboratory; time-series analysis; tidal propagation in estuaries and lagoons; numerical model applications to coastal zone; operational oceanography; HFR Surface Radar measurements.
Most of the Earth's surface is hidden underwater, from the deep seafloor to wetland environments. Revealing the patterns and processes in these marine environments is the overarching theme of Scott's research group in marine geology and geophysics.
My research is in the field of hydrogeology, from the role of groundwater in coastal ecohydrology to the origin and evolution of porewaters in large sedimentary basins. A particular focus right now is submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), which discharges nutrients and other solutes to coastal systems ranging from tidal creeks to the continental shelf.
My primary research interests are focused on the flow dynamics on continental shelves, in marginal seas and in estuaries. This includes wind- and buoyancy-driven currents, transient and time-variable processes, long waves and wave-current interaction, mesoscale variability, and adjustment of waves and currents to topographic and coastline features. My research comprises numerical modeling and the analysis of observational data.