Team TROFX is developing advanced designs and components for scalable, high-yield offshore macroalgae farming.
TROFX has a low-cost, high-yield, modular farm design scalable to deep water and high energy ocean conditions, with innovations that include lattice mooring design, multiline helical anchors, robotic anchoring, marine mammal safety features, and passive, pipe-less nutrient upwelling employing hydrofoils. A 2×2 array is now deployed in the Gulf of Maine under the ARPA-E’s MARINER (Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources) program, a U.S. Department of Energy Program.
Assistant Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Oceans at Stanford University
Tom Bell is an ecosystem ecologist who studies the dynamics of coastal foundation species (kelps, seagrasses, corals) over large space and time scales. Specifically, he uses a combination of field and laboratory studies, statistical and mechanistic models, and remote sensing to understand how the abundance and physiology of foundation species are spatially structured by environmental dynamics and biotic interactions. Foundation species structure entire ecological communities, which are often ecologically and economically important, by creating physical habitat and enhancing productivity. Thus, fundamental research which quantifies how a changing environment interacts with foundation species can lead to a greater understanding of the associated community.
Stephen Monismith’s research in environmental and geophysical fluid dynamics involves the application of fluid mechanics principles to the analysis of flow processes operating in rivers, lakes, estuaries and the oceans, with a particular interest in the ecological impacts of those flows. His current research includes studies of estuarine hydrodynamics and mixing processes, flows over coral reefs and on the inner shelf, turbulence in density stratified fluids, and physical-biological interactions in phytoplankton and benthic systems. Current and past projects include field and computational work on wave-driven flows over coral reefs, stratified turbulence due to shoaling internal waves, benthic grazing on coral reefs and in kelp forests, dispersion in complex estuarine tidal flows, and lab and computational studies of flows through coral colonies. He is also involved with various scientific panels focusing on the San Francisco Bay/Delta including an NRC committee that examined the sustainability of the Delta as a water supply system and as an ecosystem.
Professor Monismith is currently director of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory. He is the Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering. Prior to coming to Stanford, he spent three years in Perth (Australia) as a research fellow at the University of Western Australia.