A Multigenerational Success Story

Since its establishment 50 years ago, the MIT-WHOI Joint Program has had an ongoing multigenerational legacy of training leaders in the field of oceanography. Here, Susan Wijffels, an MIT-WHOI graduate student in the late 1980s, confers with her Ph.D. advisor Harry Bryden, who earned his Ph.D. from the program in 1975. Bryden was a scientist at WHOI from 1977 to 1992 when he joined the Southampton Oceanography Centre in England. Wijffels earned her Ph.D. in 1993 and became a scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s largest scientific research agency, until she returned to WHOI as a senior scientist in 2017. MIT and WHOI celebrate the program’s 50th anniversary with events today and tomorrow in Cambridge and Woods Hole, Mass. (Photo Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)