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Heather Beem holding the sensor prototype that she designed for seal whisker research.

Heather Beem holding the sensor prototype that she designed for seal whisker research.
Heather Beem holding the sensor prototype that she designed for seal whisker research.
Heather Beem holding the sensor prototype that she designed for seal whisker research.
Heather Beem holding the sensor prototype that she designed for seal whisker research.
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Pulsone, Tony
Heather Beem holding the sensor prototype that she designed for seal whisker research.
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09/18/2014
Beem_Heather_PhD-01.jpg
Image Of the Day caption:
Heather Beem earned her Ph.D. in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography working biomimetics: using features ovserved in nature to inform the design of new technologies. She closely examined seal whiskers for insights on how the shape of the whiskers helped seals detect movements in water, which lead them toward prey. She built a large-scale model of a seal whisker and tested it in test tanks to examine how it responded to water flowing around it. Based on her experiments, she designed a prototype flow sensor to detect water movements, incorporating the distinctive geometric shape of seal whiskers.
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 51, No. 2, pg. 85:
Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering.
Heather Beem is a native of Oklahoma, and her love of exploration drew her to the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. There she worked at the intersection of biology and engineering, with a backdrop of the limitless ocean. She has found great joy in uncovering the elegance of God's creation in nature and designing technologies inspired by those discoveries. Through the graduate program, she found herself immersed in hands-on learning experiences. Since graduating with her Ph.D. in 2015, she has been designing scalable methods to help educators around the globe to similarly engage their students in experiential learning. Her mentor for this article was Ken Kostel, WHOI Web science writer/editor.
Photo by Tony Pulsone
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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