Stephane Gauthier has a PhD from Newfoundland, Canada. As a research associate at the University of Washington, he was involved in projects on forage fish species in Alaska as part of a Steller Sea Lion Research Consortium. He led a survey for a pilot study on killer whales and their potential prey in Puget Sound (Seattle).
He moved to New Zealand and joined NIWA in 2006, as a fisheries scientist, where the work has taken him from the Southern Ocean to the Arabian Sea.
Stephane works on a range of projects on aquatic organism's ecology and dynamics, using active underwater acoustics as one of his main research tools.
As part of this voyage to Antarctica, he will look at the distribution and abundance of pelagic organisms, particularly krill, using the multi-frequency acoustic systems from Tangaroa. The aim will be to try to link acoustic backscatter dynamics to whale distribution and movements.
