APL-UW Principal Oceanographer Caitlin Whalen is the recipient of the 2026 Rosenstiel Award. She was invited to present a lecture, Geography and Seasonality of Tiny Fronts in a Vast Ocean, on 27 April to the faculty, staff, students, and emeritus faculty of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science. The award presentation, by Chair of the Department of Ocean Sciences Igor Kamenkovich, and a reception followed the lecture.

The award was created in 1971 by the Rosenstiel Foundation and is presented each year on a rotating basis through the disciplinary areas of marine geosciences, atmospheric sciences, marine biology and ecology, ocean sciences, and environmental science policy. The award honors mid-career scientists who in the past decade have made significant and growing impacts in their field.

Whalen, who is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the UW School of Oceanography, studies the physics of small-scale processes in the ocean from an observational perspective, how they interact with larger scale physical processes, and their impacts across a range of scales. "I am honored," says Whalen, "to be recognized for my contributions to understanding internal wave driven turbulence and the submesoscale." She is currently serving as lead PI on the NSF-funded project Mixing belOw Tropical Instability waVEs (MOTIVE) and pursuing research on the global multiscale dynamics and impact of submesoscale density fronts with support from an NSF CAREER award.

"Receiving this award reminds me of my first foray into oceanography as an undergraduate summer intern at UW," she says. "I conducted variations on the deep western boundary current experiments originated by Henry Stommel, one of the early recipients of the award."

Past UW recipients of the Rosenstiel Award are (2013) Ceclia Bitz, the Jerome M. Paros Endowed Chair in Atmospheric and Climate Hazard Research, and (2017) Curtis Deutsch, who at the time was an Assistant Professor in the School of Oceanography and is now a Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University.

Caitlin joined APL-UW in 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher after earning a Ph.D. in physical oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography the prior year. While at the Laboratory her collaborative research has been supported by NSF, ONR, and NASA.