Matthew Alford

Professor Alford is a seagoing physical oceanographer, the co-founder and engineering lead of the Multiscale Ocean Dynamics group at SIO/UCSD and the co-founder of atdepth LLC, a company providing fluid mechanics-based guidance to deep-sea-mining stakeholders.  He develops and employs novel instrumentation to better describe and understand turbulence and other ocean processes.

Professor Alford received a BA in Astrophysics at Swarthmore College in 1993 and PhD in 1998 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  He has received many awards including the Office of Naval Research’s prestigious Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award (2002), the University of Washington College of Fishery and Ocean Sciences’ Distinguished Research Award (2009) and the Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in Science and Technology (2023).

He has spent over three years at sea, and has published over 140 refereed articles in top-tier journals including Nature and Journal of Physical Oceanography, and has led many ambitious experiments funded by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.