Room: W20-307
Speaker Name:
Dr. Grace Young
Affiliation:
GoogleX
Abstract:
Dr. Grace C. Young (MIT Ocean Engineering 14) will address how connecting with the ocean and synthesizing many disciplines enhances research and impact. She’ll share her personal experiences of how effective engineering is a collaborative, multidisciplinary effort. She will discuss how she and five other aquanauts lived underwater for 15 days on Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31 for science and outreach. She’ll also share her current work at X (Googlex’) building Al tools to help achieve sustainable aquaculture, her tools for 3D modeling coral reefs, and her journey sailing across the Atlantic. She hopes to inspire students contemplating careers in ocean engineering, spark new research ideas, and add perspective for scientists and engineers already focused on oceans.
Biography:
Grace C. Young ’14 is a Research Engineer and Lead Scientist at X, Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory (formerly GoogleX), where her team is creating radical new technologies to protect the ocean while feeding humanity sustainably. She is co-inventor on over two dozen patents and her team’s ‘Underwater Al’ was named by TIME as one of the best inventions of 2023. An avid sailor, diver and National Geographic Explorer, Grace is passionate about developing tools to better understand, explore and manage the ocean. She received her PhD as a Marshal Scholar from the University of Oxford (’18), where she was a member of the Engineering Sciences and Zoology Departments. Committed to fostering early education about the ocean, she is featured in a National Geographic undersea LEGO set and a children’s book. In 2019, she. filmed the National Geographic documentary “Ocean’s Breath” that explores connections between 300-million-year-old fossils in mountains and modern coral reefs. She has developed robots, imaging systems, and other technologies for CERN, NASA, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOl), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In 2014 she lived underwater for 15 days as a mission scientist on Fabien Cousteau’s Mission 31, the youngest Aquarius aquanaut at the time. Grace was a four-year varsity letterman on MIT’s sailing team and sailed across the Atlantic for the non-profit SailFuture. Grace also served as Chief Scientist for the Pisces VI deep sea research submarine and as a liaison to the US National Committee for the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.