JAMES J. LIDINGTON

New President Roseann Runte wasn't the only high-profile Canadian export to Old Dominion this year.

The Center for Coastal and Physical Oceanography got a boost in February with the addition of Ann Elizabeth Gargett, a former research scientist from the Institute of Ocean Sciences in British Columbia.

Gargett's research on mixing and turbulence in ocean waters has been referenced frequently. She has four research grants pending, including one on phytoplankton in the Antarctic and another with an associate at Virginia Tech to create more stable towed ocean monitoring equipment.

In the coming months, Gargett also will be working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chesapeake lab, placing turbulence monitoring equipment in a stationary instrumentation package to be anchored at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay near the Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The equipment will measure turbulence in the water above it, she said.

Gargett earned her doctoral degree in 1970 from the University of British Columbia and received her bachelor's degree in math and physics in 1966 from the University of Manitoba.

She has been a visiting scientist in the United States at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Washington and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as abroad at Centre IFREMER in France. She has received funding from the Office of Naval Research.

"It's a very good group of faculty here [at Old Dominion]," Gargett said. "They have a really good combination of experience. It's a small and very cohesive group."

Gargett has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, and the highest academic accolade available to scientists and scholars in Canada. She has more than 40 reviewed publications in major journals to her credit, and her work on ocean turbulence has been widely quoted.