Tuesday, June 9, 2026

6 PM

In this free lecture, Alessandro (Alex) Bocconcelli, oceanographer emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and founder of Centinela Patagonia, in Chile, will talk about his experience in Chilean Patagonia.

Since 2014 he has been working in the Chiloense region and on the Guaitecas islands of northern Chile, studying marine mammals and the impacts of the booming industrial salmon farming there. He will also talk about an educational/outreach program started by Centinela Patagonia in the rural schools of the Desertores Islands.

About Alex

Alessandro (Alex) Bocconcelli has been at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) since 1985, beginning as a summer student and then joining the Ocean Structures and Moorings Laboratory, as an engineer. Subsequently, for seven years he worked as director of operations for the Center for Marine Science Research at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Upon returning to WHOI, he worked as a research specialist for the Digital Acoustic Recording Tag (DTAG) Laboratory. His experience with tagging marine mammals includes working with the Watkins/Tyack Laboratory and with Mark Johnson at WHOI. 

Alex has authored and co-authored more than 50 technical papers and presented them worldwide. He is a member of the Marine Technology Society, the Society for Marine Mammalogy, and the European Cetacean Society. He has served on the board of trustees for the Masonboro Island Society and the Friends School of Wilmington, North Carolina. 

Alex is a graduate of the Merchant Marine Technical Institute in Camogli, Italy, and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has sailed in the Merchant Marine, as deck officer and captain, and has participated in more than 100 research cruises, as project engineer, chief scientist, or captain of the research vessel. In Italy, he is also a guest investigator at the CIMA Research Foundation in Savona, and at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dhorn in Naples. 

His research interests include marine mammal behavior (specifically tagging and the impacts of noise), fisheries technology and engineering, mariculture, the dynamics of moored and towed arrays, underwater sensor packages, surface and sub-surface mooring systems, data telemetry from oceanographic moorings, electromechanical cables and terminations, and marine operations with research vessels.