We tackle the questions of – how can we use robotics and engineering to make future underwater tasks safer and easier.”
Developing systems that address real scientific needs
A commonality at the APL is the desire to stay at APL. It’s completely normal to hear colleagues speak about starting their career as a student intern or postdoctoral (postdoc) scholar, and continuing their career here for numerous years. Aaron Marburg established his roots at APL in 2015 as a postdoctoral scholar, and has flourished here ever since.
Aaron came on board in 2015 as a postdoc under the SEED (Science & Engineering Enrichment and Development) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. As a SEED fellow, he joined the Ocean Engineering Department. During his 2-year fellowship, Aaron worked to apply his expertise in small, flying vehicles to underwater robots.
“My interest is in developing systems that address real scientific needs, rather than considering abstract technical problems.”
He had an essentially seamless transition from his two-year SEED postdoctoral program to a full-time employment, where he’s now a Principal Electrical and Computer Engineer in Ocean Engineering.
Learn more about APL-UW’s SEED (Science & Engineering Enrichment and Development) Postdoctoral Fellowship! The growth of your scientific endeavors is truly exponential through the SEED program.
As a principal investigator in ocean engineering, Aaron is responsible for a research team. He’s responsible for developing research, funding, defining programs, and supervising employees, as well as working with the team to engineer, design, and test instruments.
Currently, Aaron is involved in two kinds of work: development of ocean instrumentation for a variety of sponsors, and research in ocean robotics within his Ocean Perception and Autonomy Laboratory (OPAL).
His team’s efforts in ocean instrumentation are building systems that collect data from the ocean. More than half of his work is with OPAL, where he directly leads four software engineers. Together, they define research problems to make future underwater robots more advanced.
Meet Aaron Marburg
Major
B.S. Engineering, M.S. Aeronautical Engineering, Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering
How I came to APL-UW
I came to APL through the SEED post-doctoral program in 2015.
Standout moment
Right at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, my team and I received funding that allowed us to build our own robot and to conduct testing in the Puget Sound. Up until that point, a lot of the testing was done in a test tank or off the pier. To have a robot in the Puget Sound was a major step in our operating capacity. We were able to get the robot working about a year ago, and have been running the robot in the Lake Washington, making huge steps in our ability to back our fundamental research with testing in the real world.
Aaron originally earned his B.S. in engineering from Swarthmore College in 1998. During his time at Swarthmore, he participated in a summer internship at the MIT Sea Grant AUV lab, an early developer of autonomous underwater vehicle technology. He worked with original developers in the technology, which hooked him onto ocean engineering and science.
Before his summer internship, Aaron had no connection with the ocean. This opportunity opened a door to oceanography while practicing his robotic skills. He was interested in the novel challenges of AUVs. Aaron then spent two years working at BlueFin Robotics, an AUV company spun out of the AUV Lab.
Afterward, he attended grad school, where he earned his M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from Stanford University. He worked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) helping deploy the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), one of the first cabled observatory systems in the United States. In 2007, Aaron and his family moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Canterbury in 2015.
After earning his Ph.D., Aaron and his wife reconsidered going into ocean science and moving closer to family in the Pacific Northwest. From there, Aaron applied to the SEED program, where the doors to APL opened.