Dr. Abigail Bodner is the Doherty Professor in Ocean Utilization at MIT, where she holds a shared position between the Departments of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Dr. Bodner is a member of the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) and Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE).
Postdoctoral Associates
Dr. McConkey joined our group in October 2024 in collaboration with Prof. Tess Smidt’s lab. He previously received his PhD from the University of Waterloo. Dr. McConkey develops AI methods for turbulence.
Dr. Conn joined our group in December 2025. He previously earned his PhD from CalTech. Dr. Conn works on inferring submesoscale dynamics from satellite observations.
Graduate Students
Sarah Snider
Sarah is a third year PhD student in Math & Computational Science and Engineering. She works on understanding submesoscale turbulence in the transition from hydrostatic to non-hydrostatic dynamics.
Raphael Benamran
Raphael is a second year PhD student in EAPS’ Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate. He works on understanding the regime where submesoscale and internal wave signals are tangled.
Cody Cruz
Cody is a second year PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. He is developing a km-scale ocean AI emulator for global and regional inference.
Anshul Agarwal
Anshul is a Masters student in EECS and SDM. He is working on generative modeling to reduce gaps in satellite observations of the ocean surface.
Agnes Robang
Agnes is a Masters student in AeroAstro. She is working on comparing ocean boundary layer closures in submesoscale resolving simulations.
Additional Members
Horim Kim
Horim is a second year PhD student in EAPS advised by Andrew Babbin. As part of his second generals project he is using machine learning to detect relationships between sea surface height and vertical velocity.
Landon Hering
Landon is a junior at MIT majoring in EECS . He joined our group as a UROP in Spring 2026, working on machine learning applied to spatio-temporal gaps in satellite measurements, under the guidance of Anshul Agarwal and Dr. Ryley McConkey.
Past Members
Yidongfang was a postdoc in our group 2025- 2026. She previously was a Houghton Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Raf Ferrari and received her PhD from UCLA. Dr. Si developed a theory to infer submesoscale restratification from SWOT.
Junyang was a visiting PhD student from ETH Zurich in Fall 2025. He worked on a Physics Informed Neural Network approach for sea surface height measurements.
Bianca graduated from MIT in Fall 2025. She was a MechE+CSE student advised by Themis Sapsis. Bianca joined our group in Spring 2025 where she developed a machine learning method to infer upper ocean density profiles from sea surface height.
Siiri Roschier
Siiri joined our group as a UROP in Fall 2025, working on machine learning turbulence closures under the guidance of Dr. Ryley McConkey.
Shirui was a postdoc in our group 2024 -2026. He previously earned his PhD from CalTech. Dr. Peng worked on numerical and theoretical methods for submesoscale and boundary layer turbulence interactions under mesoscale forcing.
Aalyaan Ali
Aalyaan was a visiting student from Brown University during Summer 2025. Under the guidance of Dr. Bianca Champanois he explored machine learning and data analysis tools for ocean observations.
Catherine Zhang
Catherine joined our group during her second generals project. She is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program advised by Christopher Piecuch. In her project she used machine learning to detect submesoscale patterns from satellite products.
bodner research group 