Scientist Profile: Tommy Dickey Recap

Tommy Dickey is a tall man with a full head of (one might say fluffy) hair who rocks back in his chair as he talks enthusiastically about ocean optics. “People are always so disappointed when I tell them I don’t really scuba dive,” he says. “[They think] you can’t be an oceanographer and not go out scuba diving everyday.” Dickey may not scuba dive, but he has been on over 60 research cruises across the world and keeps coming back for more. Born and raised in Farmland, Indiana, as a child he dreamed of being a farmer. Oceanography was the closest he came to that, he chuckles, explaining that perhaps “the reason so many of us [Midwesterners] became oceanographers is because we saw the waves of wheat and then we saw the waves of the ocean and related [them].”

Dickey majored in physics and math as an undergrad before the Vietnam War broke out. To fulfill military service within a humanitarian U.S. agency, he joined the Coast Guard and taught electronics to marine technicians. During his last year, race riots broke out at the base in New York City. “There were shootings, there were beatings,” Dickey says. “It became such a problem that they had to do some kind of race relations workshops.” Dickey was chosen as one of two leaders for the then-called “race relations,” now-called “human relations” workshops. “There was the black guy and the white guy – so I was the white guy,” he explains. Perhaps “because of, or in spite of,” the workshops, the rioting did get better. Dickey says that these workshops were the most fun and educational part his time in the Coast Guard.

He took night classes in New Jersey at Stevens Institute of Technology to receive his master’s degree in physics, and then, after borrowing texts about meteorology and oceanography from his friends, he heard about a PhD program at Princeton in geophysical fluid dynamics – a combination of words that would strike fear into the hearts of many, but not Dickey’s. He applied, was accepted, and his career took off. After finishing his PhD study, he received a residential post-doctoral fellowship to do whatever he wanted at the University of Miami, he decided that what really interested him was interdisciplinary field work. Today Dickey, who recently was named a Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Chair in oceanography, is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he is in the middle of what may be one of his last projects in the field – RaDyO. He plans to teach well into the future using a new textbook, exploring the World Ocean, written b Sean Chamberlin and himself. His two Great Pyrenees dogs, Teddy and Kiki, will assist him as he teaches.

The central question Dickey and his team want to answer is, how can we view objects above the surface while we’re below the surface? This question has everything to do with the ocean-air interface, where light enters the water. Once light hits the water, it is refracted, or bent, and one of three things may happen to it: it can scatter, or bounce between particles; it can be absorbed by a molecule, which will emit the energy as heat; or it can be photosynthesized to sustain life.

Dickey leads a team of scientists from across the United States and world, including
Scotland, Poland, Turkey, Italy, Australia, Canada, and New Jersey. They must measure an array of complex variables, such as sediments, phytoplankton, and small capillary waves to determine how light behaves in ocean water. Hopefully, the optical measurements his team collects can be modeled to convert fuzzy images into clear ones.

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