Education & Experience:

Kerri graduated from Ohio State University in 2007 with a combined degree in zoology, ecology, and music education. Her honors thesis quantified changes in the singing structure of Northern Cardinals and American Robins in different levels of anthropogenic noise environments. After founding a music education non-profit in Haiti, she began her PhD at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2009.

For her Ph.D. in oceanography (specialty in bioacoustics), she mixed her passion of music and science. In Laguna San Ignacio she studied the three different soundscapes in a grey whale breeding lagoon. In Cabo San Lucas, she developed a way to measure the relative number of humpback whales in an area based on how loudly they were singing. During this time she formed the Humpback Whale Global Social Call Catalogue Working Group to document how humpback whales of all ages and both sexes communicate using calls beyond their famous songs.

As a post-doc at the University of New Hampshire, Kerri used a decade of passive acoustic data from the Bering and Chukchi Seas to pinpoint environmental factors that explained distributions of odontocete species. Her work documented three temperate dolphin species that have now expanded their habitats northward, aligned with raised sea surface temperatures the occurrence of the Bering Sea Cold Pool – both factors that are affected by climate change. Collaborations included learning new detection/classification algorithms for automatic data analysis.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Seger worked in Colombia to record the soundscape of a humpback whale Stock G breeding ground and taught at the Universidad Pontificia Javeriana.

With Applied Ocean Sciences, she is the lead bioacoustician working on projects such as modeling noise generated from pile driving, seismic arrays, and other anthropogenic sources and estimating their impacts on marine animals. The soundscape project in Colombia continues with the help of several students.