Edward C. Monahan, director of the Connecticut Sea Grant program and a professor of marine sciences, was presented with a certificate acknowledging his election as a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America at the society's semiannual meeting held recently in Norfolk, Va. He was recognized for "contributions to the acoustics of the air-sea interface."

The Acoustical Society, founded in 1929, is the premier international society in acoustics, dedicated to increasing and diffusing the knowledge of acoustics and its practical implications. Its 7,000 members represent a variety of fields related to sound.

This honor represents the second time within the past two years that Monahan has been elected a fellow of a major professional society: in 1997 he was made a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Monahan's research, extending back to his Ph.D. dissertation at MIT in the mid-1960s on "Sea Spray and its Relationship to Low Elevation Wind Speed," has focused on how bubbles affect the transport of gases and particles between the air and the sea.

Given that long-term interest, it is not surprising that most of the published articles that he submitted in the mid-1980s for his D.Sc. from the National University of Ireland dealt with the spray droplets generated by bursting bubbles, and with the whitecaps and bubble plumes produced when waves break on the ocean surface.

In his dozen years at UConn, Monahan's research has focused on the contribution of bubbles to acoustic reverberation beneath the sea surface, and on the role of bubbles in facilitating the air-sea transfer of the gases, such as carbon dioxide, that influence our global climate.

"Each decade," Monahan says, "we seem to discover another facet to the role of 'plain old' bubbles in the physical interaction between the sea and the atmosphere - it's enabled us to pursue new questions without discarding the insights we've gained from our previous research."

In addition to his research, Monahan is director of the Connecticut Sea Grant Program, a federal and state partnership that supports university-based marine-related research, education, and outreach.

Peg Van Patten