Heidi Melita Dierssen completed her dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the guidance of Dr. R. Smith, researching the bio-optical properties of Antarctic coastal waters. Her postdoctoral research involved the remote sensing of seagrass productivity in optically shallow water with R. Zimmerman at Moss Landing Marine Labs and evaluating the optics of red tides with J. Ryan at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, Groton. She is an Interdisciplinary Research Scientist who uses optics and remote sensing to address questions related to biological and physical processes in the ocean. She is a member of the NASA MODIS Science Team, the NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry Working Group, the NOAA Coastal Ocean Applications and Science Team, and has served as a planning member for several national science meetings. She has been involved in numerous large interdisciplinary projects involving multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing, including the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research Project (Pal-LTER), Coastal Benthic Optical Properties (CoBOP) initiative, California State Universities Center for Integrative Coastal Observation, Research, and Education (CICORE), and the Long Island Sound Integrated Coastal Observing System (LISICOS). Her research has spanned the breadth of the world's oceans from the polar, temperate, and tropical seas, and her collaborators range from physical oceanographers to animal physiologists.