Eric Hochberg

Eric Hochberg is an associate professor at ASU in the School of Ocean Futures, with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and a senior scientist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS). Earning his doctorate in oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2002, he has pioneered and championed the use of airborne and spaceborne imaging spectroscopy for study of coral reef ecosystems. Partnering with JPL, he successfully competed and served as principal investigator for the COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL), a four-year (2015–2019), $15 million mission under NASA's Earth Venture Suborbital-2 program. CORAL was the first-ever ocean basin-scale, uniform survey of reef condition—benthic community composition and metabolism—across the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaiʻi, Mariana Islands, Palau and Florida. Ongoing analyses of CORAL data are revealing new nuances in the relationship between reef condition and environmental forcings. Hochberg's current research focuses on coral reef systems ecology, utilizing both in-water techniques and the remote sensing tools that he continues to develop. He is active in the scientific community, serving on review panels, as well as national and international committees, including the National Academy of Sciences' Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space and more recently the International Ocean-Colour Coordinating Group's Benthic Reflectance Working Group. He is on the editorial board for Remote Sensing of Environment and is an Associate Editor for Frontiers of Marine Science. Hochberg has taught at the graduate level since 2003 and the undergraduate level since 2008. His current courses include two intensive, advanced short-courses of Coral Reef Functional Ecology in the summer, another introductory Coral Reef Ecology course in the fall, and Marine Biology and Oceanography Research in the fall. He routinely welcomes undergraduates from around the world for 12-week internships at BIOS.