About

Bia Villas Bôas is a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is interested in better understanding how surface gravity waves interact with other processes in the upper-ocean and the overlying atmosphere. Bia has a Ph.D. in oceanography from Scripps. During her Ph.D., she was a NASA Earth and Space Science fellow and her thesis work explored observations, theory, and modeling of interactions between winds, currents, and waves. Her research currently focuses on wave-current interactions at meso and sub-mesoscales and on how surface waves impact remote sensing measurements. Bia strongly supports open science and reproducibility. She believes that teaching and promoting best practices of scientific computing is key for empowering young scientists, and will ultimately drive change in how we do and share our research. This vision has led her to get involved with The Carpentries, for which she has been a certified instructor for four years.

Before joining Scripps, Bia earned an M.S. in Physical Oceanography from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a B.S. in physics from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. During her master’s, Bia spent several months living on a sailboat in Trinidad and Tobago, from where she wrote a proposal to carry out the rest of her master’s research in France. After being awarded a BEPE fellowship, Bia moved to Toulouse, where she worked with Dr. Alexis Chaigneau at LEGOS on air-sea interactions over mesoscale eddies.

Bia grew up by the beach in a small town in the northeast of Brazil,
and her connection with the ocean started at a very young age. She is deeply motivated by the power of action, and her strongest influences come from traditional karate and Zen Buddhism. If not in her office, you will most probably find her in the closest body of saltwater, studying the ocean from a surfboard.