In September 2024, Halifax will host the OCEANS Conference + Exposition. Christopher Whitt was the driving force behind bringing the conference to Nova Scotia.

2024 is the perfect time to bring OCEANS back to Canada’s ocean hub. Global ocean leaders will be at the Halifax Convention Centre to see up to 100 exhibitors showing off the latest technology and research, technical sessions and posters, and partake in world-class networking sessions.

Join us at our first totally virtual Ocean Connector as COVE CEO, Jim Hanlon, sits down with Christopher to discuss how the bid for the largest gathering of ocean business, engineering, and science communities came to be, next steps, and strengthening the ocean tech community.

Christopher Whitt (S’95, M’02, SM’15) is a Project Engineer and Project Manager at JASCO Applied Sciences in Halifax, NS, Canada. Over the span of his career he has been involved with many wide-scale ocean acoustic monitoring projects, particularly those involved with Arctic programs, from equipment design and mooring preparation to participating in many Arctic cruises.

Christopher is a registered Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in Nova Scotia. He completed his undergraduate (B.Eng. 2000) and graduate degrees (M.Eng. 2010) at Memorial University in St. John’s, NL, Canada. Christopher’s early academic training started in digital communications and software engineering and continued to signal processing and broadband beamforming for acoustics. A long-standing interest in acoustics saw application to ocean technology upon joining JASCO in 2007.

With JASCO Christopher has designed and deployed moorings for everything from near shore to deep ocean basins. Significant projects include multi-year Arctic measurements with acoustic dataloggers, measuring biological and shipping noise using cabled observatories (such as VENUS) and wireless systems (using Wi-Fi and Iridium), and integrating acoustic sensors into gliders and other autonomous platforms. A common theme through all these projects is automating the analysis of multi-terabyte datasets. Christopher is now the field support lead for JASCO worldwide, supervises training of all field staff, as well as mentoring engineering students. Currently, Christopher is focusing on long-term soundscape studies and ambient noise statistics.