Beginning with PiE 2023, each PiE meeting will feature a $2,000 award in the name of Sequoia’s co-founder, Dr. Yogi Agrawal: The Eva and Yogi Agrawal Award for Significant Contributions to our Science Through Novel Observations. The only stipulation being that the awardee is to be selected amongst the scientists who presented results at the PREVIOUS PiE conference mainly based on novel observations.
A call for nominations for the 2025 Eva & Yogi Agrawal Award went out to PiE 2023 attendees in the fall of 2025 and several PiE 2023 presentations were nominated:
- Dr. Yves Plancke for his PiE 2023 talk ‘Settling and resuspension of fine sediment around slack in the Schelde-estuary’.
- Dr. Arsalan Mostaani for his PiE 2023 talk ‘Measuring the size distribution of bubbles under breaking waves’.
- Dr. Götz Flöser for his PiE 2023 talk ‘Particle imaging is the solution to long-term Particulate Organic Carbon monitoring at high temporal resolutions’.
An award committee consisting of Dr. Wayne Slade (Florida Atlantic University), Professor Thorbjørn Andersen (University of Copenhagen) and Dr. Grace Massey (VIMS), chaired by Sequoia’s President & CEO Dr. Ole Mikkelsen, met to decide the winner.
The award committee selected Dr. Mostaani’s talk and cites the following reason: “Understanding bubble entrainment is essential to help in quantifying ocean-atmosphere gas exchange, mixing processes of algal blooms, oil spills, etc., and potential effects on the acoustic and optical qualities of the water that can affect the interpretation of in situ and remote observation data. Dr. Mostaani’s paper provides a unique way of looking at entrainment of air bubbles under breaking waves using SINTEF’s SilCam to conduct experiments in a linear wave flume with a piston-type wave maker. Their application provides the ability to look at not only distribution of bubbles under waves but to also include those at the sea/air interface where the transfer of gas occurs. Taking images at high frequency, and repeating the same breaking wave many times, provides a measure of the time-development of the ensemble-average bubble size distribution, as well as the variation across the ensemble. Other methods that rely on single photographs only capture a snapshot in time and do not consider the natural variation in a dynamic system.”
Dr. Mostaani unfortunately was unable to attend PiE 2025, but he has received the award plaque and the $2,000 check that comes with it. Congratulations, Dr. Mostaani!!
Dr. Mostaani and co-authors at SINTEF in front of their wave tank with an inclined oil jet experiment running in the background.