…Wherein we get an insight into some of the first LISST user workshops in the late 1990’s

(Part IV can be found here)

The number of LISST users continued to grow and with it questions about best practice, data analysis, interpretation and so on. To address these questions, our heroes held the first users’ training workshop at its Mercer Island facility in the summer of 1997. Scientists from Europe and the US attended. These workshops would repeat in 1998 and 1999 at the Mercer Island office and in 2001 at the Redmond office location. Eventually these workshops led to the Particles in Europe (PiE; from 2008) and Particles in the Americas (PiA; from 2018) conferences. The workshops were well attended (compared to the size of the LISST user community!), and included evening dinners and hikes on the flanks of Mt. Rainier.

2001 LISST user’s workshop group in front of the Redmond office. Left to right: ?,?, James Liu (Taiwan), Chuck Pottsmith (Sequoia), Yogi Agrawal (Sequoia), Ken Richter (SPAWAR), Annika Fain (University of Washington), Michael Fettweis (MUMM, Belgium), Grace Massey (VIMS, VA), Ole Mikkelsen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), ?, Doug Keir (Sequoia), ?. (Apologies to the ones where we forgot your names!)

Dinner and drinks at the Space Needle rotating restaurant.

Hike at Mt. Rainier, WA with the 2001 user’s workshop participants.

An early visitor to the 1998 workshop was a graduate student from Denmark, Ole Mikkelsen, who visited the company to learn about the LISST-100 for his PhD thesis. He would return over the ensuing years, first as a visitor and then from 2007 as VP Sales & Marketing until 2013 when he returned to Denmark to work for MacArtney Underwater Technology Group. As it turned out, this was only a temporary ‘leave of absence’ as Ole returned to the US and Sequoia as President in 2019 when Yogi retired.

In Part VI we’ll learn about the LISST-25 and the LISST-Wing.