Dear colleagues and friends,

Today is such a special day for me.

Receiving the Jerlov Medal is an honor I do not take lightly. I am grateful to the International Ocean Colour community and the medal committee for this recognition. That gratitude is deepened by the legacy of Nils Gunnar Jerlov, whose pioneering work laid the very foundation for our understanding of light in the ocean.

To carry his name is not just an honor; it is a responsibility — a call to continue asking fundamental questions about our oceans.

When I began working in this field 30+ years ago, my task was to accurately estimate oceanic primary production from ocean color. I was quite puzzled:  How can the color of ocean water tell us the flow of carbon? I gradually learned that this is very complicated - and remains a great challenge even today.

We now know that the light we measure from the ocean is shaped by many things: phytoplankton, suspended particles, dissolved substances, the water itself, the atmosphere, and the geometry of illumination and observation. Understanding these interactions requires us to connect measurements, theory, and modeling.

Over the years, I have become increasingly convinced that the most important progress often comes from going back to the fundamentals.

What exactly are we measuring?

What does an optical property really mean?

What assumptions are hidden in an algorithm?

And, perhaps most importantly: what can the ocean color signal actually tell us—and what can it not tell us?

These questions have guided much of my scientific work.

One of the things I have particularly valued about working in ocean optics is the connection between fundamental science and practical observation.

Ocean color remote sensing gives us an extraordinary capability: from satellites we can observe the ocean repeatedly, over enormous spatial scales, and over decades.

But the satellite does not measure chlorophyll, primary production, carbon export, or ecosystem health directly.

It measures light.

Everything else is an inference.

That simple fact has always seemed important to me.

It means that our algorithms should be firmly grounded in optical principles, and that we should remain conscious of the uncertainties involved when we move from an optical measurement to a biological or biogeochemical interpretation.

While we are ambitious to try to extract as much information as possible from the observations, we should also be humble enough to recognize the limits of what the observations can provide.

The history of ocean optics teaches us that fundamental concepts can remain relevant for generations.

Concepts such as absorption, scattering, radiance, irradiance, attenuation, and reflectance may sound elementary. But these concepts form the foundation upon which increasingly sophisticated satellite algorithms, autonomous sensors, and biogeochemical models are built.

Today, we are entering an exciting new era.

We have hyperspectral satellite observations, BGC-Argo floats, imaging sensors, advanced radiometers, machine learning, and enormous global datasets.

These technologies and data provide unprecedented opportunities. But I believe the central challenge remains the same: We must understand the physics before we trust the prediction.

Artificial intelligence may help us discover patterns in enormous datasets. But it does not eliminate the need for physical understanding.

Indeed, I believe that the more powerful our computational tools become, the more important fundamental ocean optics will be.

This is especially true for coastal waters.

The open ocean is already a complex optical environment. Coastal waters add another level of complexity because of terrestrial inputs, suspended sediments, colored dissolved organic matter, shallow bottoms, aquaculture, and intense human activities.

Yet coastal waters are also where a very large fraction of the interaction between society and the ocean takes place.

This creates both a scientific challenge and a societal responsibility.

We need better observations of coastal waters.

We need better atmospheric correction. 

We need better optical models.

I hope that the next generation of ocean-optics scientists will take advantage of the remarkable technologies now available to us, while maintaining the curiosity and physical intuition that have always driven our field.

No scientist reaches a moment like this alone.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my mentors [Ken Carder, Curt Mobley, Andre Morel, Ron Zaneveld, Howard Gordon, Annick Bricaud, Shubha Sathyendranath, and many more], also to colleagues, collaborators, program managers, students, postdoctoral researchers, friends around the world, and my family members.

I must admit, many of the ideas that I value most emerged through discussions with colleagues, through disagreements, through failed experiments, and through the persistence of students who asked questions that I could not immediately answer.

I have been extremely fortunate to work/collaborate with so many of  you.

Finally, I would like to return to the person whose name is on this medal.

Nils Gunnar Jerlov showed us that the light field in the ocean contains information about the ocean—and that careful observation and quantitative understanding can turn that light into science.

I am deeply honored to receive a medal bearing his name.

This medal isn't just about the work that's already been done. It is encouragement for the work that's still ahead.

There is still so much that we do not understand about light in the ocean. And there is still so much we do not understand about the ocean itself.

For me, that is the most exciting part of being an ocean scientist.

Thank you very much for this great honor!

Thank you all for being here to share this moment with me!

Thank you!