Jennifer Mackinnon

Jennifer Ann Mackinnon (born September 16, 1973) is an American physical oceanographer who has studied small-scale dynamical processes in oceans for more than 20 years.^[1] These processes include internal waves and ocean mixing, turbulence, sub-mesoscale instabilities, and their complex interaction.^[2] She is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) of the University of California, San Diego.^[1] Her research requires extensive fieldwork at sea to observe these processes.

Mackinnon graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Major in Physics) with distinction from Swarthmore College in June 1995.^[3] In June 1999, she completed a Master of Science at the Department of Oceanography of the University of Washington.^[3] She then carried out a Ph. D. in the same department that she defended in June 2002.^[3]

After some postdoctoral research at SIO from October 2002 to December 2003,^[3] she was secured an assistant research faculty position^[3] before being appointed associate professor^[3] and professor.^[1] In 2019, she was appointed Associate Dean for Faculty Equity^[4] at Scripps Institution for Oceanography

In 2021, she demonstrated with coworkers in a publication in Nature Communications that pockets of warm water from the Pacific Ocean are accelerating the melting of sea ice^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

• 1991 – National Merit Finalist^[3]
• 1999 – Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Fellowship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution^[3]
• 1997 - 2000 – National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship^[3]
• 2011 – Scripps Graduate Teaching Award^[3]
• 2014 – the AMS Nicholas Fofonoff Award^[10] for "outstanding contributions to the understanding of internal mixing in the ocean, artfully synthesizing observations, theory, and numerical modeling."
• 2018 – UC San Diego Inclusive Excellence Award^[11]

• Faculty profile at SIO