Grace Young: Creating high tech for deep oceans

National Geographic Explorer Grace Young is working to protect the oceans by engineering advanced techniques & new technologies.

March 25, 2021
3 min read

Grace Young is an MIT graduate in Mechanical & Ocean Engineering developing technologies to help us better understand, explore, and manage the ocean. She is currently a Marshall Scholar and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. 

Grace Young, National Geographic Explorer
Photograph by Ian Foulk

Her work experiences include helping design, build, and test submersible and aerial robots for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and NOAA, creating new techniques to map coral reefs, and developing software for CERN and MIT. 

"@fcousteau Taking a slow-mo #selfie from our underwater #sea base during @missionthirtyone . Experimenting with the #MIT engineer devised Edgertronic prototype camera that shoots up to 20,000 frames per second!" - Grace Young

Robots she helped develop have deployed in the Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, creating 3D maps of ice shelves to better measure climate change, monitor marine protected areas, and survey endangered species populations.

"Soldering connections to our sonar unit before heading into the field. On this day we were running around and I just needed a quiet station to configure the two sonar units I was lugging around the country. So thankful to @insidenatgeo for welcoming us into the Labs — it really felt like home away from home." - Grace Young


This Explorer's work is funded by the National Geographic Society
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