Allan Adams

Allan started his career as a string theorist, earning degrees in theoretical physics from Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford before joining the faculty at MIT in 2008. While at MIT, Allan developed a passion for underwater high-speed videography and began filming documentary shorts and TV commercials for the New England Aquarium, the Boston Museum of Science, The Franklin Institute, and beyond. These experiences laid bare a desperate need for low-cost tools for ocean conservation and exploration, leading Allan to switch fields entirely to start an anti-disciplinary research group at MIT developing scalable tools for ocean exploration and conservation. This led to an appointment as a Visiting Oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), where Allan steeped himself in cutting edge ocean monitoring techniques and developed a series of powerful sensors for exploring the ocean’s twilight zone. What soon became clear, however, was that the most important problems facing ocean ecosystems, from global warming to biodiversity loss, are industrial in scale and character and can only be solved by aligning industrial incentives with global stewardship – and that the missing ingredient, over and over, was truly scalable sensing. To fill that gap, Allan left MIT and WHOI and founded Aquatic Labs.

In addition to his professional work, Allan is a dedicated educator and public speaker. His introductory lectures on quantum mechanics from MIT have been viewed more than 10 million times, and his TED talks have been viewed more than that 5 million times. His 2016 TED talk about the LIGO discovery of Gravitational Waves was chosen as one of the top 10 TED Talks of 2016.