Kakani Katija Young

Kakani Katija Young (born 1983) is a bioengineer from Oregon who was a champion ice dancer with her brother in the junior ranks. While earning her Master's and PhD in aeronautics and bioengineering, Young began to study the effect of sea creatures on tides and how that in turn might affect climate.

Biography

Kakani Katija Young was born in 1983 to Gordon and Norbaayah (née Mahari) Young. She grew up in Portland, Oregon and was a junior ice dancing champion with her brother Ikaika. Young began skating around age 5 and in 1992 won the sub-juvenile first place competition in the St. Moritz Ice Dance Championships with Ikaika.^[1] In 1999, the pair won the U.S. Novice Ice Dance Championship and they won a bronze medal at the 2001 U.S. Junior Ice Dance Championship. After competing in the senior ranks in 2002,^[2] Young went on to complete her bachelor's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington in 2004. She furthered her studies, earning a Master's in Aeronautics in 2005 at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) and her Doctorate at CIT in 2010 in bioengineering.^[3][4]

Young earned research fellowships from both the American Society for Engineering Education and the National Science Foundation to conduct graduate research. As a certified research diver, she has conducted field studies in various locations throughout the world,^[4] such as a study completed in 2009 off the coast of the Palau archipelago. In the study, Young and John Dabiri, a peer from CIT, enlisted local women to assist them with filming jellyfish whose waters had been treated with safe dyes. The goal was to understand the physics involved in the jellyfishes' movements. Instead, what they discovered was that the jellyfish not only push water into their domes, but drag an almost constant flume of water behind them. That discovery propelled Young to question how much marine life contribute to the movement of ocean and sea tides.^[5] Tides are critical to climate change as transference mechanisms of heat between the Polar regions and the equator. Young's discovery has led her to explore how much sea creatures augment wind and other external energy forces in propelling the constant motion of oceans. She won an Emerging Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society^[6] in 2011 and as part of the award, a research dive in Panama was filmed in 2012 by NatGeo.^[2] In 2013, she was awarded a Kavli Research Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences and is currently working in Moss Landing, California at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute as a postdoctoral Fellow.^[7]

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