Henrietta Dulai is an Associate Professor at the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Hawaii. Dulai earned an engineering degree in nuclear chemistry from the Czech Technical University and a doctorate in chemical oceanography from Florida State University. She is a geochemist who uses natural and man-made radionuclides as tracers to study terrestrial and marine aquatic and oceanographic processes. In the coastal realm she studies estuaries and the distribution, magnitude, and composition of submarine groundwater discharge. In the marine realm her studies focus on terrestrial runoff and shelf-water interactions. She uses radionuclides as tracers to quantify horizontal and vertical transport of biogeochemically significant elements and their relevance – for example, for natural iron fertilization. Since 2011, Dulai has been actively involved in studying the dispersion of Fukushima-derived radionuclides in the Pacific region. On this cruise she will be characterizing water masses and their vertical and horizontal mixing using radium, thorium, actinium, and cesium isotopes around selected seamounts in the Emperor chain in the Pacific Ocean.
