Dr. Amy S. Bower has been a Senior Scientist in the Department of Physical Oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since 2005. She is the most recent past chair of the Physical Oceanography Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution -- she was the department’s first female chair. Amy grew up in coastal New England, where she developed a love for the outdoors, especially on the water. Supportive math and physics teachers in high school encouraged her to pursue physics as an undergraduate at Tufts University, where she earned a B.S. in 1981. While there, Amy enrolled in Sea Semester, and off-campus inter-disciplinary program covering all topics related to the ocean. This is where Amy discovered the field of physical oceanography and decided to pursue a graduate degree. She attended the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, earning a Ph.D. in 1988, then moved to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as a postdoctoral scholar. Amy specializes in the observation of deep ocean currents using freely drifting buoys tracked underwater with sound. While in graduate school, she was diagnosed with macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually led to legal blindness. She continued with research and teaching by taking advantage of assistive technologies for magnification and speech output from computers. Amy lives with her husband David, 18-year-old daughter Sara, two retired guide dogs and her current guide Intrepid. She was recently on a combined sighted-blind sailing team, Wind Whisperers, that twice won the World Blind Fleet Sailing Championship.