Columbus O'Donnell Iselin

Columbus O'Donnell Iselin II was an American oceanographer, born in 1904 in New Rochelle, New York, and died in 1971 in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He served as director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1940 to 1950 and again from 1956 to 1960, expanding the institute more than tenfold during his tenure, and he held professorships in physical oceanography at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research specialized in the Gulf Stream and in ocean salinity and temperature distributions, and he received the Alexander Agassiz Medal in 1942.