Sean Kelley normally works behind the scenes on the @Sea site, editing stories, gathering images, and designing web pages. But when we needed to cover an engineering mission involving tools and gadgets, we couldn't keep Sean from grabbing the correspondent's hat.

"I am fascinated by machines...always have been." says Sean. "When I was growing up, my dad was an engineer at Disney. Amazing gizmos would come home in his trunk at night and come apart on our dinner table. Parts of Dumbo, parts of pirates, robot heads--you name it. My job was to hand Dad the right wrench." Far from ruining the Disney magic for Sean, this inside-out perspective deepened his sense of wonder. "The machines are the real magic at Disney. Any mechanical engineer would name that place as one of the world's seven wonders, yet millions of people get safely whirled and whooshed and serenaded by robots and rarely consider the machines and minds that made it possible. It's often the same in science--big discoveries about our universe dazzle us, but we don't hear much about the design of the telescopes and submarines, or about the women and men who bolted them together and made them work."

Before joining the @Sea team at Harbor Branch, Sean worked in Tallahassee, Florida as a newspaper illustrator and photographer, and as a graphic designer for a wide range of scientific publications. His passion for hiking took him to the mountains of Asheville North Carolina where he worked (between hikes), as the managing editor of an academic journal and as the publications coordinator for a national, non-profit science education organization. The chance to work at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution brought him back to Florida again.

"I love learning how things work," he says, "...in other words, I love science. And @Sea offers me all kinds of ways to share my excitement about learning cool new science stuff." The Ocean Net Buoy mission will be the first open ocean experience for this mountain-oriented correspondent. "That buoy is a big, interesting machine and it's going into a big, interesting environment that has the potential to make me very seasick. I'm going to have an adventure to tell, no matter what happens!"