Christopher M. Reddy

Christopher Michael Reddy (born 1969) is an American scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI; Woods Hole, MA). He is a senior scientist in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry and has been the Director of the Coastal Ocean Institute at WHOI since 2008. Reddy has held visiting positions at the California Institute of Technology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He was an adjunct professor of biology at Boston University. His interests include marine pollution, marine natural products, and petroleum geochemistry as well how science is communicated and received by non-scientists. According to a 2010 survey by Thomson Reuters, Dr. Reddy is one of the top cited and published scientists studying oil spill effects, remediation methods, and petroleum microbiology.

Reddy's entire formal education is the product of Rhode Island public schools. He received his BS in chemistry with a minor in mathematics from Rhode Island College (1992) and then worked in the chemical industry for almost two years including his first year of graduate school at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island. He finished his PhD at the latter in 1997.

Reddy also earned an executive certificate in Management and Leadership from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010) and completed the course "Leadership in the 21st century" at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (2008).

Reddy has published over 140 manuscripts, two book chapters, and holds one patent. His research has spans from the source, fate and transport of combustion-derived materials, PCBs, and DDT to the environmental chemistry of biofuels, plastics, and nanoparticles.

Reddy is the recipient of the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2002), an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow (2006), and was named a Kavli Fellow in 2009, 2010, and 2011, which is the National Academy of Science's premiere recognition for distinguished young scientists under 45 years of age, the 2014 C.C. Patterson Award, awarded for leading an innovative breakthrough of fundamental significance in environmental geochemistry, particularly in service to society.

He teaches a course at WHOI and gives workshops for graduate and postdoctoral students on communicating science to non-scientist audiences. Reddy gave a TEDx talk in Woods Hole on how the original Star Trek series can help scientists react during a crisis. It was highlighted as an editor’s pick of the week.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzeBNjHdBzc