Bryant Irawan

I earned my BA in Human Biology from Stanford (2015) and a Doctorate of Dental Surgery from UC San Francisco (2019). Still a licensed California dentist, my love for the ocean has always been present. My earliest memory is crying myself to the verge of vomiting because I didn't want to leave the beach after seeing it for the first time.

In college, I was drawn to marine biology, studying at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey and participating in two ocean conservation study-abroads: coral farming at Australia's Heron Island and oceanographic sampling on a 2,500-nautical-mile voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii.

During dental school, my love for the ocean never faded. I would volunteer at beach cleanups and also started to surf. After graduating, I chose to practice dentistry at my favorite surf city and now my beloved hometown, Santa Cruz.

After years of lunch breaks staring longingly at the ocean, I decided to learn a new skillset that would give me a better chance of working on ocean conservation than dentistry would. I chose software engineering as a versatile choice and took night classes. Soon after, I ended up quitting my job to study coding full-time in an immersive advanced bootcamp called HackReactor.

After a few months of honing my skills and gaining experience at a health-tech startup, I joined ProtectedSeas and have since developed the current mobile app as well as deployed several new M2 stations. With this grant, I can hopefully improve the M2 by developing a Loitering Guard to detect and monitor potential individual violators while making M2 drastically more affordable by ensuring compatibility with a lower-cost camera.

Other ways I express my love for the ocean include being an avid scuba diver and sailing across the Atlantic, recording the furthest north observation of pygmy killer whales.

November 2024