Halleh B. Balch is an experimental physicist, NSF Ocean Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow, and HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellow at Stanford University. Her research focuses on developing novel optical sensors for in situ microscopy and spectroscopy onboard autonomous underwater vehicles to study the impact of climate change on the ocean and freshwater ecosystems. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford, she is developing high-Q nanophotonics to measure marine metabolites and environmental DNA (e-DNA) for in situ deployment on autonomous underwater vehicles in collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the Center for Ocean Solutions, and NOAA. Halleh received her PhD in Physics from the University of California Berkeley advised by Feng Wang where she used optical spectroscopy to study 2D semiconductors and used the optical properties of 2D materials to develop a generalizable method of imaging bioelectricity. She received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in physics and literature and enjoys playing the violin and ultimate frisbee.

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