Gary Mitchum is presently a Professor of Physical Oceanography and the Associate Dean in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. After receiving his PhD from the Department of Oceanography at the Florida State University in 1985, he spent 11 years in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii, first as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a member of the research faculty and as the Director of the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center. He came to the University of South Florida in 1996. His research interests emphasize short-term climate changes, ranging from interannual variations such as ENSO, to decadal processes, to the long-term sea level rise problem. He has also done work on continental shelf dynamics, mesoscale eddy interactions with mean flows, internal tide generation and propagation, physical controls on fisheries variables, and storminess changes in the southeastern United States. Although he has used many types of data in his research, he is especially interested in analyses of tide gauge and satellite altimetric data, and notably proposed and developed the presently accepted method of estimating temporal drift in altimeters via comparisons with the global tide gauge network.