Damien Bright joined RIFS as a research associate with the Planetary Geopolitics and Geoengineering research group in July 2022. A cultural anthropologist, he investigates the styles of reasoning and ways of acting at issue when technoscience encounters the unknown. His major research interests include: epistemic, political and moral drift; the governability of planetary crisis; the psychopolitical dynamics of human/more-than-human relations in underwater worlds. At RIFS, Damien is investigating the design and testing of "ocean-based negative emissions technologies" (OceanNETs) across multiple geographies, along with the altered global connections that result. He is eager to understand the two-way traffic between the hypothetical and the happening at this research frontier, and to develop anthropological methods for analyzing how different OceanNETs subject the global oceans to remediation. Damien received his PhD from the University of Chicago for a dissertation titled "Whither the Reef?" that examines why coral reefs, especially Australia's Great Barrier Reef, have come to broadcast the cumulative perils of human industry and, at the same time, serve as the testbed for 21st-century planetary-scale engineering. He received his MA from SciencesPo Paris, where he researched the politics of auditing within the European Union Emissions Trading System.