Dr McKinna currently works for SAIC and supports ocean color science at the Ocean Ecology Laboratory (OEL), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). He holds a Bachelor of Science (Mathematics and Physics), a Bachelor of Science Honours (Statistics), and a Doctor of Philosophy (Physics) all from James Cook University, Australia. Dr McKinna has worked with in the OEL since 2014. His research focuses on developing state-of-ther-art ocean-color algorithms and implementing them within NASA's freely available ocean color processing software, SeaDAS.
Previously, Dr McKinna was based at Curtin Univesrity, Australia where he developed an algorithm for deriving water-column optical properties in the Great Barrier Reef. In addition, he investigated uses of Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO) data for mapping seagrass meadows in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area. During his gradauate program at James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, he explored new approaches for detecting blooms of the marine cyanobacteria Trichodesmium. He also developed approaches for mapping river flood plumes in the Great Barrier Reef using MODIS imagery.