Listening to What Can’t Be Seen: Martin Siderius Faculty Feature

“It’s much easier to take it apart than it is to put it back together.”

Before he was studying underwater acoustics, Martin Siderius was taking apart cars. As a teenager, he owned a 1963, a 1966 and a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, buying them cheaply and dismantling engines, brake systems and electrical wiring to see how everything fit together. The work required patience and, occasionally, humility. As he puts it, “It’s much easier to take it apart than it is to put it back together.” The appeal was never just the car but the system beneath it. When something failed, there was a reason. When it ran well, there was an underlying structure that made it possible. That instinct to understand systems from the inside would later shape both his research and his leadership at Portland State University’s Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science.

Siderius' early life was also shaped by movement. Growing up in a military family meant relocating often, from Washington to Kansas, Georgia, Germany, Lebanon and Pennsylvania, and adjusting repeatedly to new schools and expectations. Only later did he recognize what that instability meant academically, describing “pretty kind of uneven education going into and out of high school” and realizing “there’s so many holes in my education just from that not being continuous.” Learning to identify gaps and work through them became part of how he approached problems and informed how he speaks to students who may not see a straight line from where they are to where they want to be. “I wasn’t the greatest high school student,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you can’t succeed.”

“If you’re in a submarine, you really want to have reliable ways to ‘see’ underwater.”

Today, as a professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Siderius studies systems that are far more difficult to see than an engine block. Ocean acoustics begins with a practical constraint: electromagnetic signals do not travel well underwater. Radio waves that power modern communication fade quickly beneath the surface, leaving sound as the primary tool for sensing and communication. Working in that environment presents distinct technical hurdles. “It’s much more difficult to work with acoustics than it is to work with electromagnetic signals,” he explains. “So there’s a lot of challenges there.”

Much of the ocean floor remains incompletely mapped, and marine life moves through environments that resist visual observation. Submarines, research vessels and undersea cables all depend on knowing what lies below. In many cases, understanding the ocean means listening. Among the questions he has pursued is how to use naturally occurring ocean noise, especially the sound created by breaking waves, as a source of information. Rather than transmitting a powerful sonar pulse and analyzing its echo, his work examines how to extract useful data from sound already present in the environment. What most people experience as background can, with careful signal processing, reveal structure.

“It’s very hard to understand how many of those animals there are out there”

His research has also turned toward marine mammals. By analyzing whale calls and other underwater vocalizations, researchers can better estimate species type and population density, including for endangered animals such as the North Atlantic right whale. “It’s very hard to understand… how many of those animals there are out there,” he says. Acoustic monitoring offers a way to gather information in places where visual tracking is limited by distance, depth or conditions. The ocean may be opaque to the eye, but it carries constant acoustic data. “If you’re in a submarine, you really want to have reliable ways to ‘see’ underwater,” he says. Over the course of his career, Siderius has worked with organizations including NATO, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation. Five years at a NATO research laboratory in Italy and time spent on submarine-based research deployments reinforced how essential reliable acoustic systems are in practice.

At Maseeh College, that focus on systems extends beyond research. After establishing himself as a faculty member in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Siderius served as department chair before moving into the dean’s office as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. The progression reflects a widening frame of reference, from individual projects to departmental coordination and the broader structure of the college. Departments and colleges rely on alignment and feedback, with faculty workloads, enrollment patterns and research priorities interacting in ways that require careful adjustment. “I think our job is to … to remove obstacles and let them do their thing,” he says. Smaller doctoral cohorts allow students to work closely with faculty on advanced problems in acoustics, signal processing and ocean science, gaining direct experience with the kinds of questions that shape the field. For students drawn to understanding how systems function and how to improve them, the work begins the same way it always has: listen carefully, stay with the problem and learn how the pieces fit together.

“I wasn’t the greatest high school student. That doesn’t mean you can’t succeed.”