Milton Garces serves as the Director of Remote Sensing at the Applied Research Laboratory at the University of Hawai‘i and a Research Scientist at the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. He is also the Founder and Director of the Infrasound Laboratory (ISLA) and holds a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Milton is an internationally recognized subject matter expert in infrasound, a field he helped revitalize at the turn of the century and then disrupted with the RedVox infrasound app. Infrasound is inaudible long-period, far ranging sound typically generated by energetic vibrating or exploding extreme events (such as typhoons, meteors, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis). Over the last 30 years he blazed a trail of discovery and innovation, documented in over 250 peer-reviewed and technical publications in diverse disciplines of applied physics adjacent to low-frequency sound and vibration.
Milton grew up in Puerto Rico, considered the Hawaii of the East by surfers. He started his studies in Space Sciences at FL Tech in Melbourne (1985-1989) and identifies as a recovering cosmologist. Milton completed his BS in Physics and headed to Scripps Institution in San Diego (1989-1995) to continue his surfing and scientific training in applied sciences. There he received a well-rounded education in Oceanography, was introduced to global nuclear monitoring, specialized in acoustics, and completed his Ph.D. on volcano infrasound before it was cool.
In hot pursuit of exploding mountains, he wintered for two years at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where he deployed sensor systems in the Aleutians and elsewhere in collaboration with the Alaska Volcano Observatory. In 1997 he moved to the warmer climes and gentler volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii. Milton founded the University of Hawaii (UH) Infrasound Lab (ISLA) in Kona, Hawaii in 1999, and got to work deploying sensor systems globally to explore the Earth’s inaudible soundscapes. He assisted with the design and construction of the exquisite infrasound arrays of the International Monitoring System in the Pacific and Indian Oceans at the turn of the century, developed and transitioned volcano monitoring technology to operations, and discovered and characterized new maritime and littoral sources. After a 500kT meteor blast over Russia in 2013, Milton conceived a smartphone app and cloud ecosystem that could record and stream infrasound and founded RedVox Inc. in 2015 as a UH startup. After maturation from inception to operations over ten years and demonstrating the smartphone platform’s potential for reliable, secure, global monitoring of natural and man-made hazards, Milton exited as CEO of RedVox in late 2023. That year he also accepted the position of Remote Sensing Director of ARL at UH, with emphasis on technology evolution, transfer and modernization.
Today, Milton is a seasoned senior scientist and ex-CEO with substantial expertise in applied physics, fluid dynamics, acoustics, digital signal processing, information theory, data wrangling, applied ML, and how to put it all together with a bow on top. He still surfs.