Will Kyselka was a geologist by training and a retired associate professor from the University of Hawaii Curriculum Research and Development Group.
He was a lecturer at the Bishop Museum Planetarium in Honolulu when Nainoa Thompson approached him in 1978 with a question that led to lessons in astronomy and a life-long friendship. In An Ocean in Mind (1985), Will recorded the problem-solving and learning process that Nainoa went through learning to navigate without instruments, by bringing together Western information on astronomy with the traditional navigation techniques he learned from Mau, and fashioing them into a cogent wayfinding system uniquely his own.