Research fellow: Rebecca Gow
Hometown: Worcester, MA
School: Roger Williams University
Majors: Biology, Engineering

Last semester, Rebecca Gow, a rising junior, added engineering as her second major. And now, this summer, as a Rhode Island EPSCoR Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF), she is writing code and building circuit boards.

“This is all new to me,” Gow says, gesturing to a table of equipment in a Roger Williams University lab. “I’m working to help design a sensor that monitors the water quality in oyster beds.”

A sustainable, high quality protein source, oysters and other shellfish account for nearly a third of global aquaculture production. However, harmful algal blooms and changes in water quality can pose a threat to the health of these crops. Gow says her SURF project with Assistant Professor Adria Updike, a collaboration with scientists at the New England Aquarium, seeks to develop a low-cost sensor that oyster farmers in developing nations can deploy to monitor the water in their oyster beds.

Working primarily in the lab, Gow is helping to build, test, and calibrate new and existing instrumentation for farmers to monitor water quality in their oyster beds and use the data, including details like temperature and salinity, to predict when oysters are safe to harvest. The project aligns with the RI NSF EPSCoR goals of understanding and predicting the response of marine organisms to climate change while providing a platform for the researchers to engage with local oyster farmers and share the outcomes of their work with developing nations.

“The problem is, the farmers don’t know if their oysters are unhealthy until they harvest,” says Gow. “Our goal is to build an inexpensive sensor that will help predict when the oysters are healthy before they go through the expense of harvesting.”

Gow demonstrates a part of the prototype sensor that measures the intensity of the fluorescence (the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light) of algae based on chlorophyll content. She broke down the process into two steps: shining an ultraviolet LED light on an algae sample and transmitting, without loss in strength, the emitted fluorescence with an optical fiber to a color sensor. These components are controlled from an Arduino board, an open source micro-controller, that runs off a program to interpret red, blue and green light intensities. These intensities are then used as an indicator for the mass of algae, which is a contributing factor to the quality of oyster beds.

The SURF work focuses on developing different prototypes for the sensor and calculating which methods work best. She also spends time reading scientific papers, particularly on chlorophyll and sensors, to gain an understanding of what other researchers have done in the field.

Gow says her experience this summer is helping her define her path forward as graduation nears: “I wanted to work in a lab, on a scientific project, and do research full time. During the school year, it’s too crazy.”

At this point, she says, she definitely enjoys conducting research, but does not want to be limited to solitary work in a lab.

“I think I want to go into prosthetics,” reflects Gow, whose father is an engineer and mother is a college science professor. “I like working with people and helping figure out solutions. I like the idea of building circuit boards and connecting them to the human body. It encompasses my interests in both biology and engineering.”

Story and photos by Amy Dunkle