Teresa Crean, coastal community planner at the Coastal Resources Center and Rhode Island Sea Grant, received the Northeast Sea Grant Outstanding Individual Outreach Achievement Award for her work in helping develop the Shoreline Special Area Management Plan (Beach SAMP).
The following two Ph.D. students at GSO were awarded Graduate Student Fellowships from the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium—a program that provides support to student researchers in a NASA-related field of study.
Ph.D. student Sarah Nickford’s fellowship support will allow her to use Saildrone observations in conjunction with NASA satellite data. Her research objective is to quantify and produce a mechanistic understanding of wintertime air-to-sea CO2 exchange in the Gulf Stream and the subtropical mode water formation region. This will be accomplished by establishing relationships between ocean pCO2 and satellite-derived variables.
The research supported by R.I. Space Grant will allow Ph.D. student Laura Glastra to further examine the molecular processes and properties that control solute exclusion from ice during freezing. Along with this, Glastra will be examining how ice crystallography is influenced by solutes. Glastra’s research will help scientists better understand the biogeochemistry in the ocean worlds of our solar system.
Ph.D. student Michelle Hauer was recognized by the National Science Foundation as a Graduate Research Fellow, a distinction that includes funding to cover three years of her graduate education plus an annual $34,000 stipend. Hauer works with GSO Assistant Professor Roxanne Beinart examining the symbiotic relationships among organisms living near hydrothermal vents in the western Pacific Ocean. Having studied environmental science and graphic art as an undergraduate at DePaul University, she looks forward to a career combining scientific research and conservation with science communication involving nature photography, filmmaking and other innovative artistic methods
Ph.D. student Anna Robuck was selected as one of 11 exceptional Superfund Research Program trainees to win a 2020 K.C. Donnelly Externship Award Supplement. The externship will expand Anna’s research by allowing her to use non-targeted and total fluorine methods to measure new and poorly characterized PFAS chemicals in the Delaware River Estuary.
M.S. student Nina Santos received a Global Marine Initiative Student Research Award from The Nature Conservancy for her project titled “Niche overlap between Atlantic cod and black sea bass.”
Ph.D. student Virginie Sonnet was awarded a NASA-funded Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) graduate fellowship that will support her research for the next 3 years. The fellowship is awarded to graduate students in a field related to NASA’s science, technology or exploration goals. Sonnet, who works with GSO Associate Professor Colleen Mouw, will use the fellowship to support her research which will help shape the future use of data coming from hyperspectral satellite missions such as PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Clouds, ocean Ecosystem) from NASA to improve the detection of phytoplankton.