{"id":165731,"date":"2021-01-28T14:25:17","date_gmt":"2021-01-28T19:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/?p=165731"},"modified":"2021-01-29T09:31:27","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T14:31:27","slug":"beinart-research-delayed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/publications\/aboard-gso\/beinart-research-delayed\/","title":{"rendered":"Impacts of the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Research Expedition to the South Pacific Will Have to Wait.<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, professor Roxanne Beinart helps combat the pandemic.<\/h2>\n

By Todd McLeish<\/h4>\n

\"\"As soon as Roxanne Beinart joined the GSO faculty in 2017, she began planning an ambitious research trip that would take her on a 37-day expedition to the waters around the South Pacific nation of Tonga.<\/p>\n

That trip was supposed to depart from Fiji on April 3, 2020, to study the ecology of the animals and microbes that live in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. It was to be her first major research cruise as a URI faculty member and her first experience as chief scientist.<\/p>\n

But it was canceled\u2014as were all research expeditions aboard any U.S. research ship\u2014due to the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first we had a conversation about logistics and whether there would be travel restrictions and if the people we needed were going to be able to get to Fiji,\u201d said Beinart, a microbial ecologist and assistant professor of oceanography. \u201cAnd then it became clear that things were changing so rapidly that all of the research cruises were going to be paused. I was thinking about the pandemic for weeks and was anticipating that this might happen, so I was mentally prepared for the disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>

Are we there yet?<\/h1>

\u201cI\u2019ve worked in that region before and I have samples I can still analyze from previous cruises.\u2026This disruption will slow my ability to do this particular project, but I won\u2019t be at a total standstill.\u201d<\/p><\/article><\/div><\/section>\n

Unfortunately, she had shipped four pallets of equipment and supplies to Fiji ahead of her trip.The material has since been returned to Rhode Island. In addition to the pandemic, Fiji is dealing with the aftereffects of a cyclone that struck in early April.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s my one major regret, that I shipped it all just a few days before the cruise was canceled,\u201d Beinart said.<\/p>\n

Rescheduling will take a year or two, which will slow her research considerably at a crucial time in her career when demonstrating research progress is especially important.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve worked in that region before and I have samples I can still analyze from previous cruises, but my collaborators are larval ecologists and were going to collect samples that nobody has ever collected before, so I\u2019m not sure what they\u2019re going to do,\u201d said Beinart. \u201cThis disruption will slow my ability to do this particular project, but I won\u2019t be at a total standstill.\u201d<\/p>\n

With unexpected free time, Beinart shifted her focus from her canceled research expedition to Rhode Island\u2019s need for medical supplies and personal protective equipment and how URI might help fight the pandemic. She donated swabs and other supplies from her lab to the cause, then solicited faculty throughout the University for similar donations.<\/p>\n

She also surveyed faculty and graduate students working in molecular biology research laboratories to see if anyone would volunteer to help with COVID-19 testing, if the state needed additional personnel trained in relevant techniques.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew that we had plenty of people with the right expertise, and I had seen in the news of other university efforts to volunteer their time and talents, so I figured we could do that here, too,\u201d she said. \u201cBesides, I had already adjusted my schedule so I wasn\u2019t teaching this semester, so I had a little more bandwidth available to think about this kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beinart is one of dozens of URI faculty and staff who have joined together to support the state\u2019s effort to fight the COVID-19 virus in a variety of ways. But she\u2019s the only one trading a trip to Fiji to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research expedition derailed by COVID-19<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2120,"featured_media":165452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,2741,2403],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aboard-gso","category-fall-2020","category-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165731"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166036,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165731\/revisions\/166036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}