Some days, SURF students Ana Nimaja and Marcos Figueroa travel along the rocky shoreline only to find bay users who want nothing to do with them. On a good day, however, coastal visitors open up about their experiences along Rhode Island’s coast, detailing the bay’s significance beyond scientific research and tourist dollars.

Roger Williams University senior Colby Masse, leaning on a lab counter in the Marine and Natural Science building, describes Narragansett Bay as a ‘sink’ for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Along with fellow SURF student Lyndsay Marlowe, he is working under Dr. Stephen O’Shea to discover the process by which these chemicals are deposited into the bay’s sediment, and also transformed into other chemical compounds which could prove harmful to the environment.

Rhode Island College senior Eva Lincoln came to a definitive realization after participating in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) last year as an RI-INBRE student conducting research in pharmaceutical chemistry: she wanted to be outdoors.

When Christopher Jenkins first arrived at the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus from Shoreview, Minnesota, his goal was to do more work with zoo-keeping. Then he discovered Narragansett Bay through scuba diving.

When he was six years old, Salve Regina junior Joshua Jeudy moved from Bridgeport, Conn. with his parents back to their home, Akra, Ghana. Upon returning, he noticed a stark difference in the perception of science among Ghanaians and Americans.

Last summer, Danielle Jordan was manning the tanks at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography’s Blount Aquaculture Lab, examining how farm-grown oysters developed defenses to disease.

For the past 30 years, Dr. Joseph DeGiorgis has been face-to-face with the vast variety of marine organisms living in the waters of Narragansett Bay as a scuba diver for the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. Now, the Professor of Biology at Providence College is part of a collaborative effort among seven higher […]