Fellowship Experiences

Anyone who’s ever been to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor understands that there is a big trash problem in the city.

​In January 2019, I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. I came to work each morning in jeans and a t-shirt and focused on my research: modeling the biology and physics of floating seaweed.

Sometimes I feel like great scientific insights are not having an impact in societal and governmental decisions. That is particularly the case for climate science, but it is also in different scientific fields (e.g., engineering, forensic science, smart cities, etc.). As researchers, we like to think we know better, and that if others would know what we know the world would be a better place.

As a burgeoning aquatic ecologist and environmental scientist, I never anticipated needing to know how to fly a drone.

I tend to think of phytoplankton as the “forests” of an aquatic environment. Much like trees in a terrestrial ecosystem, phytoplankton form the base of the aquatic food web and are critically important to the overall structure and function of an ecosystem.