Nicole Lee, a second-year Northeastern University student, grew up enjoying the outdoors in beautiful Marin County, California, and binge-watching David Attenborough’s series “Planet Earth.” “That really inspired me to want to preserve the environment around me,” says Lee, who is majoring in environmental studies with a concentration in the green economy. Lee wanted to find […]

A co-op with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has third-year Northeastern University student Haley Benjamin observing right whales off the coast of Massachusetts, counting penguins in Antarctica via drone and getting closer to her goal of becoming a marine biologist. “I’ve just always known that I need to work with animals,” says Benjamin, who is […]

With the excitement of his recent publication, associate professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Damon Hall, met with me to discuss his research on the importance of citizen science.   “Citizen silence: Missed opportunities in citizen science” can be accessed here.  What initially sparked your interest in citizen science and its role in research?  My […]

A record number of Northeastern undergraduates are pursuing PEAK project experiences this spring, including several motivated students within the Marine and Environmental Sciences department, including Grace Marnon, Kiran Bajaj, Nicole Mongillo, and Mark Teh. We caught up with each of these talented young scientists to learn more about their research!  Grace Marnon received a Summit […]

Whether it was kayaking to small inlets in the northeastern part of the Mediterranean Sea or spending overnight on a boat all in the pursuit of tracking the local dolphin population, Northeastern University marine biology major Francesca Russell was living — and working — the dream. Russell, now a fourth-year student, spent last spring on […]

A semester on an island in the Indian Ocean sounds glamorous. But Hans Van Der Sande’s co-op in the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelago nation over a thousand miles off the coast of Africa, was a lesson in conservation. Van Der Sande, a senior ecology and evolutionary biology major, has been interested in conservation work […]

Grace Arents, a fourth-year environmental and sustainability sciences student, had never had a glass of wine before when she saw a posting for a co-op at a winery on NUWorks. Still, her interest was piqued and she applied to spend a semester learning enology — the process of making wine — in Napa Valley. Before […]

In the world of termites studied by Northeastern professor Rebeca Rosengaus, worker termites spend their few short months on Earth cleaning and feeding their enormous long-lived queen mother and tending to her eggs and their young siblings. Since termite workers and queens both possess a network of genes called the Queen Central Module, it has […]

Two unexploded ordnance were fished out of the Charles River in Needham, Massachusetts, this week. A sweep of the river by the state police bomb squad and a marine dive team didn’t turn up any more munitions. Beyond the obvious safety risks, the old weapons and ammunition left underwater also present environmental risks, a Northeastern […]

Students from a dozen area schools measured oysters, dissected squid and learned why plastic is called “ocean smog” during the annual High School Marine Science Symposium at Curry Student Center on Northeastern’s Boston campus. The 250 students got a chance to talk with fledgling and experienced scientists during the event, which was sponsored by Northeastern […]

A new offering for the spring 2024 semester, PSYC-4660 is a seminar in cognition, a subset of psychology that covers how people encode, represent and process information from the environment in the brain, according to Coley, a psychology professor with a dual appointment in environmental science. Humans & Nature zeros in on how those things […]

Dr. Bowen's work in this collaborative project focuses on using tools from molecular biology to understand how the diverse metabolisms of microbes affect the ecosystem services provided by marshes.

The San Joaquin Valley of California, despite supplying a significant percentage of the country’s food, is nevertheless a dry, arid place. Fresno, at the heart of the valley, receives just over 10 inches of rain a year on average, according to the National Weather Service, and sometimes as little as 3. And yet, until the […]

A Northeastern marine scientist has discovered a new species of tiny mollusk that lives in an ancient, submerged cypress grove called the Alabama Undersea Forest. Dan Distel, research professor at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center, says the bivalve written up in the journal Deep Sea Research represents a new genus and species of mussel and offers […]