Marine Science Center Archives - Northeastern University College of Science

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Sea Grant program has announced $1.6 million in funding for four new coastal research projects — and Northeastern University’s Coastal Sustainability Institute & Marine Science Center has strong representation among the recipients.

Jennifer Bowen, a researcher at the Marine Science Center, is co-leading one of the four funded projects, Keeping Clams Clean: Tracking microbial contamination of clam flats. Working alongside Wayne Castonguay of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Bowen’s team will investigate the sources and turnover time of bacterial contamination threatening soft-shell clam harvests in Plum Island Sound — an area whose annual clam harvest was more than halved in 2023 following an unusually wet year that triggered repeated shellfish bed closures. The project will bring together molecular techniques, community science-led sampling, public databases, and machine learning to develop more efficient and information-rich methods of shellfish sanitation monitoring.

Two additional funded projects are led by alumni of the Marine Science Center & Coastal Sustainability Institute. Sarah Donelan, now at UMass Dartmouth, and Sarah Gignoux-Wolfsohn, now at UMass Lowell, are co-leading Winter is Changing: Enhancing oyster overwintering practices, which will examine the impacts of winter conditions and husbandry decisions on oyster growth, survival, and disease — providing growers with actionable data to better protect their stock through New England’s challenging winters.

The full slate of WHOI Sea Grant awards supports research on Massachusetts’ aquaculture and fisheries industries, including work on black sea bass population dynamics and oyster reef restoration using soundscape ecology. More information on all four projects is available at seagrant.whoi.edu.

Photo by David Kimbro / Northeastern University

Integrative Approaches to Sustained Ecosystem Monitoring in the Gulf of Maine

Hurricanes & Wildfires: The Complex Relationship Between Sampling & High-Energy Events

My current project is focused on identifying sociopolitical factors that, in conjunction with hydrologic, ecological, and economic data, signal community readiness to nature-based solutions for flood-risk mitigation. I conduct research that centers community-led adaptation and hazard mitigation to better understand how people assess risk and adapt to disasters.

I received my Ph.D. from Northeastern University in the Marine and Environmental Sciences program, working under the supervision of Dr. Damon Hall . My dissertation examined the social, technical, and ecological factors impacted by increased flood events along the Missouri River to identify comprehensive and stakeholder-centered strategies for flood resiliency planning and policymaking. My work is motivated by my experiences of the tangible, cumulative effects of frequent floods in my previous home of New Orleans.

Previously, I was a research social scientist at the Missouri Department of Conservation working to understand how to connect conservation management and environmental education with Missouri communities. I was the 2024 Coastal Sustainability Fellow at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) of Massachusetts in partnership with Northeastern University’s Coastal Resilience Institute, where I supported the Coastal team in engaging with living shorelines practitioners to advance the practice in New England.

Canopy? Commodity? The Curious Case of Rockweed (Ascophyllum nodosum)

Arctic Aquatic Connectivity Under Change: Linking Physical and Biogeochemical Processes Across the River–Ocean Interface

A General Model for The Evolution of Thermal Performance Curves with Application to Real Time-Series Data

In Maine, lobstermen last year took home over a half-billion dollars in revenue.

However, that fishery remains under threat as warming waters drive invasive species into lobsters’ habitats, species that both compete for resources and hunt the native lobsters. Working lobstermen’s ecological knowledge can be key in untangling these complicated dynamics, according to a Northeastern University professor of marine and environmental sciences.

Using an in-depth survey and interview process of lobstermen in Maine and Massachusetts, Northeastern University professor Jonathan Grabowski and his intercollegiate team studied the innate knowledge that lobster fishermen have of complex food-web relationships and animal interactions within and across different habitats. Their findings demonstrate that the insights of lobstermen, and local fishermen more broadly, provide an invaluable understanding of changing ecosystems as fishery management practices struggle to keep up.

The Role of Eddies in Eastern Boundary Upwelling Systems

Join the seminar at the MSC Bunker Classroom or virtually on Zoom.

Preserving DNA in biological samples has long posed a challenge for researchers, but the process may be about to get a lot easier.

Researchers and students at Northeastern’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center (OGL) have developed what they claim is a breakthrough in DNA recovery from frozen tissues. And they shared the discovery in a recent publication.

The Northeastern team found that using a common food additive called EDTA did a better job of preserving the DNA of biological specimens than traditional methods such as immersion in ethanol.

“We discovered that EDTA is very effective at preserving DNA in tissue samples, which was something that no one had actually demonstrated before,” says Dan Distel, the project’s principal investigator and director of OGL.

“EDTA is safer and more effective than ethanol, and much more convenient than working with frozen tissues,” Distel says.

The team recently received patent approval to protect their discovery.