Faculty Labs and Research

At the Coastal Sustainability Institutute collaborative research focuses on coastal communities that are particularly susceptible to threats such as rampant pollution, extreme weather, and loss of biodiversity.

An internationally recognized research institution that focuses on the ocean environment, marine life and ecology, and discovering biotechnological and medical potentials in the sea. Projects include building underwater robots and creating genetically engineered seaweed to clean wastewater from agriculture facilities.

The Ocean Genome Legacy Center (OGL) at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center is a non-profit research organization and biological specimen repository dedicated to exploring and preserving the wealth of information contained in the genomes of endangered, rare, unusual, and ecologically critical marine organisms. Its mission is to acquire, authenticate, study, preserve, develop, and distribute genetic…

The Distel Lab studies the evolution, physiological ecology, genomics, and metabolism of marine bacteria and bacteria-animal symbioses, with a focus on symbioses between bacteria and bivalve mollusks. Most recently, Dr. Distel and his colleagues have described two new species of shipworms, with unique symbionts, digestive strategies, and habitats

We examine socio-ecological plant systems that preserve biodiversity and foster resilience to a changing climate, including how plant population and community dynamics impact human well-being and management decision-making, and how those decisions feed back to influence ecosystem dynamics.

Led by Assistant Professor Alison Glassie research areas include environmental humanities, qualitative and narrative approaches, oral history.

Research includes representation and communication of social–ecological models, cultural models in environmental decision making, stakeholder engagement in environmental policy, and environmental communication.

Marine Evolutionary Genomics Lab (Gatins Lab) Our lab uses genomic tools to better understand how ecological and evolutionary processes shape biodiversity patterns in marine systems. Our current research focuses on three main areas: genetic connectivity in marine fishes, genomic signatures speciation and hybridization, and the impact of climate-driven range expansions in marine organisms. As a…

The Water Resources Ecohydrology Lab (WRElab) seeks to help better manage watersheds for the good of both people and nature in a shifting climate. To do so, we build new understanding of how watersheds function as systems, with interactions among meteorological forcing, geologic setting, and ecological process, and how these systems affect critical water resources.

The Climate Dynamics Lab investigates the causes and impacts of changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulation and climate variability, both past and future, with the goal to improve quantitative understanding of the physical processes driving climate dynamics across time scales. They take an interdisciplinary approach that integrates climate modeling, isotope-enabled simulations, statistical and machine learning…