Making Waves

These awards recognize and reward OSU undergraduate students who demonstrate outstanding scholarship and pursuits consistent with the transdisciplinary, collaborative, experiential learning and outreach vision and mission of MSI.

  

MSI Undergraduate Award Recipients 

Kristen Alvstad

Sophomore in Marine Biology, whose award will go towards travel costs for her Shark Conservancy Internship this fall in South Africa.

Grace Doleshel

Junior in Environmental Public Policy, whose award will go towards travel costs to Florida for a Youth Ocean Conservation Summit this December. 

Maia Insinga

Junior in Psychology, whose award will go towards travel and textbooks related to completion of her honors thesis.

Tom McCambridge

Junior in Marine Biology, whose award will go towards housing costs at the Hatfield Marine Science Center when he takes BI 450 there in the spring of 2021.

Kendal Oetken

Sophomore in Marine Biology, whose award will go towards textbooks, course fees, and online access codes. 

Alexander Shoulders

Sophomore in Fisheries & Wildlife, whose award will go towards an application fee and travel costs to Mexico for a summer study abroad program. 

Bethany Whitten

Sophomore in Ocean Science, whose award will go towards class fees for a scientific diving course she will take in the 2020-2021 academic year.   

  

CIMRS Undergraduate Marine Studies Scholarship Recipients 

Geoffrey Walker

First-year graduate student studying genetics. For the fellowship, he is sequencing DNA samples of albacore tuna off the pacific coast and analyzing genetic variation with single nucleotide polymorphisms to determine genetic population structure. His favorite ocean/coastal place is Rarotonga, Cook Islands. 

Jeremy Schaffer

Freshman majoring in Liberal Studies and a minor in Oceanography. For the fellowship, he is gathering data from around seven years’ worth of videos of the seafloor. With the help of Waldo Wakefield and several others, classifying grading and identifying certain qualities of the seafloor features and the life that lives on around and in it. His favorite ocean/coastal place is Deception Pass in the San Juan Islands.

Becky Smoak

Incoming graduate student in Fall of 2020, in the Marine Resource and Management program. For the fellowship, she is working with Maria Kavanaugh and Kym Jacobson on a OSU-NOAA Fisheries collaboration research project related to the NOAA Newport Hydro-graphic Line. Her favorite ocean/coastal place is driving down Highway 101 in Southern California.

Jill Munger

Senior studying Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences. For the fellowship, she is working with Joe Haxel using PMEL's Noise Reference Station (NRS) network to monitor the health of marine ecosystems by listening to fishes. The enormous amount of acoustic data being collected by the NRS network presents a unique opportunity to experiment with different acoustic techniques. Since most marine bioacoustics research has been conducted on small data sets, no consensus has been reached on the effectiveness of one technique over another. However, working with the extensive data collected by the NRS network could produce minimally invasive, inexpensive solutions to help understand how the marine environment is changing over time. As a certified advanced diver, she understands the challenging nature of studying the ocean and it was exciting to find a new way to have that experience, simply by putting on headphones. Her favorite ocean/coastal place is “anywhere salty and wet.”

Owen Welch

Senior majoring in Environmental Science with an option in Economics and Policy. For the fellowship, he is working with a a NOAA research team to characterize the squid fishery population off the coast of Oregon. The main goal is to understand what variables go into the squid population as a whole on the west coast, and predicting population shifts further north off the Oregon coast. More specifically, he has been working to understand the management implications of a growing squid fishery in Oregon and have been learning a lot about the future for a squid fishery in Oregon. His mentors for the project are Dr. Ana Spalding of OSU and Dr. Mary Hunsicker from NOAA who have both helped him learn so much during the fellowship. His favorite ocean/coastal place is Cape Lookout.

  

CIMRS Marine Studies Graduate Scholarship Recipients