REU Site: Resilience and Response of Marine Organisms to Environmental Change

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This REU Site award to the College of Charleston, located in Charleston, SC, will support the training of 10 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2018- 2020. Research is conducted at Fort Johnson, located just across the harbor from downtown Charleston. Fort Johnson is a marine science campus that houses the College's Grice Marine Laboratory and research labs from four federal and state partner institutions that contribute to the program. The program focuses on how organisms, populations, communities and ecosystems respond to natural or anthropogenic change in marine environments. Student projects involve issues like environmental variability, climate change, coastal development, species introductions and contaminants. In addition to being engaged in full-time research in the lab or field, students will participate in seminars, discussions, field trips and workshops to develop science communication and professional skills. Students will be housed in the Grice Marine Laboratory dormitory. Students from schools with limited marine research opportunities and from underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to apply. Participants are selected based on potential career benefits, on the diversity that each student contributes to the intern group, and on evidence of strong potential for academic and personal achievement. It is anticipated that a total of 30 students, primarily from schools with limited opportunities in marine research, will be trained in the program. Students will learn how research is conducted, how different scientific institutions formulate and address research questions, how the graduate school application process is carried out, what kinds of scientific careers are available, and how scientific information is presented to public and professional audiences. Many will present the results of their work through scientific conferences and publications.A common web-based assessment tool used by all REU Site programs funded by the Division of Biological Infrastructure will be used to determine the effectiveness of the training program. Students will be asked to respond to an automatic email sent via the NSF reporting system, and student career paths will be tracked after the program. More information about the program is available by visiting http://reu.cofc.edu or by contacting the PI (Dr. Robert Podolsky, reu@cofc.edu).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.