WHOI Named As NSF Science And Tech Center
The National Science Foundation has named Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as the Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet, or C-CoMP, one of six science and technology research centers announced last week.
The NSF science and technology centers are equipped to advance ambitious, transformative research in STEM fields ranging from mechanobiology to climate change. Simply put, C-CoMP will be studying the innerworkings of Earth’s carbon cycle. The center will be headed by co-directors Elizabeth Kujawinski, a senior scientist in WHOI’s Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry Department; and Mary Ann Moran, regents professor in the University of Georgia’s department of marine sciences; and have an official start date of October 1.
“It’s meant to be a multi-institutional, highly collaborative, high-risk type of science as well as a significant education and outreach component,” Dr. Kujawinski said. “The basic idea is that we’re trying to understand the molecules and the microbes that are really important for transforming about a quarter of Earth’s photosynthetic carbon every year. That area, that particular pool of carbon, has been really hard to study because it turns over really fast, which means it’s produced and consumed in very short time periods. There’s not much of it at any one point in time, so we have had a very hard time analytically pulling it out of seawater, characterizing it, trying to understand which bacteria or phytoplankton or microbes, in general, are important for controlling it and so on.”
At a time when both global and ocean temperatures are rising due to increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the research C-CoMP plans to conduct is critical to understanding the world’s current position relating to climate change, she said.
“We don’t really understand the governing mechanisms [of the carbon cycle], we don’t understand the processes that are important, and as the planet changes and we move into unknown territory relative to the state of the ocean, we don’t have a sense of how resilient that is or how it might change in the future,” Dr. Kujawinski said. “Because it’s such a large component of carbon, it has the potential to have a large impact on our understanding of climate and habitability of the planet. People have not been able to do that on a project-by-project basis, so now we’re going to try an approach where we bring together a large group of collaborators who can work more effectively and can work iteratively and really make progress on this.”
In addition to shedding light on these emerging areas of science, the C-CoMP program is designed with robust public education and outreach aspects. Dr. Kujawinski said the center has invited two individuals who study best practices on how to engage students of all ages in STEM and one of the programs being implemented, called CURES, is aimed at getting students in the research mindset through scientific exploration. Through the program, students in a class would work collaboratively on a project, encouraging what Dr. Kujawinksi called a “hive-mind approach” to science.
“This allows students to get an appreciation for the fact that there’s not always a right answer,” she said. “Research can be challenging and hard, it can be somewhat open-ended, so the students are graded not so much on the answers they get, but on the process. These types of classes have been shown to really open students’ minds to the idea of doing research and can be a nice jumping-off point to getting more involved in a particular research project at a different institution or at their own institution.”
C-CoMP will also be introducing a Bridge to PhD program, through which a handful of Bridge to PhD fellows will be appointed each year, giving them the opportunity to work as research technicians for two years while they explore and decide exactly what they would like to do as they advance their careers.
“It’s targeted toward students who are generally underrepresented, certainly in the ocean sciences but also broadly in the geosciences,” Dr. Kujawinski said. “It provides a mentoring system and alumni network [for the students] that facilitates their movement into the graduate program…and along the way, we’re hoping to establish open-science research frameworks, a collaborative community of scientists, a more-inclusive and diverse community as well. We have high hopes for our impact on the community.”