The following UW students received funding through the CICOES Graduate Student Award program. 

2023-2024

Arial Brewer

Arial is broadly interested in the acoustic ecology and behavior of marine mammals. For her PhD, she is investigating the vocal behavior, population structure, and epidermal microbial patterns of Alaska’s Cook Inlet beluga whale population and how those may be impacted by anthropogenic disturbance. Working with UW, NOAA, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Arial aims to understand how the sociality of this population affects their communication patterns and the spread of epidermal microbes throughout this critically endangered population.

2022-2023

Emily Bishop

Emily’s research seeks to understand the consequences of human modifications to marine environments. Her current work focuses on describing the circumstances which cause structures built along shorelines to have an impact on nearshore fish populations, in order to support habitat restoration efforts that aim to reverse these impacts. Specifically, she uses linear models to associate catch data with shoreline modification records at multiple spatial scales to identify whether there is a threshold of modification that results in altered fish abundance. This work will enhance our knowledge of nearshore ecosystem function, enable more efficient use of restoration funds, and support commercially valuable species.

Mary Fisher

Mary’s research seeks to evaluate climate adaptation strategies for West Coast fisheries, with a focus on the Dungeness crab fishery. Using qualitative network models, her goal is to identify how alternative strategies can influence community well-being and adaptive capacity through key social-ecological feedbacks. This highly collaborative work with the Ocean Modeling Forum draws on outputs from regional climate change scenario planning, expert knowledge, and literature reviews.

Ellen Koukel

Ellen (she/her) researched sea ice freeze variability in Kivalina, Alaska, an Iñuit community for whom sea ice is significant for both cultural and physical wellbeing. Using reanalysis and climate model data, she worked to determine the mechanisms behind and predictability of sea ice freeze at Kivalina. She hopes to be able to share this knowledge with the Kivalina community in an applicable, easy-to-use format as they adapt to a changing polar climate.

Piero Rivas

My research is to develop a new thermodynamic index for thunderstorm formation in the northern coast of South America. This region is particularly vulnerable to heavy rainfall when ENSO and “El Niño” are present. rainfall amounts can reach more than 200 mm (8 inches) in just one convective system across different locations and cities. I plan to study convective cells on said region using satellite data from GPM and TRMM, weather station data, and Self Organizing Maps (SOM) to determine the mechanisms that undergo before thunderstorms in different variables in multiple atmospheric levels and therefore develop a mathematical algorithm to forecast severe thunderstorms using numerical models. 

Marie Zahn

Marie’s research is at the intersection of marine animal ecology and ice-ocean dynamics in polar regions. She studies beluga and narwhal bioacoustics and glacier fjord hydrography in West Greenland. Specifically, her work quantifies features of beluga and narwhal echolocation and oceanographic variation in three northwest Greenland fjords occupied by narwhals. Her PhD will help improve long-term oceanographic and toothed whale observation methods in the Arctic.

Shuting Zhai

2021-2022

Katie Brennan

Katie (she/her) worked to reconstruct Arctic sea ice and climate conditions from 1850 to present on monthly timescales. To do this she used online data assimilation techniques, originally developed for weather forecasting, to optimally combine temperature observations with climate models. To make this computationally feasible, she first developed a climate model emulator (Linear Inverse Model) that predicts Arctic climate conditions on monthly timescales and then embedded this model into a data assimilation framework. The result was a new independent reconstruction of coupled sea ice, atmosphere and ocean variables throughout the Instrumental Era.

Gabriela Carr

Gabi (she/her) researched the impact of sea level rise on water quality in Kitsap County shellfish growing areas due to inundation of shoreline septic systems. Her methodology allows for (a) identifying septic systems particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and (b) identifying portions of shellfish growing areas that are likely to experience spikes in poor water quality in response to leakage from those systems. Going forward, she is presenting this methodology to managers around Puget Sound to extend its use beyond Kitsap County.

Jennifer Gardner

(no bio available)

Julia Indivero

Julia’s project analyzed local abundance and size of walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus) in the Bering Sea from 1984—2019. Walleye pollock are the second-largest fishery in the world, and the size-at-age is an important component in the stock assessment model. She estimated size-at-age using the NOAA bottom trawl survey data with a model that accounts for spatial and spatio-temporal variation and compensates for shifts in abundance. She evaluated patterns in the size of walleye pollock across the region and years and between age classes, and compared how this approach for determining size-at-age impacted outcomes of the stock assessment. This project can help correct for spatial gaps in data availability for the stock assessments and can lead to a better understanding of both local and population-level demographic processes. As climate change is likely to shift fish distributions and alter environmental conditions that impact growth, this approach for integrating spatiotemporally explicit size-at-age processes into the stock assessment may provide more accurate forecasting.

Katherine McElroy

Katherine (she/her/hers) applied a common ecological model, the Ideal Free Distribution theory, to grizzly bear foraging and commercial fishing in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Through the application of the theory, she investigated the role of competition, information, and habitat quality in fishing/foraging area use by bears and fishers as they targeted sockeye salmon. Her research will allow managers to adapt management strategies that match the decision-making process in their fishery and mitigate potential fishery and ecosystem impacts.

Jennifer Stern

Jenny’s research applies dietary tracers to elucidate the feeding habits of the wild subpopulation of Baffin Bay polar bears. She analyzes hair and fat samples from captured polar bears using stable isotopes and fatty acid analysis. She then combines these data with movement data from adult females tracked with satellite collars. Her project also includes an examination of hair growth in bears as an indicator of feeding, with a focus on polar bears through an experimental study of zoo animals.

2020-2021

Grant Adams

Grant (he/him/his) worked to develop a  multi-species, climate-enhanced, age-based stock assessment model to groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska. In addition he developed a management strategy evaluation to test the performance of single-species management strategies for groundfish in Alaska when time-varying predation mortality is present, but ignored.

Christopher Liu

My project focused on the application of machine learning techniques to real-time tsunami forecasting. I developed a 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict unit source weights from tsunami amplitude data as part of the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research (NCTR) Short-term Inundation Forecasting for Tsunamis (SIFT) system. The resulting CNN is able to make more accurate predictions with less data than the existing inversion method currently in use by the NCTR and highlights the potential for machine learning to improve our ability to quickly and accurately forecast tsunamis in real-time.

Laura Moore

My project focuses on the organic complexation of iron in hydrothermal plumes and how this complexation impacts the stability of iron during long-distance transport. The stability of hydrothermally-sourced iron impacts iron supply to remote regions of the ocean, subsequently influencing primary productivity and resulting climate feedbacks. The CICOES fellowship allowed me to prepare for a cruise that was conducted this fall between September 18^th and November 6th along the Southern East Pacific Rise (SEPR). During the so-called 2021 PLUME RAIDERS cruise, we collected samples along the SEPR from both diffuse and high temperature hydrothermal plumes that we identified. Analyses are currently in progress to elucidate both bulk characteristics of the iron-binding ligand pool and to identify specific ligands known as siderophores. Together, these measurements will help us to understand the organic contribution to iron stability in the region and predict downstream effects of organically complexed hydrothermal iron.

Jazzmine Waugh

Jazzmine investigated seabird oiling susceptibility using a long-term beached bird dataset and data from the Nestucca and Tenyo Maru oil spills. Jazzmine first used multivariate analyses to explore overall patterns in variation between spill and non-spill data.  She then conducted analyses that identified the taxa that were under/over-represented in spill data relative to the long-term beached bird dataset, indicating seabirds that were more susceptible to oiling.

2019-2020

Lindsay Alma

Grace Crandall

Lindsey Davidge

Silvana Gonzalez

Jessica Hale

Yakelyn Ramos