Reaching into the classroom

June 27, 2012

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During the coming school year I’ll be part of an NSF GK-12 program at UCSD, which teams Ph.D. students with K-12 teachers in classrooms throughout the county.

We’re in the throes of a four-week course that preps the grad students and teachers for our collaboration in the classroom. We began with simple communication: the grad students had to strip jargon from our research explanations while the teachers had to clarify the array of acronyms used in education. Then we, the grad students, began our training to be effective teachers.

The program’s aim isn’t solely to make us better at presenting Powerpoints to a general audience. We’re pushed to dig deeper and make our research both intellectually and physically accessible to our high school students.

With the help of my mentors, I’ll develop a series of lessons drawing on coral ecology and biology, using coral reefs to teach ecosystem interconnectedness, coral energy reserves to discuss macromolecules, and coral skeletons and tissue elements to talk about isotope chemistry.

On top of that, my teaching team plans to implement a full-scale scientific experiment in the classroom, guiding, but not instructing, our students through the process of defining questions, developing hypotheses, and planning experiments, then implementing and collecting data, and finally analyzing and interpreting findings.

I’ll have the privilege of working with a team at High Tech High North County— environmental engineering teacher Chris Morissette and biology teachers Matt Leader and Parag Chowdhury — along with fellow Ph.D. student Mike Lovci. Because High Tech High is a project-based school, we have the flexibility to tackle the ambitious undertaking of studying coral health in the classroom as we attempt to build a bridge between professional science and high school education.

Our project will challenge everyone, students and teachers alike. Through the process I’m certain that the students will learn critical truths about science, such as the importance of working together, the value of detailed planning and the necessity of problem solving on the fly.

One of the major themes I’ve tried to thread into Science Minded is that science can be best learned by doing. When students have to combine book smarts and hands-on ability they have the potential to advance rapidly, and in doing so realize both their strengths and weaknesses.

To conduct the project our students will have to read and engineer, write and design, and interpret and build; it’s unlikely that any are skilled in all of these areas, but through the diversity of roles necessary to complete the project we hope that each student will find their niche.

Throughout the year I’ll use Science Minded to communicate our progress—conveying what I’m learning from the students and my mentors—both scientifically and as a budding educator. On a broader scale, I hope that our hands-on approach will engage high school students and push them to be science-literate citizens.

I’m certain that there are multitudinous teachers out there using interactive lessons in and out of the classroom. My exposure to the array of such strategies is only in its infancy and my team could certainly use your help. So please offer feedback, thoughts and suggestions as we navigate this ambitious and exciting project.

Mentors play critical role

May 13, 2012

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One of the lesser-known facts about grad school is that much of what we learn doesn’t necessarily come from professors or reading scientific papers. While both are critical to our education, other grad students also provide a wealth of information and support.

During my first year at Scripps I was required to jump into a research project. I hadn’t chosen adissertation topic, but I knew that I wanted to continue to mix biology, chemistry and geology as I had done in undergrad. It wasn’t long before I realized that corals suited my interests well, being that they’re an animal, “plant” and rock all wrapped in one.

This led me to another grad student named Jessica Carilli who was using geology and chemistry to study how corals react to changes in their environment. To conduct her research Jess was examining skeleton cores that she’d collected from boulder-shaped corals in Belize and Honduras.

Similar to a tree, corals grow a new band of skeleton each year. But the skeleton records much more than just the corals’ age. By measuring element concentrations and taking X-rays of the cores, Jess determined the temperature of the sea, the level of metal pollutants, and how frequently severe bleaching had occurred throughout the lifetime of individual colonies.

When we met, Jess was nearing the end of her dissertation and her only regret was that there just wasn’t enough time to ask the many questions that her cores could potentially answer. So after hearing about my interests, she was excited to take me under her wing and learn more from her samples.

Jess taught me how to make elemental measurements and helped me interpret my findings. She had also collected some complimentary data, and when we put it all together the project got much stronger. At the end of my first year I wrote about our joint work in a paper, along with the help of a few other researchers, and it became the first chapter of my dissertation.

Three years later, I found myself deep into my primary dissertation work in Curaçao. While I enjoyed my first year project, I had since become excited about reef ecology, and in particular, how the health of baby corals influences future generations. To investigate my new research topic I had turned to a different technique: measuring fats in coral to see how much energy they store in their tissue.

Meanwhile, Jess had graduated and taken up a postdoc position in Australia. There, she and collaborator Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia, were looking for bleaching events in skeletal cores collected from corals in the Pacific. In addition to looking into each coral’s past using techniques from Jess’ dissertation, they wanted to know the current health of the animals. To do this they turned to fat measurements, and because of the work I was already doing they turned to me.

The gist of what we found—combining all three of our areas of expertise—is that when the sea heats up, corals used to living in places where the temperature varies a lot bleach less than those used to a constant-temperature ocean, presumably because they’re better at tolerating high temperatures.

All in all, my relationship with Jess has gone from mentor to collaborator. As is the case throughout the world of science, we’ve figured out how to draw on each other’s now different skills, utilizing our individual strengths in order to solve nature’s puzzles.

Dissertation comes slowly into focus

April 30, 2012

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Friends and family often ask me what it means to be a Ph.D. student. Some wonder if it’s just more years of classes, while others think it involves a lot of teaching. While both are part of it, a Ph.D. is at its core all about our research.

At the end of five, six or even seven years of grad school, all of our research goes into a dissertation. The document can be more than 100 pages in length and is broken up into chapters, each detailing individual projects that we conducted. In the end, the quality of our dissertation is used to decide whether we’ve achieved the knowledge necessary to be called a “Dr.”

When I started grad school, I had little idea what my dissertation topic would be. I had many interests: microbial geochemistry, tropical aquaculture, and coastal pollution, along with a background in biology. But none of the topics excited me enough on their own, nor were they easy to connect.

Thankfully, my mind was put to ease from the get-go. Before I even applied to Scripps a professor here gave me some great advice: Don’t come into grad school thinking you’ve got your topic figured out. There are things that you will learn here that you didn’t know existed.

He was essentially saying that grad school is a process of intellectual growth—your knowledge will grow, and your dissertation will come into focus and continuously improve as you learn new things.

In my first year at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I helped on a project looking at pollutants in Venice lagoon sediments (Italy that is), and then studied skeletal isotopes in corals collected from small islands in the Caribbean.

Both of these projects utilized my background in geochemistry and I liked the opportunity to dig my hands into familiar territory. But I wasn’t getting my hands dirty enough. While I was studying samples that came from incredible places, I wasn’t the one out there designing the research and working in the field.

My first opportunity to visit Curaçao came in my second year. While there I assisted with on-going projects and performed small experiments of my own. My early research question was somewhat rudimentary: how do coral babies react to fertilizer? But as I kept going back to the island, trying new things and asking new questions, my work became more refined.

The health of baby coral piqued my interest and I began throwing ideas around with my colleagues on the island and at Scripps. I wondered whether healthy adult corals make health babies, and whether health babies are better able to tolerate polluted environments. As my excitement, knowledge and experience grew, my dissertation topic came into focus.

Many professors I’ve spoken with lament the fact that some students enter grad school highly focused on one area of research, but they also fear the student who jumps from project to project. From my experience, it seem that there are no true rules for picking a topic—be it a senior or masters thesis, or a Ph.D. dissertation. It’s really about keeping an open mind, finding something that interests you, and seeing it through to the end.

Marine biologist stays dry

April 30, 2012

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I’m a tropical marine biologist but I don’t SCUBA dive. Sound crazy?

While true, it’s not the whole story. I am not allowed to SCUBA dive. Knowing my medical history of heart and lung issues my doctors think it’s too risky. But even when I take the time to explain this to people, some still scoff.

“Aaron, how do you think you can work with corals if you can’t dive? I just don’t understand,” a professor from another university once asked.

“You don’t dive?” A tourist once exclaimed while in Curaçao on a dive vacation. “That makes no sense,” she laughed. “What are you thinking?”

While their comments stung, I’ve learned to smirk them away because I can confidently tell them: I make it work, and it’s not even that hard.

Their questions are practical, I suppose—the animals I study live in water that’s at least ten feet deep, so I can’t very well collect them or run experiments in their natural habitat. But my naysayers forget one key thing: science is collaborative; I don’t have to be the one dropping below the surface.

To get past my limitation I’ve linked up with two highly skilled SCUBA diving scientists, Kristen Marhaver and Mark Vermeij, who make the collections necessary for me to do my work—or better said: to do our work.

Conducting research as a group is the norm, not the exception. When people bring different expertise and ideas together the outcome can be bigger than the sum of the parts. In other words, cool things happen.

While it’s rare for a team member to be medically barred from completing part of a project, it’s common for individuals to have certain skills and lack others. That’s the whole point of working together, and this is true in just about every field of science.

Kristen and Mark are much more than expert divers, they’re coral reef ecologists. Through sharing their expertise with me, the three of us have discovered some really interesting things about what make corals tick. But our work wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t contribute.

At the field station in Curaçao I set up complex aquarium systems, collect and rear baby corals, run experiments and take samples. I then process the samples and analyze data back in San Diego. While Kristen and Mark taught me some of the techniques we use, many others I’ve learned, practiced and developed on my own.

Looking back, I wouldn’t say that I had an unusually large amount of determination or perseverance, I just believed in what I was doing and wanted to keep doing it.

Many of us have experienced someone telling us that we aren’t capable of something. Just like how I was told to forget marine biology, people may have said you can’t do something because you’re a girl, a boy, a C student, too short, too tall, and on and on.

What matters is how you respond. And I don’t mean in that moment—my encounters with naysayers left me angry and venting to friends afterward—I mean in the long-term. I could have let their comments get to me and turned away from studying corals, but I didn’t.

In many ways I was lucky to link up with Mark and Kristen: they’re great at what they do and welcomed me in as mentors and friends. But none of it would have happened had I not first proved myself as a scientist and hard worker. They didn’t offer me the opportunity on a whim, I had to work hard to build our collaboration, excelling at what I could do and accepting what I couldn’t.

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