Graduate Students

Joshua Kelly unexpectedly found himself on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea on his very first week as a student at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

“Talk about being thrown into the fire,” said the native of North Reading, Mass. “But it was a blast!”

A team of 17 University of Rhode Island faculty and students depart this week for a month-long expedition to the waters off Antarctica to study the feeding behavior of krill, a key organism in the food chain in the Southern Ocean.

The Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island is providing URI undergraduates interested in earning a Master of Oceanography degree with a chance to get a jumpstart on their coursework and complete the degree just one year after finishing their bachelor’s degree.

The journal Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography has celebrated the career of Emeritus Professor of Oceanography Tom Rossby, devoting its January issue, titled "Modern Physical Oceanography and Professor H.T. Rossby" to his life and work.

Kerry Whittaker, a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, has been recognized with an award for her research at a recent scientific conference.

Maryjo Brounce, a doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, has been recognized with awards for the best student presentation and the outstanding student research paper in the field of tectonophysics at the recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest gathering of earth and space scientists in the world.

University of Rhode Island graduate student Justine Sauvage returned recently from a two-month expedition aboard a Japanese ship studying life deep beneath the seafloor.

In the process of the research effort, the international team of scientists and crew aboard the 210-meter ship D/V Chikyu set a record for drilling into the sediment. They drilled 2,446 meters (over 8,000 feet) below the seafloor off the coast of Japan; the previous record was 2,112 meters (a little under 7,000 feet).

Oceanographers at the University of Rhode Island have analyzed long-term data from several anemometers in southern New England and found that average wind speeds have declined by about 15 percent at inland sites while speeds have remained steady at an offshore site.

Scientists have long used the speed of seismic waves traveling through the Earth as a means of learning about the geologic structure beneath the Earth’s surface. A University of Rhode Island graduate student is using the tiny seismic waves created by ocean waves crashing on shorelines around the world to learn how an underwater plateau was formed 122 million years ago.

From December 3-7 2012, over 20,000 people will attend the 45th annual American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California. This event is an important venue for international scientific exchange among Earth and space scientists and educators.  

A significant contingent of URI GSO faculty, staff and students will be presenting their research to an international audience.