As an undergraduate at Northeastern University, I worked on co-op in the Anderson Laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There, I became immersed in the study of harmful algal blooms in the Nauset Marsh System on Cape Cod and in the Gulf of Maine and assisted several projects to prevent, mitigate and control blooms of the harmful alga, Alexandrium fundyense, that biologist Don Anderson and colleagues have been doing over the past forty years.  

The implications are significant for public health – reliable early warning signals for dangerous levels of the red tide causing alga, A. fundyense, are critical to direct shellfish managers to close harvests during blooms and avoid cases of life-threatening paralytic shellfish poisoning. Building upon what I learned on co-op, I completed an honors senior thesis project on the potential impacts from climate change on the timing, incidence, and severity of blooms in the Gulf of Maine. I was honored to receive the top undergraduate prize in Physical and Life Sciences for presenting this research at the 2013 Northeastern University Research, Innovation and Scholarship Exposition.