NSF grant extends BC research related to ocean science education

The National Science Foundation has renewed a five-year, $25 million Science and Technology Center grant shared among 14 marine biology labs and institutions of higher education, including Boston College, designed to promote a deeper understanding and appreciation of the chemicals and the processes that underpin ocean ecosystems.

The original $25 million award was announced in September 2021, and it launched the Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet, or C-CoMP, a Science and Technology Center, which is led by a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Marine Biological Lab and the University of Georgia’s Department of Marine Sciences.

The center’s aim is to foster education, outreach, and knowledge transfer activities that engage students of all ages, expand participation in the next generation of ocean scientists, and extend novel open-science approaches into complementary academic and industrial communities.

“A goal of C-CoMP is to bring rapid and transformative advances to the understanding of the bio reactive molecules within the chemical-microbial network of the ocean carbon cycle that are responsible for a quarter of Earth’s annual organic carbon flux,” said Laura M. O’Dwyer, a professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development’s Department of Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment.

“The BC team is involved in the educational research side of the work, and we just conducted a large-scale study with a nationally representative sample of teachers to better understand why ocean science isn’t prioritized in middle and high school science content.”