GOM - Gulf Research Program Awards Seven Early-Career Research Fellowships in Environmental Protection and Stewardship

The GRP’s Early-Career Research Fellowship helps researchers during the critical pre-tenure phase of their careers. Fellows receive a $76,000 financial award along with mentoring support to provide them with independence, flexibility, and a built-in support network as they take risks on untested research ideas, pursue unique collaborations, and build a network of colleagues.

Starting in September 2023, the fellows in this two-year program will undertake research to predict and prepare for ecosystem changes in the Gulf of Mexico region and its coastal zones in the face of climate change and sea-level rise.

Climate change and rising sea levels have already impacted many coastal ecosystems throughout the world, including the Gulf of Mexico. Although a global phenomenon, there is significant geographic variation in the impacts of sea-level rise. In the Gulf region, sea-level rise is intensified by land sinking due to a variety of geological factors, including fluid withdrawal.  

“This year’s goal for the Environmental Protection and Stewardship track responds to the need for improved understanding of the impacts of climate change on the unique ecosystems of the Gulf coast,” said Karena Mary Mothershed, senior program manager of the GRP’s Board on Gulf Education and Engagement. “These early-career researchers are taking innovative research approaches that take into consideration the unique characteristics of the Gulf region and will help inform ongoing restoration and stewardship efforts.”  

Pending finalized agreements, the 2023-2025 Environmental Protection and Stewardship Early-Career Research Fellows are:

Gabriel de Oliveira
University of South Alabama
Gabriel de Oliveira is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of South Alabama. He has expertise working in subtropical and tropical regions (e.g., Mobile-Tensaw Delta; Amazonia), focusing on the use of orbital remote sensing imagery and ground observations to understand how deforestation, fire, and droughts affect plant ecophysiological processes and, consequently, the regional climate. De Oliveira has more than 13 years of field experience in the Amazon rainforest and has traveled to most parts of the Brazilian Amazon as well as to parts of the Bolivian and Peruvian Amazon. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and is currently serving a two-year term as an ambassador of the AGU’s Local Science Partners Program. De Oliveira received a B.S. in geography from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and an M.S. and Ph.D. in remote sensing from Brazil’s space agency, the National Institute for Space Research. Following that, he conducted postdoctoral studies in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas and the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto.

Victoria Donovan
University of Florida
Victoria Donovan is an assistant professor in the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences at the University of Florida, based out of the West Florida Research and Education Center. Her research focuses on understanding how drivers of global change, like wildfires and hurricanes, can enhance or erode ecosystem resilience to inform natural resource management. She integrates small-scale, field-based measurements with large-scale, remotely sensed information to understand interactions between global change drivers and ecosystem structure and function across multiple scales. Donovan’s research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and she is an affiliated researcher with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service Working Lands for Wildlife, which focuses on conservation using science coproduction on working lands. Donovan earned her B.S. in biology at Queen’s University, an M.S. in assessing the impacts of landscape-level forest management on wildlife at Laurentian University, and a Ph.D. in applying ecological resilience theory to global change-driven natural resource issues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Madeline Foster-Martinez
University of New Orleans
Madeline Foster-Martinez is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is a member of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans. Her research focuses on coastal wetlands and leveraging vegetation for climate change mitigation and adaptation. She uses fieldwork and modeling to address questions that promote the use of vegetation in coastal protection strategies (i.e., nature and nature-based features), accelerate land building in deltaic areas, and increase the accuracy of coastal landscape predictions at a variety of scales. Her work also seeks to increase the sustainability of human resource cycles by linking them to natural coastal processes. Current projects include vegetation modeling for the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan and helping lead the University of New Orleans’ Center for Equity and Diversity in Engineering. Foster-Martinez graduated with her B.E. in civil engineering from Cooper Union and her M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on environmental fluid mechanics. She completed a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Internship at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center and a postdoc in the Center for Coastal Resiliency at Louisiana State University.

Nimish Pujara
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Nimish Pujara is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He leads a group that pursues research in fluid mechanics with the aim of improving understanding of various environmental processes. His lab’s research focuses on the transport of mass, momentum, particles, and energy in wavy and turbulent flow environments using a combination of theory and experiments. He also teaches courses in fluid mechanics, turbulent flows, and environmental mixing and transport phenomena. Pujara was a 2018-19 fellow of the Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence program. He earned his B.A.(Hons) and M.Eng. in engineering from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Cornell University. He completed a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley.

Charles A. Schutte
Rowan University
Charles A. Schutte is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Rowan University. He joined the faculty at Rowan University in 2019 where he teaches field methods and oceanography courses. As a biogeochemist, Schutte focuses his work on understanding how nutrients and greenhouse gases cycle through aquatic environments and how these cycles are likely to shift in response to global environmental alterations like climate change and sea-level rise. Prior to Rowan, Schutte was a research scientist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. He earned a B.S. in environmental science and another in biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in marine science from the University of Georgia. In addition, he was a postdoctoral scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany.

Kendall Valentine
University of Washington
Kendall Valentine is an assistant professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. Valentine is a coastal ecogeomorphologist — a scientist who studies the interactions of physical, geological, and biological forces on the coast — to make predictions about how coasts will change. Her research combines fieldwork, numerical modeling, and laboratory experiments to understand these processes on a range of temporal and spatial scales. Currently, Valentine’s work is focusing on integrating biological processes and community knowledge into physics-based numerical models to develop holistic predictions of coastline evolution. She envisions a future where her work on coastal resilience to sea-level changes can be more impactful by building trust and long-term relationships with coastal communities. She earned her B.A. in marine science from Boston University and her M.S. in geology and geophysics from Boston College. Valentine then moved to the Gulf Coast and earned her Ph.D. in oceanography and coastal sciences from Louisiana State University. Prior to joining the University of Washington, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Christopher Vincent
University of Florida
Christopher Vincent is an associate professor of citrus tree ecophysiology in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. Stationed at an off-campus research center, Vincent and his team work closely with growers to produce more resilient and profitable production systems. His work includes studying the impact of sunlight and shade, temperature fluctuations, and hurricanes on how plants move water, photosynthesize, and move the sugars made in photosynthesis to grow and produce fruit. Vincent hopes to establish long-running experiments addressing how planting different tree species together in planned multi-story canopies may result in better growth and more environmentally and economically sustainable production systems. He uses his communications background to convey the results of research to the public, especially tree fruit growers, to teach graduate students about citrus production, and to enhance written communication skills of developing scientists for better communication with the public. His academic background includes a B.A. in journalism and Spanish and an M.S. in horticulture from the University of Arkansas, where he also worked in the Cooperative Extension Service. He earned his Ph.D. in interdisciplinary ecology from the University of Florida.

The National Academies’ Gulf Research Program is an independent, science-based program founded in 2013 as part of legal settlements with the companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. It seeks to enhance offshore energy system safety and protect human health and the environment by catalyzing advances in science, practice, and capacity to generate long-term benefits for the Gulf of Mexico region and the nation. The program has $500 million for use over 30 years to fund grants, fellowships, and other activities in the areas of research and development, education and training, and monitoring and synthesis.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

Contact:
Pete Nelson, Director of Communications
Gulf Research Program

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