REU Site: Coastal Ocean Research through the University of Southern California Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies

The University of Southern California (USC)'s Wrigley Institute of Environmental Science and the USC Department of Biology will host a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. The program will bring undergraduates to USC each summer for three years for a ten-week internship. Participating interns will be housed at either the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center (WMSC) on Catalina Island or the USC University Park Campus, Los Angeles. Potential research topics are focused on the theme of coastal oceanography and include a wide range of studies. Interns will also participate in a variety of professional development activities and workshops as well as field-based activities. Interns may have the opportunity to participate in scientific conferences. Participating USC faculty have come from seven different departments/sections at USC (Earth Sciences, Marine Environmental Biology, Spatial Sciences, Environmental Studies, Archaeology, Civil Engineering, and Molecular Computational Biology), and all have active, nationally-funded research programs and strong publication records. The program also recruits top research faculty mentors or co-mentors from local 4-year public and liberal arts colleges who routinely work at the WMSC in the summers. Taken together, REU Interns can choose from potential research projects in a wide variety of fields, such as marine biogeochemical cycles, population genetics, genomics, marine Nitrogen cycles, microbial ecology, protistan diversity, molecular ecology archaeology, hydrology, phytoplankton biology and physiology, marine bacteria, viruses, archaea, benthic and marine invertebrate ecology, physiology, evolutionary adaptation, microbial eukaryotes, ecophysiology of corals, trace metals, microbiology, squid-Vibrio symbiosis, Human-environment interactions, sustainability, kelp forest ecology, neuroendocrinology, and Tardigrade diversity and ecology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.