Connecticut Sea Grant

“Long-term effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico”

By Sylvain De Guise, Professor of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science and Director, Connecticut Sea Grant, University of Connecticut
Sylvain De Guise completed his veterinary medicine (DMV) at Université de Montréal in 1988, as well as a combined residency and MSc in veterinary pathology at the same institution, completed in 1993. His research was on the pathology and toxicology of St. Lawrence beluga whales. He then pursued a PhD in immunotoxicology of beluga whales at the Université du Québec à Montréal, which he completed in 1996. He pursued a three-year post-doctoral fellowship on marine mammal immunology at the University of California Davis. He is now an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he studies pathology, immunology, toxicology and immunotoxicology of aquatic organisms, including marine mammals, oysters and lobsters. He also studies new approaches to risk assessment resulting from exposure to environmental contaminants such as PCBs in target species such as humans and marine mammals. Dr. De Guise also serves as Director for the Connecticut Sea Grant College Program.

“Shallow Thinking: Science, Violence, and American Imperializing Along the Littoral”

By Jason W. Smith, Southern Connecticut State University
*book signing* - books will be available for purchase onsite

Jason W. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He has published in Environmental History,` the Journal of Military History, the International Journal of Maritime History, and the New England Quarterly. He is the author of To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire, published in 2018 from University of North Carolina Press. At the intersection of military power, the natural environment, and science and cartography, this talk will examine the role of the U.S. Navy, and naval science in particular, in extending American commercial and, later, strategic power over foreign coastlines through hydrographic surveying, chart-making, and narratives of science and exploration. These staked potent American claims to coastal waters even as they were continuously undermined and undone by the agency of the marine environment.

A symposium on how changing weather patterns are affecting all aspects of site design and maintenance. Presented by the Climate Adaptation Academy and The Rockfall Foundation.

“Ocean Plastics Pollution from Sources to Solutions”

By Dr. Kara Lavender Law, Sea Education Association
Dr. Kara Lavender Law is a Research Professor at Sea Education Association (Woods Hole, MA), studying the sources, distribution, behavior and fate of plastic debris in the ocean. Trained as a physical oceanographer, Dr. Law has more than 12 months of sea time on oceanographic and sailing research vessels, including in the eastern North Pacific and western North Atlantic Oceans where plastic debris accumulates in regions dubbed, “garbage patches”. Dr. Law’s current research interests focus on the sources of plastic to the marine environment, understanding how ocean physics determines the distribution of plastic and other marine debris, and the degradation and ultimate fate of different plastic materials in the ocean. Efforts to quantify the size of the problem and its impacts, as well as a toolbox of potential solutions, will be discussed. She is co-chair of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) Working Group FLOTSAM (Floating Litter and its Oceanic TranSport Analysis and Modelling), and serves as the co-principal investigator of the Marine Debris Working Group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Dr. Law holds a PhD in physical oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a BS in mathematics from Duke University.