WASHINGTON — The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine today announced its 2022 cohort of Early-Career Research Fellows in the Environmental Protection and Stewardship track. These seven scientists will spend the next two years advancing scientific knowledge and its applications to predict and prepare for ecosystem changes in the Gulf of Mexico and its coastal zones as the region navigates a changing climate and energy transition.

“While it’s impossible to predict what the Gulf’s incredibly diverse ecosystems will look like years from now, we know the changing landscape will require people to adapt and become better stewards of the environment,” said Karena Mary Mothershed, senior program officer for the GRP’s Board on Gulf Education and Engagement. “This fellowship provides a unique opportunity for researchers to incorporate the best available science into programs building stewardship and protection of the Gulf region. We hope fellows will be trusted allies to Gulf region decision-makers and community leaders, and engage the public in understanding how the changing Gulf region affects the economy, environment, and our everyday lives.”

The Gulf Research Program’s Early-Career Research Fellowship helps early-career 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 network as they take risks on untested research ideas and pursue unique collaborations.

The 2022-2024 cohort of Environmental Protection and Stewardship Early-Career Research Fellows are:

Katherine Anarde
Katherine Anarde is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. She received her B.A. in geology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She then worked as an environmental consultant at ENVIRON International Corp. before heading to Rice University for a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering. Anarde is a coastal engineer and geomorphologist who combines observational and numerical approaches to investigate coastal hazards. Her current research is largely interdisciplinary and focuses on climate impacts to coastal communities. This body of work includes projects investigating community- and household-level impacts from flooding due to sea level rise, as well as modeling of how humans alter natural barrier evolution over decadal time scales. Her past research focused on storm impacts to sandy coastlines, with projects measuring ocean waves during hurricanes and modeling of future infrastructure vulnerability. Prior to joining NC State, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Coastal Environmental Change Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and project manager for the Collaboratory for Coastal Adaptation over Space and Time (C-CoAST).

Santiago Herrera
Santiago Herrera is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University. He received his B.S. in biology and microbiology and M.S. in biological sciences from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. During his master's work, he was a graduate fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. He earned his Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joint program. He was also a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the ecological and evolutionary processes that produce global biodiversity patterns in the ocean. He uses interdisciplinary approaches that combine molecular and environmental data with bioinformatic tools to study the past, present, and future of deep-sea and cold-water ecosystems, focusing on deep-sea coral communities in the Gulf of Mexico and around the world.

Vanessa Hull
Vanessa Hull is an assistant professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida. She received her B.S. in animal behavior from Bucknell University and M.S. and Ph.D. in fisheries and wildlife from Michigan State University. Her research deals with applying interdisciplinary approaches to understanding protected area management, social-ecological resilience, and interactions between social and ecological processes in coupled human and natural systems. Her recent work seeks to apply the telecoupling framework to examine impacts of distant social and ecological interactions on Marine Protected Areas, with a particular interest in the impacts of wind energy development on marine wildlife. She was a co-recipient of the Innovations in Sustainable Science Award from the Ecological Society of America in 2020 for research on the food-energy-water nexus for global sustainability.

Reza Marsooli
Reza Marsooli is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in civil engineering from the Azad University of Tehran (Central Branch), M.S. in civil engineering with a concentration in water/hydraulic engineering from the University of Tabriz, and Ph.D. in engineering science with a concentration in computational hydro science and engineering from the University of Mississippi. Marsooli leads a research group that aims to advance our understanding and prediction capabilities of storm surge and wind-wave climate, flood hazards and mitigation, and the effects of climate change on coastal areas. Examples of his ongoing research studies are the vulnerability of New Jersey’s barrier islands to extreme sea levels; benefits of nature-based features such as beaches and vegetation for mitigating flood hazards and increasing the performance of engineered structures such as seawalls; and wind-wave climate change and variability. His research findings appear in impactful scientific papers published by renowned journals such as Nature Communications, Coastal Engineering, and Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. Marsooli has been featured in the local, national, and international media and commented on the effect of climate change on coastal hazards and their impacts on communities.

Rosanna Milligan
Rosanna (Boyle) Milligan is an assistant professor at Nova Southeastern University where she runs the Seascape Ecology Lab. She earned from the University of Glasgow her B.S. in aquatic bioscience, M.S. in parasitology, and Ph.D. studying the ecology of deep-sea demersal fishes, before moving to the U.S. as a postdoctoral researcher to study deep-pelagic ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico. Her research interests lie in understanding how the distributions and biodiversity patterns of deep-sea animals are shaped by both natural and anthropogenic drivers across multiple scales. She is particularly interested in understanding how mobile deep-sea fauna, particularly fishes, create connections between deep- and shallow-water ecosystems, how deep-sea fishes contribute to the ecosystem goods and services that we rely on, and how those services might be perturbed by human impacts occurring at any ocean depth.

Abdullahi Salman
Abdullahi Salman is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He holds a B.E. in civil and construction engineering from Curtin University, Malaysia, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in civil engineering from Michigan Technological University. He served as a research associate at Case Western Reserve University before joining the faculty at UAH.  Salman specializes in modeling the impacts of natural hazards and climate change on coastal ecosystems, civil infrastructure systems, and communities. He is especially interested in developing strategies and decision support systems to reduce the risks posed by natural hazards and climate change to the natural and built environment.  Salman’s research involves developing models to predict changes in hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico due to climate change and how the changes will impact the ecosystems in the Gulf. He also develops comprehensive decision-making frameworks that stakeholders can use to make environmental protection decisions considering deep uncertainties. Another aspect of his research entails formulating infrastructure and community resilience models that integrate social-vulnerability factors, such as income/class, age, gender, health issues, and disability into pre-disaster resilience improvement and post-disaster recovery planning. He is the faculty adviser of the UAH chapter of Engineers Without Borders and is involved in planning the chapter’s clean water-related projects overseas. He is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Ricardo Sánchez-Murillo
Ricardo Sánchez-Murillo is an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his B.S. in chemistry from the National University of Costa Rica and an M.S. and Ph.D. in water resources from the University of Idaho.  As a tracer hydrologist, Sánchez-Murillo has been focused on improving the understanding of tropical rainfall impacts on natural and human-altered ecosystems through the lens of naturally occurring tracers. His research efforts across the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and Central America regions have contributed to filling a historical, ground-based, and high-frequency tracer data gap; advancing the understanding of key governing drivers in rainfall and runoff generation and groundwater recharge during the genesis, development, and landfall of tropical storms; generating groundwater recharge indicators for effective management, conservation practices, and decision-making; and providing crucial and modern evidence to review and validate past climate reconstructions and ongoing ecohydrological interpretations. His early-career scholarly contributions include over 50 peer-reviewed publications. Before joining the University of Texas at Arlington, he served as the coordinator of the Stable Isotopes Research Group and Water Resources Management Laboratory at the National University of Costa Rica, where he obtained a joint award from the World Academy of Sciences (Trieste, Italy) and National Council of Science and Technology (San José, Costa Rica) for the advancement of tracer hydrology in the Central America region.

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, technology, 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
PNelson@nas.edu