Grassle Fellowship Fund

The intent of the Grassle Fellowship Fund (GFF) is to support post-generals graduate student research related to ocean biodiversity or physical-biological interactions.  The ocean biodiversity theme relates to five questions:  What lives in the ocean?  Where do they live and why?  How many are there?  Are there long-term trends in biodiversity of marine ecosystems?  If so, what factors affect observed/predicted changes? The physical-biological interactions theme relates to the effects of physical processes at all spatial scales on the ecology of marine organisms or ecosystems.

2026

Jo Hickman
Unveiling the Biogeography of Marine Diatom Parasites Via Single-Cell Sequencing

2025

Avery Fulford
Geochemical Constraints on Microbial Biodiversity at Brine-Dominated Hydrothermal
Vents, an Understudied Endmember of Hydrothermal Space

Miah Manning
Investigating the Marinobacter pangenome for the genetic basis of phytoplankton-bacteria
interactions

2024 Recipients

Loicka Baille
Development of a low-cost, long-range, low-power emperor penguin tag to monitor foraging habits

Serena Sung-Clarke
Exploring spatiotemporal population dynamics of Dinophysis on Outer Cape Cod

2023 Recipients

Kharis Schrage
The role of early life-stage bottlenecks in setting up along-fjord diversity gradients in benthic fjord communities

Ciara Willis
Establishing mesopelagic food web structure in the North Atlantic via simultaneous, multi-ship sampling

2022 Recipients

Brenna Boehman
Assessing the role of priming in riverine organic carbon remineralization and burial

Arianna Krinos
Contextualizing Emiliania huxleyi thermal acclimation experiments

Zachary Tobias
Exploring cryptic biodiversity in the invasive golden star tunicate using low-coverage whole genome sequencing

Jane Weinstock 
Assessing shifts in dispersal and population connectivity of Semibalanus balanoides over 20 years of ocean warming