By: Lannis Dodge, recent Master of Environmental Science and Management graduate
I will always remember getting up bright and early to drive the team down to Silver Spring. There was a lot of anticipation in that car. We were about to present a project we had been working on for months to Dr. Steve Thur and the rest of NOAA’s Ocean Acidification team, and it was the first time I would be standing in front of a federal agency representing something I had helped build.
We got to the office early because we had a full day ahead of us, so we walked over to a nearby Starbucks. I definitely did not order coffee, but I did get a blueberry muffin that lasted about two seconds. Then I sat with my note cards and went back over what we were about to say.
The project asked us to think about community engagement for marine carbon dioxide removal, a space that is both new and very data-poor. I brought my background in marine systems, and we pulled lessons from wherever we could find them: offshore wind community engagement projects, land-based carbon capture, and environmental justice research. The through line was that any new ocean industry has to be built so that marginalized communities are not stuck with the same status quo of extractive industries. If mCDR is going to be integrated into the larger ocean community and our working waterfronts, it needs to benefit the environment and the people who depend on the ocean for their livelihoods, now and in the not-so-distant future. We integrated feedback from experts along the way, and the final product was something my team and I were proud of. My nerves melted as soon as I opened the talk. I just remembered all the work the team had put in and what it meant to represent it well. I think we nailed the presentation, and being able to answer questions about next steps felt like real proof that we understood what we had built.
Afterward we got a tour of NOAA headquarters, from research aimed at preserving coral to the ocean exploration team and their effort to map the entire world’s oceans. Getting that inside look at how the government does science is something I am very thankful for, and I cannot thank Dr. Oremus and Dr. Birkenbach enough for organizing this fantastic opportunity for us.
The biggest thing I took from grad school is confidence in communicating with people from backgrounds different from my own. I am putting that to use right now, talking with commercial fishermen from Maine to North Carolina for the 2026 NOAA Crew Survey and trying to understand the livelihoods and stories of the working waterfront. I want to keep being a conduit for knowledge transfer between science and the people it affects.
I feel confident I am on the right path, and that I will keep finding roles where I can make a difference for a resource so many people rely on and care deeply about.