BOWLING GREEN — In January, Bowling Green State University PhD student Audrey Maran, her husband, their cat, and two dogs will decamp for Silver Spring, Md., where she will serve for a year as a communication specialist in the National Sea Grant office, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Ms. Maran, who is finishing her doctorate in biology, was chosen for the John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship, one of the most competitive marine policy fellowships in the United States. She is only the second BGSU student to ever receive the award, and the first in many years.
She will be part of the fellowship’s executive branch; there is also a legislative branch, whose fellows work primarily on Capitol Hill with lawmakers. The 66 finalists represented 30 of the 33 National Sea Grant programs. Since 1979, Sea Grant has provided one-year Knauss fellowships for more than 1,200 early career professionals to work in federal government offices around Washington.
“This is one of the most prestigious awards that a junior scientist in environmental sciences can be awarded,” said Shannon Pelini, Ms. Maran’s thesis adviser and an associate professor of biological sciences.
“It’s meant for people with a science background, but it gives you a window into how policy works and how science is turned into policy and how policy affects science on the ground,” Ms. Maran said. “The idea is, it’s science to policy. I have very little background in policy but I’m very interested in it because I firmly believe we need science-based policy in our government, and I want to see if I can play a role in helping make our policy more science-based.”
Brooke Carney, communications lead for Sea Grant and leader of the NOAA Facilitation Network, will be Ms. Maran’s mentor at Sea Grant and will work with her to help her reach her goals. For example, Maran said, “I’m really interested in evaluation of the effectiveness of science communication. I’m excited about exploring that.”
Sea Grant is a federal-university partnership program, with a network of university-based researchers and outreach specialists located within the coastal communities they serve. The communication specialists’ job is to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences, from the public to the legislative, about issues and research and their application to both policy and everyday life.
In her new position, which begins Feb. 2, Ms. Maran will have a diverse array of assignments on a wide range of subject matter. As part of her information gathering and disseminating, she may be called upon to interview Sea Grant researchers. She will use her science background to explain complex material and messages through stories and visual aids, from video to infographics to social media. She also will talk with the people doing the field work about how their applications of science are helping the community, as well as sharing information with them.
“Sometimes we’ll get requests from congressmen asking for information and background on topics,” she said. “In this position, I will do a little bit of that.
According to Sea Grant, “the 2019 fellowship will include specific projects on communicating research impacts as well as a focus on communicating aquaculture research and collaborating with aquaculture operations in other NOAA offices.”
Ms. Maran said she was initially doubtful about whether her background, which is both in aquaculture and terrestrial systems, would be attractive to the Knauss program since it is specifically aimed at marine science. But that may have turned out to be a plus, along with her education background.
“My first PhD project was at the aquatic-terrestrial interface, looking at nutrient runoff from farm fields, and bugs’ role in that,” she said. “We hope to improve the number of insects in fields and their role in nutrient cycling. I’ve always been interested in both aquatics and terrestrial systems, so for me this fellowship felt like a good move.”
It was a series of transformative educational experiences that led Ms. Maran to where she is today. She vividly remembers a field trip to Stone Lab on Gibraltar Island, an Ohio Sea Grant station now led by Christopher Winslow, a BGSU graduate.
“When I was in elementary school I was part of a program called Horizons,” she said. “We went to Stone Lab, and I have never forgotten that trip, because I loved it so much. I remember dissecting a fish shortly after it was killed so we could still see its beating heart, and we looked at zooplankton in the water. During graduate school, we went again as part of my limnology class and did a lot of the same things. It’s cool that now I can look back at that and think, ‘Oh, now I work for the national group of Sea Grant.’”
Ms. Maran attended Start High School in Toledo, and then went to Owens Community College for two years before transferring to BGSU with the goal of becoming a science teacher. She studied life sciences and earth science, receiving her bachelor’s degree in science education, “which is why these communication positions appeal to me so much,” she said.
Maran is working on her Ph.D. on the impact of habitat structure on arthropods who are predators, and detritivores, who consume dead plant materials, and how habitat structure affects their activities. She’s considering the type of plants present and how dense they are, how much room the arthropods have to move around in, and other factors. She is interested in urban ecosystems, specifically, urban prairies, and whether what’s in them or their location matters more for insect predation.
First Published November 26, 2018, 11:45 a.m.
