Contributors + Acknowledgements
Andria Miller is an aquatic scientist from Jackson, MS, whose passion for marine science led her to pursue a Master's degree at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography (URI-GSO) in 2021. During her matriculation at URI-GSO, Andria delved into investigating seasonality patterns and alterations in phytoplankton production and mortality, spanning from the Northeast Atlantic to the temperate estuaries of New England. Post-graduation, Andria seamlessly transitioned into a role in science communication, channeling her expertise as a producer for environmental justice documentaries centered around marginalized communities residing along water bodies.
Andria is currently the Ocean Science Education and Outreach Coordinator at Jackson State University in Mississippi.
Watch an Interview with Andria Miller
https://youtu.be/Ea8nBIb-e0E?si=7FiISYgkOfrpqWK_
Cynthia Beth Rubin, an early adopter of digital art with decades of fine art practice, began working with the Menden-Deuer lab at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography (URI-GSO) when she was teaching “Digital Nature” at the Rhode Island School of Design. As her teaching evolved to include plankton imagery, her work followed, and she joined lab meetings with the Menden-Deuer lab. She soon was combining micro-captures and hand-drawing into expressive prints, video, and AR installations. Rubin's work has been recognized internationally through exhibitions and film festivals, including the Techspressionism exhibition, Creative Tech Week in New York City, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Siberia State Art Museum, the Kyrgyzstan State Museum, and in cities such as London, Paris, New York, Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere around the world, and in numerous editions of SIGGRAPH and ISEA. Her awards include multiple Connecticut Artist Fellowships, the New England Foundation on the Arts, among others, and artist residencies in France, Israel, Canada, and Scotland.
See Rubin's other recent work on Instagram:and on her website
https://www.instagram.com/cbrubinstudio/
Dr. Menden-Deuer is a seagoing oceanographer, with research interests focused on marine planktonic food web structure and function. Research in Dr. Menden-Deuer’s group combines in-situ work in the temperate and polar ocean of primary production and phytoplankton mortality, laboratory measurements of plankton behavior and physiology and theoretical modeling work to establish linkages between microscopic events (e.g. predator movements) and macroscopic phenomena (e.g. phytoplankton production and distributions). Since 2008, Dr. Menden-Deuer has been a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. Before coming to URI, Dr. Menden-Deuer was a research fellow at Princeton University with Simon Levin and a Lecturer at Western Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in 2004 and a M.Sc in 1998 both in Oceanography at the University of Washington with Daniel Grünbaum and Evelyn Lessard, respectively. She received her first degree in 1996 from the University of Bonn, Germany, with research done with Victor Smetacek at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Sciences. Dr. Menden-Deuer was fortunate to spend 1 year at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Beyond her scientific interests, she has been active in contributing to enhancing diversity and science communication in oceanography. Initially, through teaching and mentoring a diverse undergraduate student body in marine science at Western Washington University teaching fellows in what was then called the ‘Minorities in Marine Science Undergraduate Program’ (MIMSUP) – a program led by Profs. Brian Bingham and Steven Sulkin. Dr. Menden-Deuer also serves on the editorial boards of oceanographic publications and the Board of Directors of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO).
She also supports science education and outreach, through participation in the National Ocean Science Bowl and as a science mentor for the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting that targets environmental journalists as well as working with students and faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design Studio.
Learn more about Menden-Deuer's research:
https://web.uri.edu/gso/meet/susanne-menden-deuer
https://web.uri.edu/mendendeuerlab
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge open access to the Narragansett Bay Plankton Time Series at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island.
We thank the Edna Lawernce Nature Lab at the Rhode Island School of Design where Cynthia Beth Rubin imaged plankton, using microscopes which were purchased with support from the NSF funded EPSCOR project.
Susanne Menden-Deuer received support from NASA’s EXport Processes in the global Ocean from RemoTe Sensing (EXPORTS) field campaign (grant 80NSSC17K0716).
Techspressionist group members and members of the Menden-Deuer lab provided valuable feedback during the project’s development. Cynthia DiDonato and Karen LaFleur, as members of both Techspressionists and the Synergy project, were especially
insightful in their comments.
We also gratefully acknowledge the team at DataWrapper, who contributed to our collaboration by providing an online data visualization platform that made it possible for a non-scientist artist to envision what the scientific team might produce.
Our project is part of the Synergy Project sponsored by the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Rhode Island Art League.