Three graduate students in Sara Rivero-Calle’s lab have completed or been accepted to competitive and prestigious training programs in remote sensing and ocean optics. The three- to four-week courses are sponsored by organizations such as NASA, the French Space Agency, the International Ocean Color Coordinating Group and the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Project Office. They are held at different institutions around the world. They are considered to be the best intensive trainings for studying ocean color, ocean optics and satellite remote sensing and are intended for graduate students, post-docs and early career research scientists.

Mallie Hunt and Ben Lowin completed the summer 2021 course at Bowdoin College in Maine.

Masud-Ul-Alam has been accepted for this summer’s program at the Laboratoire d’ Oceanographie de Villefranche near Nice, France.

(l-r) Masud-Ul-Alam, Mallie Hunt, Ben Lowin

Rivero-Calle participated in two of these programs when she was in graduate school, and it has had a deep impact in her career and the lab group that she is building at Skidaway Institute.

“It is a great way to meet the leaders in ocean color research and a cohort of future colleagues who you will end up collaborating with,” she said. “And you will get training that you can’t get anywhere else.”

All expenses for the students, including travel, are paid by the space agencies and OCB.