Biology/Chemistry Research Opportunities
The below list contains profiles of USGS scientists who are looking for interns to assist with their research in the areas of biology, microbiology, biochemistry, and adjacent fields of study. Interested students should reach out to the individual researcher via the contact information provided.
Stephen Formel, Biologist, Node Manager GBIF-US/OBIS-USA
Contact: sformel@usgs.gov
I am the US node manager for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF-US) and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS-USA). Both GBIF and OBIS are international networks and data platforms funded by the world's governments. They strongly support open science and are aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. I represent the US scientific community in these efforts. My daily work includes synthesizing, publishing, and facilitating access to species occurrence data and analyses of species trends, drivers of change, and potential implications of future changes in biodiversity in the United States. Lastly, I help educate the US scientific community at large in the biological standards, like Darwin Core and Ecological Metadata Language (EML), and practices, necessary to accomplish Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and Open data. All of my work depends on the tools of data science, and programming languages like R, and python.
Tabitha Graves, Spatial Wildlife Biologist
Contact: tgraves@usgs.gov
I evaluate the effects of stressors on wildlife habitat, distributions, disease, and demographics using spatially-explicit approaches, large datasets, and tools including genetics, remote sensing, hierarchical models, climate models, and GPS collars. Current project subjects include huckleberries, bumblebees, chronic wasting disease, bighorn, mountain goats, mule deer, elk, black bears, and grizzly bears.
Nancy Prouty, Research Oceanographer
Contact: nprouty@usgs.gov
This research is focusing on investigating the role of mass wasting events in Alaska fjords to alter the organic carbon source and carbon burial of sediment deposited in Prince William Sound. Sediment cores collected by the USGS in 2020 and 2022 were previously scanned via computed tomography (CT), and preliminary results suggest there is evidence of earthquake induced mass wasting event triggered by the 1964 M9.2 earthquake. These events have the potential to remobilize organic-rich surface sediment and transfer carbon to the fjords where it is rapidly buried and removed from oxic conditions. Previous work has suggested that these events contain a distinct source signature in the geochemical composition (e.g., elemental ratios, stable isotopes) that can be used to identify the event and the timing of the event. Using a suite of geochemical proxies (e.g., elemental ratios, stable isotopes, lipid biomarkers), this project will focus on 1) characterizing sources of organic matter buried in the fjords and 2). investigate the role of mass wasting events to transport and sequester organic carbon in different fjords, as well as compare these results to other settings, such as high latitude lakes.
Travis S.J. Gabriel, Section Lead Resources and Hazards
Contact: tgabriel@usgs.gov
I work on developing AI/ML tools to detect outliers/anomalies, chemical compositions, and compositional clusters from spectroscopy datasets (X-ray fluorescence, gamma-ray, visible emission), predominantly using Python. The goal of the work is to make robust algorithms and workflows that help Earth geologists, astronauts, and robotic platforms able to rapidly characterize geologic targets with greater fidelity than provided by standard methods. The work impacts active space missions, Earth and planetary resource exploration, and foundational methods.