WILMINGTON (August 24, 2022) – The science of our coast is, as you might expect, quite complicated. And it affects many, many of our lives, UNC Wilmington Chancellor Aswani Volety says in the accompanying video.
For starters, Volety says, whether it’s for business, recreation or transportation purposes, more than half the U.S. population lives within 20 miles of the coast – and the so-called “blue economy” is important to North Carolina’s continued growth.
Volety is quite familiar with UNCW’s Center for Marine Science. While serving as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences during a previous stint at UNCW, Volety also was Executive Director of the Center for Marine Science from 2018-19.1
He stresses how multidisciplinary the center’s work is: Chemistry. Biology. Physics. Policy. Modeling.
“I think the opportunity and exciting part for me at that time was seeing how all these disciplines come together to solve some of the things we are trying to solve,” Volety says.
More recently, UNCW has expanded its master’s program in ocean policy, as well as its doctoral programs, and it has launched a program in Applied Coastal/Ocean Sciences. “It is a lot more comprehensive Marine Science institution,” he says.
Part of the Center’s aim will be to position faculty, staff and students in research to address societal needs.
Volety notes how former professor John Morrison and his colleagues designed a satellite the size of a loaf of bread called Seahawk-1 that can measure what food is available for the aquatic food chain or use geospatial mapping to identify areas suitable for shellfish aquaculture.
Seahawk-1 was launched by NASA in December 2018 and is now transmitting clear, high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface to researchers.2
The Center can also help extract drugs from marine organisms and even help forecast hurricanes.
“We service all the buoys from Virginia to South Carolina that provide the data for hurricane prediction and forecasting,” Volety says.
“So anywhere from basic research all the way to applied research, UNCW is very well-positioned to build on its already-existing strong positions,” he says.
1 https://uncw.edu/news/2022/05/aswani-k.-volety-named-chancellor-elect-of-uncw.html.
2 https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/news/education/2022/06/24/uncw-satellite-enters-new-phase-after-three-years-orbit/7565953001/.
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