San Francisco State University Marine Operations

Romberg Tiburon Center’s Marine Operations has been running sampling cruises for NOAA/GFNMS/CBNMS at multiple sites in the Bay in response of the Cosco Busan oil spill. Other groups at RTC are also involved in post spill research. San Francisco Bay NERR is monitoring and sampling at their China Camp NERR site. Matt Ashby, TAXON and Adjunct Professor RTC/SFSU collected samples to profile the microbial communities to see whether organisms known to biodegrade petroleum have started to proliferate.  And Chela Zabin, UC-Davis post-doc at RTC is involved in assessing injury to native oysters for NOAA. Both oysters and sediment were collected for analysis for the official damage assessment.

Media inquiries, please contact:

Denize Springer, Senior Publicist
University Communications
San Francisco State University

415/405-3803 direct
415/338-1665 department
415/338-1498 fax

The American Academy of Underwater Sciences awards two scholarships to graduate students engaged in, or planning to begin, a research project in which diving is or will be used as a principal research tool.

The Kevin Gurr Scholarship awards $2500.00 to a Masters program student.

Applicants must fulfill the following requirements:

Be a current member of AAUS (student or full member).
Be accepted and enrolled in a Masters program (for the Masters Program award) or a Ph.D. program (for the Ph.D. program award).
Submit online a proposal of 3 to 5 pages describing the research methods, significance of the research, and a budget (if part of a larger budget, specify how AAUS funds will be spent).
Agree to write an article for The Slate, a news publication of AAUS, describing the proposed research.
Present the results of their research at an AAUS symposium or other scientific meeting within one year of the project’s completion.
A letter of support from a faculty advisor must be submitted online.

Proposal deadline is June 30.
Scholarship winners are announced October 1.

To upload proposal, budget and letter of support click on the appropriate forum under the Student Scholarship Applications category of the AAUS Bulletin Board.

The R/V Questuary’s diesel engines, now 11 years old, are scheduled to be replaced in the next six months. This will require that the vessel be laid up at our dry dock in Vallejo for 4-5 weeks. Marine Operations will work with all RTC scientists and faculty to minimize disruption to planned field sampling using the Questuary.

You are encouraged to submit your sampling schedule so that we may post these dates on the web calendar and plan for the best time to dry dock the vessel. Please contact David Bell in marine operations for more information on the repower.