Hi y’all,
Briana Prado here, I am thrilled to share that I’ll be boarding the RV/Kilo Moana this October through the UNOLS MATE Internship. I’ll be joining in on 3 legs of expeditions that all have their own unique set of goals and objectives! The first leg entails working on HOT Cruise #353 in a site North of Oahu to conduct a routine sample collection of a suite of environmental variables . The second leg entails traveling from Honolulu to Tahiti on a biological expedition. The third leg would be a transit back from Tahiti to Honolulu doing more observational analysis and assisting in trouble shooting instrumentation. I really look forward to learning about all the different instrumentations and types of analyses we will be doing under these three different legs of cruises and how to best support these cruises!
A little bit about me.
I recently graduated from CU Boulder with a masters in geography where I gained experience in remote sensing, quantitative analysis and geochemistry. In undergrad I majored in Chemistry and Earth Science at UC Santa Cruz and participated in undergraduate research ranging from studying below ground biomass of tree saplings, to the photo-oxidation of plastic under UV light to sampling chemical communities during a time series off the coast of San Diego. Right before graduating I had the opportunity to go out to sea as a volunteer with Dr. Anela Choy and Dr. Phoebe Lam’s deep pelagic food webs cruise which gave me a brief introduction to an array of oceanographic instrumentation and what a career at sea might look like.
Thus, I am so excited to dive deeper (pun intended) and get practical hands-on experience collecting and processing chemical and biological samples, troubleshooting instrumentation, and supporting the amazing research teams out of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I know that I will learn a lot! I am so thankful for the opportunity to be out to sea and I’ll keep y’all posted in what I find!
When I am not in school, I am most likely biking to a coffee shop, going down wikipedia wormholes, reviewing 70’s and 80’s rock indie albums and substitute teaching.
Cheers,
Briana
P.s I really can’t wait to see a Mola Mola (sunfish) in the wild!