Back to School
A Pivot Fellowship is helping Earth and environment professor Wally Fulweiler learn data science.
With the support of a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship, Wally Fulweiler is spending this school year studying data science and building a new tool that could greatly expand her research as an ecosystems ecologist and biogeochemist.
Fulweiler is interested in an often overlooked element of ocean ecosystems: sediment. These unglamorous particles of soil, rock, and other organic matter are immensely important. “They recycle nutrients that support food webs and they sequester greenhouse gases,” she says. But they’re also hard to study, in part because marine ecosystems like “open ocean” and “coastal,” where sediment collects, lack standard definitions. “How can we make models or inform policy without some sort of guidelines?” she says.
The Pivot Fellowship will fund Fulweiler for a year as she learns data science with the help of mentor Mark Crovella, a professor of computer science. Along with a graduate student, Fulweiler will focus on gathering and studying data from a wide range of sources, including buoys operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and academic papers.
The project relates to one of Crovella’s primary areas of interest: interpretable machine learning, or the ability to generate useful information. “It’s a challenging project on many levels,” he says. “We are thinking about how to classify coastal ecosystems in terms that are correct empirically and scientifically and also useful and intuitive to humans.”
If they succeed, their work could unlock new ways to study and understand coastal environments. Beyond that, Fulweiler expects the fellowship to better position her to mentor the students in her lab. “Data science is going to be an important part of the future of research,” she says.