When oceanographer Bess Ward was granted research time aboard the R/V Sally Ride during the middle of the spring semester, she had to figure out how to teach GEO 428, “Biological Oceanography,” from the Pacific Ocean.

She created a teaching schedule that used student presentations, a series of guest lecturers, and her first teaching assistant for this course, who showed the students videos that Ward created and uploaded from the ship as it sampled the waters off the coast of Mexico. The goal of the work in the Pacific Ocean was to find and analyze the microbes that play a key role in climate change and ozone depletion.

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