In 2015, Branwen Williams, associate professor of environmental science at the W.M. Keck Science Department, found and collected coralline algae 20 meters beneath the ice in freezing sea water for her research on oceanic climate change, as a grantee of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. Her work has now been featured by National Geographic in its #bestjobever and Oceans View series online. NATGEO produced a video and news article recounting Williams’ thrilling polar expedition and the importance of her research findings in helping reconstruct the ocean’s complex history and “people’s impact within that narrative,” its authors say.
“The ocean is absolutely an amazing, massive, dynamic part of our world. Really, my goal is to understand how the oceans change so we can figure out how humans are changing it so then we can know how to try and mitigate some of the negative changes that people are causing. That’s the part I do,” Williams is quoted as saying in the article.
Williams is associate professor of environmental science at the W.M. Keck Science Department of Pitzer, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna colleges. She says she is striving to find a thousand-year-old algae.
