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Coastlines and Oceans Division Research Award

The Coastlines and Oceans Division has funding to award small grants of up to $1,000. This award can be used to cover any legitimate expense related to research (e.g., field work, laboratory analyses) or the presentation of Coastlines and Oceans research at conferences and meetings. This award is open to all Division of Coastlines and Oceans faculty and students, including postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and staff members. 

Applications for awards are due by November 12th, 2022 at 6:00pm. 

Applications will consist of:
1) a letter from the applicant that explicitly explains how these funds will lead to either a published paper, a competitive research proposal, or a job;
2) a budget and budget justification explaining how the funds will be used; and
3) a letter of support from the applicant's advisor if the applicant is not a faculty PI.

Please combine all parts of the application together into a single pdf and submit then to Jeremy Kiszka (jkiszka@fiu.edu) by the deadline. The committee (Justin Campbell, Jeremy Kiszka and Yannis Papastamatiou) will review applications by November 30th, and funds will be available for use between December 1, 2022, and May 31, 2023.

Past Awardees

  • 2019
    • Camila Caceras, a student in the Heithaus lab, will present her research on elasmobranch exploitation in artisanal fisheries at the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Snowbird, Utah.
    • Lainie Esch, from the Harborne lab, will travel to the Marine Aquarium Conference of North America in Orldano, FL to research the threats posed by the aquarium trade for introducing non-native fish to Florida's reefs.
    • Carissa Gervasi, a student in the Rehage lab, to present her work on acoustic tagging and tracking of Crevalle Jack at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation meeting in Mobile AL.
    • Serena Hackerott, from the Eirin-Lopez lab, to support for field research in Bonaire on epigenetic modifications in corals caused by environmental conditions.
    • Jordan Massie, a student in the Rehage lab, to present his talk "Meeting in the Middle: Resource Tracking of Freshwater Prey Subsidies by an Estuarine Consumer, Common Snook in the Florida Everglades" at the Joint Conference of the American Fisheries Society and the Wildlife Society in Reno, NV.
    • Valeria Paz, from the Heithaus lab, to present a talk based on her dissertation research entitles "Investigating the Habitat Use of Coastal Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Response to a Major Hurricane" at the World Marine Mammal Conference in Barcelona.
    • Bradley Strickland, from the Heithaus lab, to the attend the  Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky and present his dissertation research on predicting how animals respond to extreme weather events based on a study of the responses of juvenile bull sharks to a coldsnap in 2010 and Hurricane Irma in 2017.
    • Serena Hackerott, a PhD student in Dr. Eirin-Lopez' lab, to study the application of environmental epigenetic approaches to improve coral reef conservation in Bonaire.
    • Courtney Knauer, a PhD student in Dr. Heithaus' lab, to investigate the behavioral ecology of hawksbill turtles in Madagascar.
    • Sarah Luongo, a PhD student in Dr. Papastamatiou's lab, to study the energetics of Nassau grouper in Cape Eleuthra, the Bahamas.
    • Jessica Quinlan, a PhD student in Dr. Chapman's lab, to study the population structure and habitat use by sharks in Belize.
    • Dr. Lorian Schweikert, a postdoc in Dr. Bracken-Grissom's lab, to support a project investigating the link between skin photosensitivity and dynamic camouflage in hogfish at the Keys Marine Lab.
    • Maurits van Zinnicq Bergmann, a PhD student in Dr. Papastamatiou's lab, to investigate the habitat and space use of sharks in Bimini, the Bahamas.
    • Dr. Elizabeth Whitman, a postdoc in the Heithaus lab, to present the talk "Large grazer foraging habitat use and resource selection is affected by the invasive seagrass, Halophila stipulacea, in the French West Indies" at the 2019 ASLO meeting in Puerto Rica.
  • 2018
    • Dr. Jeremy Kiszka will be traveling to St. Vincent and the Grenadines to work on a new project on the ecology and conservation of whales.
    • Dr. Ligia Collado-Vides will be traveling to Belize to represent FIU on the board of the Association of Marine Labs of the Caribbean.
    • Dr. Camilo Roa, a post-doc in the Boswell lab, will be attending the upcoming meeting of the American Fisheries Society to resent his paper "Taxonomical classification of reef fish based on a swim bladder BEM modeling and Bayesian estimator".
    • Jimmy Kilfoil, a PhD student in the Zhang lab, will also attend the AFS conference to present his paper: "Validating the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to study the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata) in the Bahamas".
    • Maurits van Zinnicq Bergmann, a PhD student in the  will be traveling to the Bahamas to continue his dissertation research using a spatial array of acoustic receivers to study movements and habitat use by tagged sharks.
    • Virginia Fourqurean, a PhD student in the Heithaus lab, will travel to Madagascar to begin her dissertation research studying the interactions of whale sharks, manta rays, and baleen whales.
    • Camila Caceras, a PhD student in the Heithaus lab, will present a part of her dissertation research focused on quantifying the magnitude of elasmobranch exploitation and bycatch in artisanal fisheries in various regions of the Caribbean at the III Sharks International conference in João Pessoa, Brazil.
    • Tom Frankovich, CCOR Research Faculty, to travel to the U.S. Virgin Islands to collect diatoms that live on the skin of three species of sea turtle.
    • Lowell Iporac, PhD student in Dr. Collado-Vides' lab, to attend the specialty course in Invertebrate Zoology at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
    • Jorge Perez-Moreno, PhD student in Dr. Bracken-Grissom's lab, to present his dissertation work at the 9th International Crustacean Conference in Washington, D.C.
    • Danielle DeLeo, Postdoc in Dr. Bracken-Grissom's lab, to present her dissertation work at the 9th International Crustacean Conference in Washington, D.C.
  • 2017
    • Laura Timm, PhD student in Dr. Bracken-Grissom's lab, to travel to the Crustacean Society’s Mid-Year Conference (TCS) in Barcelona, Spain.
    • Kevin Boswell to go to the GEER meeting in Coral Springs.
    • Jason Howard, in Dr. Fourqurean's lab to go to the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation's fall meeting in Providence, RI.
    • Collado-Vides to attend the Association of Marine Labs of the Caribbean meeting in Mexico.
    • Alain Duran from Dr. Collado-Vides' lab to attend the AMLC meeting in Mexico.
    • Lowell Iporac from Dr. Collado-Vides' lab to attend the AMLC meeting in Mexico.
    • Jimmy Kilfoil from Dr. Zhang's lab to attend American Fisheries Society Meeting in Tampa.
    • Jeremy Kiszka to attend the 22nd Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals in Halifax Nova Scotia.
    • Bradley Strickland from Dr. Heithaus' lab to attend the GEER meeting.
    • Courtney Knauer from Dr. Heithaus' lab to go to Madagascar for a month-long research trip.