Education and Careers

We are delighted to announce that the 2021 winner of the ZEISS-GSL scholarship is Kelsey Archer Barnhill, University of Edinburgh. Congratulations Kelsey!

After researching tropical corals for her Masters in Tropical Ecology and Management of Natural Resources at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Kelsey Archer Barnhill made the dive to deep sea ecology for her PhD. A member of University of Edinburgh’s Changing Oceans Research Group, Kelsey is an iAtlantic Fellow, One Ocean Hub Early Career Researcher, and the All-Atlantic Ocean Youth Ambassador for the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on multiple stressor impacts on the habitat-building cold-water coral, Lophelia pertusa. Using laboratory mesocosms to run year-long experiments on live corals and coral skeletons, her work will allow scientists to better understand physiological and structural responses of L. pertusa to ocean acidification, warming, and deoxygenation. She will combine her experimental results with the outputs from her ZEISS-GSL Scholarship to help better predict deep sea reef futures in projected ocean scenarios.

Combining geosciences, marine ecology, and material sciences, this project will help gain a better understanding of how cold-water coral skeletons are built and how ocean acidification impacts growth. The ZEISS-GSL Scholarship will provide the opportunity to 3D image the tissue-skeleton interface and aragonite skeleton crystals for the first time, helping predict deep sea coral futures in a changing ocean.

Applications for the scholarship are not available at this time.