Jeff Houghton: Exploring the Underwater Realm

Meet Jeff. As a boy he fished with his father and scuba-dived with his twin brother in the lakes of northern Wisconsin. Jeff became scuba-certified at age 13 and always wanted to find a career that would involve exploring underwater—inspired by Discovery Channel videos that revealed an amazing universe of life below the waves. At the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences as a research specialist in the lab of Dr. John Janssen, Jeff has found a role that enables him to use his passion and ingenuity to explore beneath the waters of our Great Lakes. Supported by a grant from the Fund for Lake Michigan, Jeff is surveying four Lake Michigan harbor areas to produce both data-intensive and public-facing maps highlighting fish habitat hotspots. This research is revealing fish in forgotten backwaters and setting the stage for efforts to improve habitats in ways that also support our coastal communities.

Liz Ulrich: Investigating Harbor Habitats

Meet Liz. She’s an undergraduate student doing summer research with Dr. John Janssen at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. Liz gets to kayak to fish “habitat hotels” that the nonprofit Harbor District, Inc. has installed along the steel sheet pile in Milwaukee’s Inner Harbor. She then uses an underwater camera to survey these innovative contraptions—built of old fish fry baskets and designed to provide a safe space for young fish to hang out. She finds that some plants have died but others are doing well, which informs how Harbor District, Inc. will re-plant them for long-term success in a harsh environment with a lot of wave action against the vertical walls. She’s also captured video of adult and baby bass. Inspired by the movie Fly Away Home, Liz has a passion for nature photography and one day hopes to work for the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wis. Liz became fascinated by the aquatic world after some classes taught by Dr. John Janssen, and is learning to appreciate how the aquatic and terrestrial food webs depend on each other.

Graceanne Tarsa: Studying Invasive Species Impacts

Meet Graceanne. She studies invasive species in Lake Michigan in Dr. Harvey Bootsma’s lab at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. Graceanne gets to scuba dive, using a paint scraper to scrape mussels from the lake bottom, and herding fish called round gobies into nets so she can collect them and analyze what they’re eating to learn how the Lake Michigan food web is changing. Many of us never see—let alone think about—what lives beneath the waters of our Great Lake, but Graceanne sees firsthand. She is one of many master’s-degree students at SFS—as the unique institution is known to its graduate students—and hopes her education will lead to a career where she gets to engage the public about aquatic science.

Dr. Val Klump: A Freshwater Oceanographer Inspired to Save Our Lakes

Meet Val. Inspired by Jacques Cousteau as a boy, Val knew he early he wanted to be an oceanographer. Today Val serves as dean and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. As a biogeochemist—or “a mud scientist” as he jokes—Val, his fellow researchers, and crew of the research vessel Neeskay have years of experience studying Green Bay’s “dead zones” and addressing other big-picture questions about the Great Lakes that are critical to our understanding of how to protect and restore them. Val has already achieved one dream: he feels privileged to be a freshwater oceanographer.