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. Dong-Fang Deng: Researching Aquaculture Nutrition

Meet Dong-Fang. She’s a nutritionist researching better fish feeds to support the aquaculture industry and conservation efforts. Dong-Fang works with students ranging from high school interns to international postgraduates. Her dynamic team learns from one another as they tend to many species of fish—including yellow perch, rainbow trout, Atlantic salmon, tilapia, and even lake sturgeon—in the School of Freshwater Sciences’ extensive aquaculture lab.

In Milwaukee, Dong-Fang is pushing at the frontiers of the global aquaculture industry as a whole.

As the human population continues to grow and global fisheries face further stress, aquaculture is expected to become an increasingly significant part of humankind’s portfolio of food strategies. Fish are nutritious and—relative to other animal protein sources like cattle or pork—require less feed to produce the same amount of product. But there’s a catch. Most fish feed comes from wild-caught fish. In order to raise fish sustainably, alternate protein sources for fish feed are therefore in high demand.

Dong-Fang notes that much research has been done exploring soybeans and corn as a “next generation” fish food, but the drawback to relying on those crops is they require a lot of land, energy, and water. Dong-Fang and her lab are interested in exploring other fish meal alternatives, including algae, duckweed, food waste, or even insect protein. Dong-Fang’s current research in 2020-2021, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, explores alfalfa leaf protein. If this strategy proves viable, she notes it would help both the aquaculture and agriculture industries by dramatically expanding the market for alfalfa crop.

She finds her work motivating. “If you feel that your work can help out society, can help out the industry,” she says, “you have the passion.”

Becky Curtis: Researching Aquatic Toxicology of Nanomaterials

Meet Becky. She’s conducting doctoral research on how nanomaterials impact aquatic organisms at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences in the lab of Dr. Rebecca Klaper. Becky went back to school after a long track record working in sustainability, including for the City of Milwaukee to support its recycling programs. But she chased her life’s dream to do research in aquatic science. “It really is a dream come true,” she says.

Dr. Ryan Newton: Discovering New Microbial Communities

Meet Ryan. Dr. Ryan Newton at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences has the exciting privilege of exploring life at the microbial frontier. His lab is discovering new communities of microorganisms that live in our sewer pipes and our Great Lakes aided by technologies that weren’t even invented yet when Ryan was in grade school.

Just as the invention of the telescope allowed astronomers to observe and catalog distant stars and galaxies—leading to a fundamental shift in our understanding of our place in the universe—recent advances in genomic sequencing and microscopy have opened up a new realm of discovery, allowing scientists like Ryan to learn totally new knowledge about freshwater microbes that no one has before. “It’s a great time to be a microbiologist and exploring life on this planet,” he says. Ryan’s work has helped reveal a major surprise about the microbes inhabiting urban sewer systems—with global implications.

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.

Katie Schulz: On the Pulse of PFAS Research

Meet Katie. She grew up in Milwaukee and knew she wanted a future in science. As a master’s student at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences, Katie spent her first year reviewing research on a group of synthetic compounds known collectively as PFAS. You may have heard of them in the news. PFAS are known as “emerging contaminants” because although they’ve been around for some time, they are “emerging” in the sense that scientists, industry, and government are finding that they have unintended effects on life when they get into our environment. Katie is supporting Dr. Klaper and others working to find out more about PFAS and how to avoid the worst health impacts.

Emily Koster: Putting Together the Plume Puzzle Pieces

Meet Emily. A Milwaukee native, Emily is a graduate student in Dr. Sandra McLellan’s lab at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences helping to put together the puzzle pieces of evidence that inform when we should close our beaches to protect the public from exposure to pathogens in the water. Ever since she was a little girl playing in and around Wisconsin’s lakes, Emily was interested in protecting this precious natural resource. From Dr. McLellan and other researchers who underscore that interdisciplinary collaboration is the norm at SFS—including Dr. Ryan Newton and Dr. Hector Bravo—Emily has learned what it means to work in a lab, how to communicate scientific knowledge to audiences with different perspectives, and more about microbiology than she ever imagined. Emily is looking ahead to applying what she’s learned to a career that bridges science and policy.

Dr. James Price: Researching the Economics of Water

Meet James. He’s an assistant professor and environmental economist at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. What does economics have to do with water science, you might ask? Actually, a lot.

“Economics as a discipline does recognize that environmental natural resources have tremendous value,” James says. “It's just that these things are not oftentimes accounted for in policy decisions. Some of the work that I'm doing is to try to fill in those gaps in order to improve those decisions and outcomes.”

One of those gaps involves how we value the quality of groundwater in Wisconsin. James specializes in nonmarket valuation, a field of economics that assigns quantitative values to environmental goods and services—like water quality—that are not directly traded on markets. His current research covers all groundwater drinking water plants in the state, which are responsible for serving 42% of Wisconsin’s population with clean water. James is exploring the relationships between the quality of source water and the cost of treating that water. “Once we have that information, drinking water treatment plants can use it to look at the tradeoffs between, say, treating drinking water in plant versus protecting source water prior to entering [the system].”

Jill McClary-Gutierrez: Combining Microbiology and Water Health

Meet Jill. For the past two-plus years at SFS, she’s worked not only with Dr. McLellan but also with Dr. Ryan Newton and Dr. Val Klump on a interdisciplinary project to pinpoint the sources and timing of different contamination pulsing through our waterways after heavy rains. Jill gains from all three scientists’ perspectives—Newton’s expertise on microbial genomics, Klump’s expertise on sediment chemistry, and McLellan’s expertise on tracking novel gut bacterial indicators—to alert the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and other local regulatory entities with detailed data on how rural and urban areas contribute distinct pollution to our waters when it storms.

Kyle Poplar: Researching Health from Aquaculture to Zebrafish

Meet Kyle. He participated in the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences’ Applied Urban Aquaculture Certificate program, and then worked for one year in Dr. Michael Carvan’s research lab examining zebrafish embryos exposed to a battery of 42 chemicals in a high-throughput screening ultimately in the service of human health. In July 2020, Kyle started his new job at a Milwaukee-area wastewater technology firm, Saukville-based Aquarius Technologies.