{"id":59713,"date":"2015-01-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-oceanography-student-to-combine-science-political-experience-in-ocean-policy-career\/"},"modified":"2015-01-21T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T00:00:00","slug":"uri-oceanography-student-to-combine-science-political-experience-in-ocean-policy-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2015\/01\/uri-oceanography-student-to-combine-science-political-experience-in-ocean-policy-career\/","title":{"rendered":"äçÐÄvlogÃâ·ÑBÕ¾ oceanography student to combine science, political experience in ocean policy career"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 January 21, 2015 \u2013 Newport resident Olivia Ahern is working toward a career as a legislative aide, translating hard science into policies to protect the oceans and environment. Having already worked on five political campaigns before earning her bachelor\u2019s degree, she would seem to have a leg up on her competition. Now she is adding a master\u2019s degree from the äçÐÄvlogÃâ·ÑBÕ¾\u2019s Graduate School of Oceanography to her resume.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI had an internship at GSO while I was in high school, and I loved it,\u201d said Ahern. \u201cIt was a great opportunity to do real oceanography research when I was only 16.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tOceanographic research wasn\u2019t the only thing she started early. When she was a child, her mother worked for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, back when he was a candidate for Rhode Island attorney general and governor. Ahern was a volunteer for several of his campaigns. She also volunteered for the Obama\/Biden presidential campaign in 2008, was a paid staff member for Whitehouse\u2019s campaign for U.S. Senate in 2012, and a fellow on Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey\u2019s U.S. Senate campaign in 2013.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cSenator Whitehouse\u2019s campaign was a full-time job working seven days a week and up to 100 hours a week,\u201d Ahern said. \u201cI was in charge of his campaign schedule and his day-to-day activities, and I helped coordinate his campaign commercials, one of which involved over 100 volunteers at a community dinner in Bristol.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIt was a lot of hard work. You have to be constantly on and talking to people, but that was the aspect that was really interesting to me \u2013 the sense of community,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n


\n\tAhern\u2019s continuing interest in oceanography led her to jobs at Save The Bay, where she served as coordinator of volunteers, and the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program, where she works as an assistant environmental analyst while enrolled at the Graduate School of Oceanography.<\/p>\n


\n\tHer GSO research focuses on marine phytoplankton, which produces about 20 to 25 percent of the world\u2019s oxygen, and how that production may change due to the warming planet. She is studying the global distribution of bacteria that are found on one species of diatom.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cDiatoms rely on nutrients for their growth,\u201d Ahern said. \u201cAs the water warms, they may have to become more reliant on the nutrients that are remineralized by the bacteria that live on them rather than on the nutrients in the water column.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tSo she is collaborating with scientists at Duke University to identify the populations of bacteria found in the wild, growing various bacteria in her lab, and experimenting with different combinations of diatoms and bacteria.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in population genetics,\u201d said Ahern. \u201cBut the technologies we\u2019re using are so cutting edge that it has opened up a whole new field that I didn\u2019t even know existed.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAs she works toward graduation in 2016, she envisions herself working for a legislator in Washington or as a policy aide at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or other government agency.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cMy ultimate goal is to write legislation,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to translate hard science into effective, practical policy.\u201d <\/p>\n


\nPhoto by Mike Salerno Photography<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 January 21, 2015 \u2013 Newport resident Olivia Ahern is working toward a career as a legislative aide, translating hard science into policies to protect the oceans and environment. Having already worked on five political campaigns before earning her bachelor\u2019s degree, she would seem to have a leg up on her competition. Now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59715,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}