The ENVS program is proud to showcase two seniors in the Class of 2022, Morgan Buchanan and Mitch Porter, who completed honors theses this year, thereby earning honors in their Environmental Science majors. They gave their thesis presentations in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences on April 25, 2022.

Morgan’s thesis is titled “Explaining Variation in Photosynthetic Gene Abundance in Chesapeake Bay Requires Accounting for Ecological Succession,” and her research was supervised by Dr. Anand Gnanadesikan utilizing data from an ongoing project he is working on with Dr. Sarah Preheim in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering.

Mitch’s thesis is titled “Regional and Global Climate Drivers of Marine Heat Waves and Related Atmosphere-Ocean Anomalies in the Eastern North Pacific,” and his research was also supervised by Dr. Anand Gnanadesikan and Dr. Tom Murphree at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. It builds upon the project he began in the summer of 2021 as a participant in a Research Experience for Undergraduates at California State University Monterey Bay.