SOEST faculty grow new research directions with NSF fellowships
Two researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) have been selected to receive National Science Foundation EPSCoR Research Fellows awards. The competitive federal program gives early- and mid-career researchers opportunities to develop new expertise and collaborations through extended work with host institutions.
The awards will support Helen Janiszewski of the Department of Earth Sciences and Lenore Pipes of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center as they develop new expertise through collaborations at UC Santa Cruz and Scripps Institution of Oceanography and develop new directions in fiber-optic geophysical sensing and reconstructing ancient marine ecosystems.
“What’s exciting about these fellowships is that they give Helen and Lenore the opportunity to take their research in new directions and build on that work at SOEST,” said Rebecca Chung, SOEST director of research development, who worked with Janiszewski and Pipes on developing their fellowship proposals.
Turning submarine cables into seismic sensors
Janiszewski, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, will lead a project focused on distributed acoustic sensing (DAS)—a technology that enables telecommunications fiber-optic cables to function as dense, continuous arrays of seismic sensors.
Despite Hawaiʻi sitting at the nexus of the Pacific submarine cable network, local DAS infrastructure and expertise remain limited. Janiszewski aims to establish the technical and collaborative foundation necessary to develop DAS capability at UH Mānoa, enabling her to lead fiber-optic sensing research and education in Hawaiʻi and the broader Pacific.
The project leverages two major observational opportunities. The first is data from a DAS pilot project along the Aloha Cabled Observatory recently obtained by Ethan Williams at the University of California – Santa Cruz, with whom Janiszewski will collaborate with for the fellowship. The second is the planned Hawai‘i Interisland Fiber Link, a new submarine telecommunications cable system that would offer a future platform for interisland DAS. Janiszewski will develop a data management and signal processing pipeline at UH Mānoa and use the pilot data to build an initial seismic event catalog for the Hawaiian region, establishing workflows that can be expanded to additional cable systems as they become available. This work has potential applications for earthquake and tsunami hazard research in Hawaiʻi.
Unlocking biological history from ancient marine sediments
Pipes, an assistant professor at the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, will develop computational methods to recover biological information from ancient DNA preserved in seafloor sediments, helping to reconstruct past marine communities and build historical baselines for understanding how ocean biodiversity responds to climate change.
In standard marine environments, ancient DNA preserved in deep-sea sediments degrades into extremely short, damaged fragments. Current methods can mistake that damage for evolutionary change, making it difficult to accurately identify the organisms represented in the samples.
Pipes will work with Brice Semmens and Nastassia Patin at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego to sample refrigerated marine sediment cores and develop new computational methods that account for ancient DNA damage. The approach could recover highly degraded genetic material, including from highly diverged and extinct marine taxa, that standard mapping tools may miss.
Using these newly recovered deep-time genomic records, Pipes will construct predictive ecological models to forecast how marine communities will shift under future warming scenarios. Ultimately, Pipes will bring the resulting open-source tools and laboratory protocols back to UH Mānoa, expanding local expertise in marine paleogenomics and UH’s capacity to process deep-sea sediment cores locally. The project will also support a postdoctoral researcher and integrate these novel datasets into UH courses, which will train the next generation of Hawaii’s STEM workforce in advanced data science and marine ecology.
Growing new research at SOEST and beyond
Both fellowships are designed so the work continues at UH Mānoa after the host collaborations end. Through their projects, Janiszewski and Pipes will engage graduate students and embed state-of-the-art methodology directly into UH Mānoa training and coursework in support of the STEM pipeline.
Together, the projects can support future research and collaborations at SOEST and beyond. Janiszewski will establish new data-processing tools at UH Mānoa to advance fiber-optic sensing in Hawai‘i, with approaches that could transfer to other Pacific communities. Pipes will bring the resulting open-source tools and laboratory protocols back to UH Mānoa, expanding local expertise in marine paleogenomics and UH’s capacity to process deep-sea sediment cores locally.