By Mara Miller

It was a summer full of swimming, biking, and killing cyanobacteria for Sarah Choyke ‘10, a chemistry major and geology minor, who spent eleven weeks at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in picturesque Cape Cod, Mass. Choyke enjoyed the scenery, but she gets even more excited talking about her research experience at the prestigious institute and haven for young and uber-talented science nerds. 

“At Woods Hole, I worked in biogeochemistry,” she says. “And I know that’s a lot of prefixes.”

Choyke made cultures of cyanobacteria, a type of bacteria that gets its energy from photosynthesis, and then subjected them to acidified ocean conditions. “And then I watched them die slowly,” she laughs.  

She explains that as the earth’s atmosphere gathers more carbon dioxide, more of it dissolves in the ocean, contributing to acidification.

“The two types of bacteria I worked with produce more oxygen than all the rainforests on the planet combined,” she says. Put simply, if the ocean’s acidity keeps them from photosynthesizing, we’re in big trouble. 

Since each student at Woods Hole was assigned his or her own project, Choyke tackled the study solo, working under the supervision of trace metal chemist Mak Saito. There were also three graduate students and two technicians in her lab. The study is ongoing, so another student is currently carrying on her research.  

Choyke didn’t have to do much fieldwork—her supervisor had already taken care of that.

“The rest of the lab had gone on a ‘research cruise,’" she said with emphatic air quotes. “They went to the mid-Atlantic—like, the middle of the Atlantic—and had a lot of samples ready. That’s the cool thing about oceanography. To do anything, you’ve got to go on a cruise.” 

Choyke says that living on Cape Cod was entertaining in itself.

“It’s known for two things: research and Martha’s Vineyard," she said. "It’s quite a mish-mash of people. Every weekend fancy cars lined up for the ferry, and there we were lined up in our little dork outfits.” 

“There were lectures almost every day,” says Choyke, explaining that though Woods Hole is a tiny town with one main street, it is so packed with scientific research centers that any chemist would call it paradise. “At one, this guy explained in an hour how the six major elements became biologically available. It was so cool.”  

Choyke’s senior thesis project also deals with environmental science—she’s looking at “how contaminants hang around in the soil longer than they should.” 

After graduation (gulp), she would like to work as a lab technician and eventually go on to graduate school.

“I’d love to go back to Woods Hole at some point,” she said. “My favorite memory from the summer was swimming with the biolumes,” she said, before remembering that she is speaking to a humanities major, and that description merits some explanation.

“Biolumes are like jellyfish that glow,” she said, “and one night they were out, and it was the same night as the meteor shower, and a bunch of us went swimming, and the water and the sky were both glowing. It was such a perfect and beautiful science-y thing.”

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