Programs

  • Royce Fellowship
Miriam
Goldstein

Concentration 

Biology

Award Year 

2002
The Effect of Wave Energy on the Atlantic Dog Whelk (Nucella lapillus), a Mobile Intertidal Predator

Faculty Sponsor: Jon Witman

Miriam attempted to determine the causes of variation in feeding and movement behavior between wave-exposed and wave-protected predatory intertidal snails in the New England rocky intertidal. By observing and manipulating substrate complexity, temperature and vertical distribution, Mariam hoped to discover more about the effect of physical stress on the efficiency of mobile predators.

Miriam is the Knauss Sea Grant Legislative Fellow, at the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee Democrats, Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans, and Insular Affairs. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For her thesis work, she researched the impact of plastic debris on zooplankton communities and invasive species transport in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. She was the principal investigator on the SEAPLEX cruise, which explored plastic debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre in August 2009. Miriam is an active science popularizer and educator, and has appeared on CNN, CBS, NPR Science Friday and PRI’s The World, among many other media outlets.