Faculty Honors and Awards
September 25, 2025 – Andrew Moore received the 2025 Edward A. Flinn III Award from AGU. This award recognizes recognizing unselfish cooperation in in research related to the development of the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). Dr. Moore’s research encompasses many other areas including coupled modeling, predictability of the ocean circulation, seasonal forecasting, stochastic forcing of climate variability, adjoint methods, and the development of advanced methods and tools for ocean data assimilation.
March 27, 2025 – Raphe Kudela, professor of Ocean Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has been named as a new fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Kudela was recognized for “distinguished contributions in research and education to the field of biological oceanography, in the study of harmful algal blooms and application of state-of-the-art techniques.” His research is focused on global phytoplankton dynamics, with an emphasis on the Eastern Pacific Ocean coastal region, and finding new applications for remote-sensing technology.
February 1, 2025 – Kendra Turk-Kubo, Assistant Professor of Ocean Sciences, was one of the UC Santa Cruz researchers who made the discovery of a new organelle within single-celled algae that converts nitrogen gas into ammonia. This group of researchers have won the 2025 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize. The prize is the oldest one awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and goes to the paper deemed by a deciding committee to be the most outstanding among all the ones published in the “Research Articles” or “Reports” sections of Science in a given year.
October 3, 2022 – The American Geophysical Union has awarded the 2022 Maurice Ewing Medal to Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz. The Ewing Medal is given annually in recognition of significant original contributions to the ocean sciences and outstanding service to the marine sciences. has made outstanding achievements and contributions in the study of ocean processes in past climate variability, and transitions, and is pushing forward the frontiers of ocean science.
February 24, 2022 – Claudie Beaulieu, Assistant Professor of Ocean Sciences, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her work using data science to study climate variability and climate change. Dr Beaulieu’s research program is motivated by the need to understand the drivers of variability and change in the ocean and climate, and it addresses the challenge of harnessing increasingly complex environmental data. The NSF CAREER Award will support an integrated research and education program focused on the observed and future rate of climate change, which has implications for societies and the environment.
2020 – Michael Polito was awarded a National Academy of Sciences Gulf Research Program, Early Career Fellowship. The Gulf Research Program’s Early-Career Research Fellowship supports emerging scientific leaders as they take risks on research ideas not yet tested, pursue unique collaborations, and build a network of colleagues who share their interest in improving offshore energy system safety and the well-being of coastal communities and ecosystems. Dr. Polito’s research interests include stable isotope ecology, foraging and food webs, marine birds and mammals, Antarctic ecology, and coastal wetland ecology.
October 12, 2020 – Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has been selected by the California Academy of Sciences to join the ranks of Academy Fellows. Dr. Ravelo’s research focuses on determining the role of ocean processes in past climate variability, including investigation of climate transitions, warm climate processes, and regional expressions of global climate change. She has held leadership roles at UC Santa Cruz, the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation panels, the American Geophysical Union, and the International Ocean Discovery Program.
September 20, 2018 – Phoebe Lam, Associate Professor of Ocean Sciences, is one of three chief scientists on the U.S. GEOTRACES GP15 cruise to sample the Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Tahiti. This is the fourth U.S. GEOTRACES cruise, and Lam’s lab has been involved in all of them. This time, she is participating both as a chief scientist helping to coordinate the whole operation and as a principal investigator overseeing her lab’s research project.