2009 Teachers at Sea

Canterbury Basin Sea Level: Expedition 317, 4 November, 2009 - 4 January 2010

Julie Pollard

Julie Pollard is a middle school science teacher in Texas. She found out about the Teacher at Sea program through her involvement in the professional development program, TXESS Revolution, with which she worked during the expedition.  She has a degree in geology, and loves unlocking a love of science in her students.  She has been married for 25 years, and has a teenage son who is active in theater and drama.  In her spare time, Julie likes to read, scrapbook and collect rock and mineral samples and watch her son act. She got her degree in geology at University of Texas at Arlington. 

Julie worked as a field scientist for an environmental firm for two years before realizing that her gift and calling was to be in the classroom with the kids.  She has been teaching middle school science for seven years now.  Julie was thrilled to have the opportunity to show her kids that science is active and ex

citing, and that a career in the sciences doesn't mean sitting in a lab all day every day.  They were very excited about following the expedition.  Julie’s son said it was fine for her to go on the ship as long as they had email, which they did!

Bering Sea: Expedition 323, 5 July - 4 September, 2009

Douglas LaVigne

I am Doug LaVigne.  I live in Acworth, GA, a suburb in the North Metro Atlanta area.  I currently teach Physics at South Cobb High School in Austell, GA, but my first love in science is biology.  South Cobb has around 2200 students in grades 9-12.  I have also coached soccer at the school and have worked with the school’s Science and Robotics clubs.  I also work with a club at school named Bogg’s Doggs that allows our students to assist in rescuing and finding homes for abandoned and abused pets.

I was born and raised in this area, and graduated from South Cobb’s rival, Osborne High School.  It is an amazing place to grow up, because you are a half hour from Atlanta to the south or to the north, the North Georgia Mountains.  It presents wonderful job opportunities, and I’ve done everything from computer programming for a Fortune 500 company to swinging a sword at a joust.   In my spare time I love playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and I play guitar and sing in a couple of local rock bands.

I originally wanted to be an electrical engineer, like my father, when I graduated from high school and attended the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Georgia Tech is an amazing school, but I soon found out that I was in the wrong place.  I loved my science classes, and teaching science would mean I could share my passion.  I transferred to Kennesaw State University, where I obtained a Bachelors degree in Secondary Education in Biology, and more recently my Masters in Education.

Teaching science is about more than learning facts and formulas.  It is a process which helps us understand the natural world, and sometimes we lose sight of that process when we teach.  I have made it a goal to get involved in doing science, and bring that to my students.  By seeing how science and scientists work, I hope I can inspire my students to pursue a career in science or at least leave high school with a better understanding of what science does and can do for us. That is why it is such an incredible opportunity for me to have been selected as the Teacher as Sea on Expedition 323 of the JOIDES Resolution.  The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program – US Implementing Organization (IODP-USIO) presented an opportunity for me to work in the field with scientists looking at the sedimentary record to help investigate such things as the surface water conditions during the Pliocene–Pleistocene and interactions between the sea and the continents at that time.  And it is also an incredible opportunity to share the many roles that make such a project possible.

Shatsky Rise Formation: Expedition 324, 4 September – 4 November, 2009

Nasseer Idrisi

Nasseer is currently on the research faculty at the University of the Virgin Islands studying connectivity of larval stages of coral reef organisms among reefs and their distributional patterns. He received his Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Basrah, Basrah, Iraq in 1984 in the field of Aquatic Biology. He received his Master’s of Science also from the University of Basrah in1989 in the field of marine biology, where his thesis was on the bioenergetics of the larval stages of the shrimp, Caridina babaulti basrensis. Nasseer received his Ph.D. from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY in 1997 in Aquatic Ecology and the topic of his dissertation was the impact of zebra mussels on the pelagic food web in a lake ecosystem.

Nasseer then went on to do his post-doctorate at the University of Miami, in Miami, FL in biological oceanography studying zooplankton dynamics in the Arabian Sea, in the Indian Ocean. Concurrent with conducting research, Nasseer places high priority on the development and enrichment of students’ learning experiences alongside formal classwork, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It is Nasseer’s belief that the learning experience at the college level should be an interactive process between students and the lecturer. In order to keep ideas fresh in the minds of students, active discussions need to take up an adequate amount of the lecture time. Nasseer’s main interests are in developing new ideas in ecology by building upon ideas developed in other disciplines. These approaches should be used to solve scientific problems.