Allyson Ropp, a Ph.D. candidate in the Integrated Coastal Sciences Ph.D. Program, has been named to NOAA’s Dr. Nancy Foster Scholars Class of 2023. This multi-year award will support her doctoral education and dissertation research. Allyson’s research aims to characterize and evaluate the degradation of wooden shipwreck through the integration of archaeological, microbial ecology, hydrological, and geospatial methods.
Using a WWI-era U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation wooden steamship, Aowa, in the Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary, her research will leverage traditional and emerging technologies to quantify the shipwreck’s degradation over three years to better understand in situ wooden shipwreck preservation. This scholarship would not have been possible without the support of the Maryland Historical Trust, NOAA’s Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary, ECU’s Program in Maritime Studies and the Department of Biology, and her co-advisors Dr. Nathan Richards (Maritime Studies) and Dr. Erin Field (Department of Biology).