Joye selected for Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration

University of Georgia oceanographer Samantha Joye has been awarded the 2022 Captain Don Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration.

Awarded jointly by the Marine Technology Society and the Society for Underwater Technology, the award is named for American oceanographer and marine policy specialist Capt. Don Walsh, who co-piloted the bathyscaph Trieste when it made its daunting record descent on Jan. 23, 1960, into the deepest point of the world’s oceans – the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

The award recognizes outstanding, sustained, international contribution to the development, application and propagation of marine technology toward the advancement of ocean exploration.

Joye, Regents’ Professor, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of marine sciences, is an internationally recognized educator and deep ocean explorer whose work has revealed unexpected connectivity between elemental cycles, unanticipated feedbacks between geological elemental and microbial dynamics, and fundamental controls on microbial populations and their activity.

An expert in ocean biogeochemistry and microbial ecology, her work has focused on the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California, and along the North American Atlantic Margin. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on deep water habitats and extreme environments and tracks the cycles and fate of hydrocarbons, nutrients, sulfur metals, and trace gasses and interrogating the microbial communities that cycle these materials.

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Image: Samantha Joye (Photo by Todd Dickey)