Photo: Isabel Chenoweth
Professor Vince Breslin measuring temperature and salinity at a fish tank for Striped Bass at SCSU’s Werth Center for Coastal and Marine Studies
Coastal and Marine Studies Riding A New Wave The Werth Center for Coastal and Marine Studies at SCSU Is Making Its Mark Across Connecticut and Beyond Third In A Three Part Series: Southern on Science’s Edge By: Emili Lanno
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n the first and second floors of Southern Connecticut State University’s Academic Science and Laboratory Building, the Werth Center for Coastal and Marine Studies has found its place.
Breslin said students are able to get involved in a wide variety of different projects and research while in the marine studies program.
Vincent Breslin, Science Education and Environmental Studies professor and coCoordinator of the Werth Center for Coastal and Marine Studies said the program originally started over a decade ago in 2004, and then went up from there.
The particular courses that Breslin teaches in Marine Science are Coastal Marine Studies, Marine Pollution and Marine Field Studies. Within these courses, Breslin and the students look at the distribution and tropic transfer of “contaminant metals in Connecticut harbors.”
In 2006, the Werth Family Foundation provided funding for the center and then in 2013, an endowment. It was then that the program was renamed the Werth Center for Coastal and Marine Studies. “The program was [designed] to provide a facility for undergraduate research that would focus on issues that were important to coastal Connecticut and Long Island Sound,” said Breslin.
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Their most recent project was documenting plastic microbeads present from “consumer products in Long Island Sound.”
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