Kate Ballard is a data scientist. Eight months ago, the former Weston Scholar and Sea Grant student landed a job as a statistician at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center in Virginia.

A pair of Wisconsin Sea Grant researchers are unraveling the mysteries of one of commercial aquaculture’s greatest bacterial threats–is a vaccine on the horizon?

Water flows both above and below ground, traveling through watersheds on the land surface and infiltrating the soil to flow through underground aquifers. In fact, 25 percent of the world’s freshwater supply is contained in the lithosphere – the top 60 miles of earth beneath our feet. A new, free podcast series produced by the University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute demystifies two fundamental concepts of the physical geography of water – aquifers and watersheds.

The next monthly River Talk is scheduled for Wed., Apr. 15, 7 p.m. at Amazing Grace Cafe (394 S. Lake Ave., Duluth, Minn.) Tom Hollenhorst with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will present, “Remembering the Cultural History of the St. Louis River Estuary Through Maps.

Dreux Watermolen has a long-standing relationship with Wisconsin Sea Grant..

The next monthly River Talk is scheduled for Wed., Mar. 18, 7 p.m. at Amazing Grace Cafe (394 S. Lake Ave., Duluth, Minn.) Caitie McCoy with Illinois Indiana Sea Grant will present, “Restoring the Spirit to the River: The U.S. Steel Superfund Site on Spirit Lake.”

A special bonus talk in conjunction with the St. Louis River Summit will be held on Tues., Mar. 31, 7:30 p.m. at the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) Learning Center (3 Marina Dr., Barker’s Island, Superior, Wis.) Lizzie Condon, a former staffer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will present, “The St. Louis River in Your own Words: Results from NOAA’s Stakeholder Engagement Interviews in the St. Louis River Estuary.”

In 2010, Sue Zanne Tan received the Carl J. Weston Memorial Scholarship, an annual award given to promising undergraduate students working on Aquatic Sciences Center-supported projects. Now, five years later, her scientific exploration continues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

It seems counter-intuitive, but Wisconsin Sea Grant researchers have found that an invasive fish, the round goby, may have greater impacts on native fishes when there are fewer gobies rather than gobs of gobies.

Matt Kornis’s mother likes to tell the story of how they would walk in the neighborhood when Matt was two and he would pick up a stick to “fish” for leaves in puddles. Later, in college, his love for water, fish and the outdoors won out over his interest in molecular biology, leading to his current job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in Green Bay, Wis. Kornis is a fish biologist and data analyst with the Great Lakes Mass Marking Program, a multi-agency study across the Great Lakes that involves implanting coded wire tags into millions of stocked fish each year to help assess the effectiveness of the stocking program for lake trout and Chinook salmon.

The next monthly River Talk is scheduled for Wed., Feb. 18, 7 p.m. at Amazing Grace Cafe (394 S. Lake Ave., Duluth, Minn.) Hansi Johnson with the Minnesota Land Trust and Diane Desotelle with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency will present, “Making the St. Louis River Hip: The River Corridor Project.”