SPOTLIGHT: Jahnelle Howe

Posted on October 28, 2019

Patience, Determination and Ambition are the main skills that Jahnelle Howe, a NOAA-CESSRST Fellow and graduate student in City College’s M.S. program in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. maintains to be successful in life.

Jahnelle’s journey as a NOAA-CESSRST Fellow began in 2017 at Lehman College in the Bronx, where she resides. After graduating the following year with a B.S. in Environmental Science, she came to City College to continue on the path toward eventually earning a Ph.D.

Her research project is on Contaminants in Coral sediments and Coral Tissue of Guanica Bay. It focuses on how the discharge of the Guanica Bay in Puerto Rico influences the mercury levels (if at all) and other contaminants in corals and coral sediment in waters in and near the bay.

This summer, Jahnelle spent two weeks aboard the NOAA ship “Okeanos Explorer” as an Explorer-in-Training, helping to map the waters off the coast of Florida for further exploration and research. Every day she and her shipmates created products of what they surveyed. They profiled the sub-bottom, checked water column data and processed it to identify underground seeps and other environmental issues. She wrote about her experiences on her blog, The Epiphany of Science.

As a NOAA-CESSRST Fellow, Jahnelle has learned a great deal about NOAA and its critical missions, what it stands for as an organization and why it is a force in scientific innovations. She says she would love to work for a NOAA-mission enterprise after her academic career.