Beth Caissie

I grew up running around the New England woodlands and as an undergrad I wanted to use photography as a tool for providing new perspectives of the environment. Once I discovered diatoms in graduate school (UMass Amherst), I knew these gorgeous organisms would let me combine my interest in environmental science with the arts. I’ve also lived in Alaska where I feel most at home, in Iowa, where I spent as much time at the Iowa Lakeside Lab as I could, and now in San Francisco where I bike commute daily and can get to the beach in 15 minutes! My research uses diatoms to reconstruct how the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea have changed over the past 500,000 years. In particular I want to know how sea ice changes when the climate warms. I love to image diatoms on the light microscope and the SEM.