There is one part of campus that overlooks the Bogue Sound.
The students here hang up their waders after a long day. Seagulls have usurped the pier, and in the parking lot sit motor boats — not cars.
Though this building is, roughly, a 150-mile trek from Central Campus, the faculty and students who frequent the Center for Marine Science and Technology represent three colleges, according to CMAST’s director, David Eggleston.
“It’s unique in terms of N.C. State in that we do have [agriculture and life sciences, physical and mathematical sciences and veterinary medicine] represented,” Eggleston said. “It’s a great opportunity for the departments’ research.”
A few of the research projects Eggleston mentioned include integrating marine science and modern technology to produce data useful to producers.
“[The research involves] locating platforms and buoys throughout sounds that would transmit via cell phone or satellite real-time data of water quality,” Eggleston said. “We would then download, deduce and disseminate it to user groups.”
The Seafood Laboratory uses its closest resources — the Atlantic Ocean and the sound — to gain access to data.
“The Seafood Laboratory does a wide range of things,” Eggleston said. “One issue they’re addressing is how you handle fish to increase the shelf life.”
The lab is also working on “seafood traceability,” which Eggleston said, involves technology to track seafood from the moment it’s caught to when the consumer purchases the product.
Jill Miller Fournier, an information and communication specialist who works within the Department of Food Science, said one over-arching focus is extension research.
The data researchers gain from these experiments, Fournier said, provide retailers and packing houses with the data and advice they need to improve shelf life, comply with Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point standards and meet federal regulations for seafood.
Proximity to the ocean and sounds surrounding CMAST, which is located in Morehead City, is an integral part of the Center, Fournier said.
“This building provides easy access to what the researchers need to be working on,” Fournier said. “CMAST is more of a conglomeration and collection of colleges and departments.”
According to Fournier, though no classes are taught on-site, professors, undergraduate and graduate students work together as CMAST researchers.
“There’s a wide variety of research centered [on] marine life and the ocean,” Fournier said.
But CMAST doesn’t just do its own research. According to Eggleston, CMAST researchers also use data collected by North Carolina’s programs, such as the Division of Marine Fisheries, to analyze the status of the state’s fish stocks.
“We provide the division with expertise and quantitative fishery science,” he said.
CMAST is neighbor to Cartaret Community College and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Institute for Marine Science, both of which collaborate with CMAST on projects and share lab equipment and space.
“The community college has started growing baby blue crabs for a project that I have,” Eggleston said. “We’re growing hatchery-reared crabs in freshwater ponds … it’s been fairly successful. They’ve really developed the science nicely on how to do that on a larger scale.”
Eggleston said he hopes CMAST will expand and encompass three more programs, which include: educating grade-school students at the Center, integrating NCSU’s engineering program and technologies and working on coastal sustainability.
“NCSU has such a strong engineering program, and there’s a lot of very interesting, cutting-edge work being done — waste water treatment, green buildings,” Eggleston said.
“We’re trying to provide leadership and leverage to the talent and expertise of UNC systems’ researchers — as well as state and federal researchers — in promoting coastal sustainability.”
According to the CMAST Web site, the Center’s principal mission is to explore and identify new, innovative solutions to questions and problems in marine systems and effectively communicate and share these discoveries.
And though no students arrive at CMAST expecting to be taught in a classroom, Fournier said they learn through other methods — mainly their own work.
“It’s not so much classes that are taught here,” she said. “It’s experience and research.”
By the numbers
51,000 — square feet in size
2000 — year opened
3 — colleges represented
17 — departments affiliated
35 — marine science faculty
Classes and research opportunities
Workshops and short courses
Undergraduate internship program
Undergraduate and graduate courses
Field courses
In-class and distance learning courses
Source: www.cmast.ncsu.edu
