Anna's Project Page

Who:  I am from Michigan. I came to Utah for ACCESS, the University of Utah’s mathematics program, and to connect with my extended family. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and baking.

My scientific/engineering interests:  I have loved biology for longer than I can remember, and math (statistics in particular) is something that just clicks with me. That’s why my goal is to one day use mathematical skills to better understand the world around me.

Academic goals:  I am a mathematics major with a statistics emphasis. While I work toward my degree, I plan to continue working in my ACCESS lab answering questions pertaining to sea ice and its related systems.

Career goals:  Someday, I want to use my mathematical skills to form the basis of a career in data science. Although I have an interest in almost everything, I find biology to be particularly interesting, so I hope that my future career will be one where I tackle questions of a biological nature.

Between 1999 and 2017, the Arctic lost more than two million square kilometers of its thick multiyear sea ice, being replaced by thinner seasonal ice, and the extent of summer sea ice has almost been cut in half. While many factors contribute to the trend of melting polar sea ice, the role of algal communities hosted by sea ice cannot be ignored. They form the base of the rich food webs in the polar oceans and can affect the albedo of the ice. By secreting extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) to help them thrive in such an extreme environment, they can modify the porous brine microstructure. Because the growth of these algal communities is dependent on nutrient availability, accurately modeling how easy it is for nutrients to pass through sea ice will further our understanding of how these communities develop. Here we propose to model sea ice permeability in the presence of algae, and in particular explore the effect of EPS “clogging” the pores.

Modeling the Effects of Algal Polymeric Substances on Fluid Flow in Sea Ice Download Modeling the Effects of Algal Polymeric Substances on Fluid Flow in Sea Ice