Britta Voss

Britta Voss came to the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in 2009 after earning her bachelor’s degree in oceanography from the University of Washington. As an aspiring oceanographer, she was at first skeptical about rivers. But after countless field trips to beautiful British Columbia with her Ph.D. advisor Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink and an unforgettable visit to Bangladesh and Nepal with WHOI scientist Valier Galy (and most of the French-speaking world), she’s now a riverine apostle. Her favorite lab-related activities are doing strontium chemistry in the ultra-clean laboratory in a container van on the roof of the Clark building at WHOI and goading her friends and family into collecting river water samples on their vacations. Outside the lab, she spends most of her time reading and dreaming about the Pacific Northwest and agitating for climate change action. Her mentor for this article was Jeffrey Brodeur, a writer at WHOI Sea Grant.