Professor Leslie Sautter is like a one-woman marketing department for the marine sciences. Funded by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Sautter gets young people hooked on hands-on research through exciting oceanographic cruises off the South Carolina coast.
Her philosophy is simple and effective; the best way to learn oceanography is to actually do oceanography.
That goes for undergraduate college students, high school students and elementary school teachers. Under the umbrella of Project Oceanica, her NOAA-funded initiative, Sautter has taken hundreds of students and educators out on the open water to feel what it’s like to be real working scientists.
Sautter's proudest achievement is the Transects Program, a subset of Project Oceanica that focuses on College of Charleston undergraduates. Through a series of five-day research expeditions, Transects students have helped monitor and map the unexplored ocean floor off the South Carolina coast.
During five intense days at sea, Transects students take shifts collecting data around the clock. Back on dry land, they spend the next semester in the lab for a minimum of six hours a week analyzing samples and generating hypotheses work that eventually leads to draft manuscripts and poster presentations.
"They really develop into junior scientists by the end of the semester," says Sautter, whose innovative teaching methods earned her the 2002 National Marine Education Award. Two years ago, Sautter convinced NOAA to let her borrow one of their ships equipped with multibeam sonar. This fall, Sautter is training her third "Beam Team" of College of Charleston marine geology students to use the high-powered, 3-D sonar equipment to map portions of the South Atlantic continental shelf.
When a Transects crew discovered what appeared to be a 10,000-year-old river channel 60 feet below the ocean surface, the Beam Team went back to map it in detail. Other students made SCUBA dives to the river channel and took video with remote vehicles.
"We've mapped 4.5 kilometers of the river channel with all of its bends. It looks just like the Lowcountry," says Sautter, known to her students as "Doc."
Transects students, armed with their extensive hands-on research experience, are extremely competitive in their ability to land internships and jobs, and get into the best graduate programs.
"They just get put to the top of the list," says a proud Sautter, who keeps in touch with all of her former students. "They rarely get turned down."
Learn more about Sautter's incredibly successful students at the Transects Program Alumni page.
