Meet 2025 NOAA Ocean Exploration Hollings Scholar, Alex Ensign
Alex Ensign joined NOAA Ocean Exploration in 2025 as an intern with the Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship Program. For her internship, Alex worked with the Science and Technology Division on a project studying midwater fauna in the Blake Plateau region. Here, Alex shares reflections on her internship experience.
Alex spent the summer at the NOAA Ocean Exploration office in Silver Spring, Maryland. Here, Alex is standing with the NOAA Silver Spring campus’s famous “NOAA Hand” statue. Download largest version (jpg, 1.78 MB).
As an undergraduate at The Ohio State University, I am working toward dual bachelor’s degrees in atmospheric science and music. I’ve always loved to learn about a wide variety of topics—astronomy, art history, forensics, and more—and have been heavily involved in both the sciences and the performing arts for most of my life. My first exposure to acoustics was in a physics class, and I absolutely loved working with sound. Equations suddenly made intuitive sense in a way they hadn’t before, representing phenomena I heard every day as a musician. This interest in acoustics lined up with my acceptance into the Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship Program, and I was excited by the opportunity that this internship position with NOAA Ocean Exploration provided to learn about acoustics while also jumping into a new field of study.
For my Hollings internship project, I worked to analyze acoustic, video, and environmental data to estimate the distribution of marine life from the deep water column of the Blake Plateau region. This analysis used active acoustic (sonar) data, along with video and environmental data collected by remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Deep Discoverer.
Having no prior experience with water column biology, bioacoustics, biology in general, or ocean exploration, I had a lot to learn! Diving headfirst into a completely new scientific field was absolutely a challenge, but also such a privilege. Despite the initial overwhelming feeling of trying to understand terms and concepts I’d never heard of, the challenge paid off, and I ended my internship with a solid introductory understanding of the components and contexts involved in my project. Having to “start from scratch” in terms of background knowledge on this project has deepened my appreciation for the scientific expertise required for research. The collaboration I saw in the office highlighted the importance of expertise both inside and outside of the sciences in conducting and implementing that research.
This jellyfish (Trachymedusae) was seen on the midwater transects at a depth of approximately 700 meters (~2,295 feet). Image courtesy of NOAA Ocean Exploration, Gulf of Mexico 2018. Download larger version (jpg, 930 KB).
My project isn’t entirely complete yet, but I’ve really enjoyed it! So far, we’ve found that acoustic data potentially indicates more organisms nearshore than offshore in the Blake Plateau region. We’re still analyzing how this relates to environmental variation and to what kinds of organisms were seen on ROV video in the area. It’s proven incredibly important to integrate our understandings from the three different data sets—acoustic, environmental, and video—to start to piece together the complicated and dynamic phenomenon in the water column. I enjoyed learning about the physical processes and instruments that allow us to collect bioacoustics data and use it to learn about ecosystems. I also enjoyed getting to work with multiple data types to draw more complex conclusions about the data we analyzed.
Outside of my project, one of my favorite parts of my internship was getting to learn so much from various specialists in their fields. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have been so immersed in a new area of science and for all of the support I received during my time at NOAA Ocean Exploration. I’m excited to use the skills I learned through this internship in my future studies in the sciences and beyond!
By Alexandra Ensign