University of Georgia Marine Scientist Wins Award for Deep-Water Ocean Exploration

Samantha Joye, Regents’ Professor, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, and professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, has been awarded the 2022 Captain Don Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration. Awarded jointly by the Marine Technology Society and the Society for Underwater Technology, the award is named for American oceanographer and marine policy specialist Captain Don Walsh, who co-piloted the bathyscaph Trieste when it made its daunting record descent on January 23, 1960, into the deepest point of the world’s oceans – the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

“Captain Don Walsh — a pioneering oceanographer and ocean explorer — has always been a source of inspiration for me,” Dr. Joye said. “This award recognizes my two passions — exploring the oceans and developing instrumentation to assess and monitor contemporaneous changes in ocean physics, chemistry and biology. I’m extremely honored to be named the 2022 Walsh Award winner,. I am excited to continue to explore at the frontier to advance ocean science, as Capt. Walsh has always done.”

The award recognizes outstanding, sustained, international contribution to the development, application, and propagation of marine technology toward the advancement of ocean exploration. An expert in ocean biogeochemistry and microbial ecology, Dr. Joye’s work has focused on the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California, and along the North American Atlantic Margin. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on deep water habitats and extreme environments and tracks the cycles and fate of hydrocarbons, nutrients, sulfur metals, and trace gasses and interrogating the microbial communities that cycle these materials.

Professor Joye earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.