Research, Travel & Internship Opportunities

Students at Stony Brook Southampton also have many options available for supplementing their classroom studies with a variety of field experiences.

lab work

Research Opportunities

Hands-on field and laboratory experience is an important part of being a Stony Brook Southampton undergraduate. A typical morning might find you aboard the R/V Paumanok, a 44-foot ocean-going vessel used for coastal research; the R/V Shinnecock, a 35-foot platform craft used for sampling local bays and estuaries; or the R/V Peconic, a 45-foot catamaran, houseboat-style vessel for operation in protected bays and rivers, collecting samples of water, sediments, and animals from local marine habitats and bringing them back to the lab. Or you might probe the secrets of the seafloor, using sophisticated echosonar technology to locate colonial shipwrecks at the bottom of New York Harbor.

Some of the research projects in which our students take an active part:

  • Causes and consequences of shellfish disease

  • The role of rising sea level in New York's shrinking salt marshes

  • Using paleooceanography to reconstruct climate changes during the past 10,000 years

  • Storm-related and tidal surges

  • Population biology of local marine fishes

Travel

Our location makes us ideally suited to studying New York's diverse environments. But your studies at Stony Brook Southampton can take you even further afield, to places like:

  • Jamaica's coral reefs, as part of our popular Tropical Marine Ecology course

  • Tanzania's Lake Victoria, where you'll examine the interaction between the environment and human health

Our students also participate in exciting programs like:
  • Sailing a tall ship and learning maritime policy through the Sea Education Association

  • REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab, or at the University of Alaska

  • National Student Exchange or study abroad

Internships

Internships assist our students in putting theory into practice togain valuable real world skills. Recent internship experiences include:

  • Rehabilitating and releasing marine mammals and sea turtles for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation

  • Identifying and monitoring nesting sites for the Town of Southampton's piping plover protection and management program