Dr. Sam Muka, assistant professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, will deliver a talk titled “Bringing the Ocean In/Building the Ocean Out,” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 21, on Zoom. Sponsored by S&T’s Center for Science, Technology and Society, the talk will center the discussion on the impact of climate change on marine environments and what humans can do to help.

Keeping coral in captivity is tricky, and the methods have been developed over the last 70 years. The earliest successes in this field came not from laboratories and aquariums, but from home hobbyists looking for a way to enhance their home aquarium tanks. Methods for keeping corals moved to public aquariums and then into academic laboratories. Today, all three groups are working, sometimes together, to develop methods for captively maintaining coral. In summer 2023, researchers saw how these methods, and the stakeholders that developed them, will have to work with a growing number of communities to assure the future of coral reefs.

Muka’s new book, Oceans under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. Her work focuses on developing technologies that help humans understand and shape the submarine world. She is currently researching the development and deployment of artificial reefs in the coastal United States.

For the Zoom link, email Kathleen Sheppard, director of the Center for Science, Technology and Society, at sheppardka@mst.edu.