Conference: 2025 Chemical Oceanography Gordon Research Conference and Gordon Research Seminar

This award will provide travel and registration support for attendees of the 2025 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) in Chemical Oceanography and the associated Gordon Research Seminar. The field of Chemical Oceanography addresses many issues of broader societal importance, such as the fate of human inputs to the ocean, sustainability of ocean ecosystems, and the scientific underpinnings of proper management of coastal and open oceans.

The Chemical Oceanography GRC brings together scientists from all career stages and different parts of the chemical oceanography research field to discuss their newest ideas. The Gordon Research Seminar is a two-day workshop prior to the GRC meeting, focused on mentoring and cohort-building among researchers new to the field.

The 2025 Gordon Research Conference will be held in July 2025 at Southern New Hampshire University. The theme of this year’s conference is “Fingerprints in the Ocean,” reflecting how the discipline of Chemical Oceanography uses chemical fingerprints left by physical, chemical, biological, and geological processes to understand the ocean. Nine topical sessions will showcase research advances in the chemical tools used by the scientific community to study the ocean and how it is changing.

The sessions cover coastal biogeochemical processes, natural and anthropogenic carbon cycling, insights from autonomous observations, molecular chemical oceanography, trace elements and isotopes, biogeochemical modelling, a session devoted to marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR), and what sediments tell us about past and present biogeochemical cycling. Interest in mCDR has expanded rapidly in academic, governmental, and entrepreneurial circles, and chemical oceanographers are uniquely qualified to address the fundamental bases for mCDR strategies.

This year’s conference will provide a forum for examining several of these strategies in the context of other fundamental advances in chemical oceanography.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.