Angie Wills of the River City Community Development Corp. YouthBuild Program in Elizabeth City has been helping young people discover opportunity in part by rebuilding oyster reefs and planting rain gardens.
Beaufort native Paula Gillikin is caretaker of the wild horses at the Rachel Carson Reserve, but that’s only one of her responsibilities as the N.C. Coastal Reserve and National Estuarine Research Reserve central sites manager.
Nathan Richards, head of the Marine Heritage Program at the UNC Coastal Studies Institute, began his marine archaeology career in Australia. He and his team recently solved the mystery of the Pappy’s Lane shipwreck in Rodanthe.
Michael Murdoch of Carteret County has long been committed to environmental protection, but lately his focus is on sparing his rural community from a roadway project that could bring big changes.
He has ancestors that were Blackbeard’s crewmen and pewter plates believed to have once belonged to the notorious pirate –Chester Lynn of Ocracoke has deep knowledge of island history and a passion for figs.
Beaufort Mayor Everette “Rett” Newton, a doctoral student and program manager with the Duke Lab’s drone program, hope to use new technology to help make the town and local waters cleaner.
Steve Murphey, new director of the state Division of Marine Fisheries, has devoted decades to fisheries biology work and hopes to help better educate the public on the division’s efforts in his new role.
Eighty-year-old Ocracoke native Della Gaskill has seen great changes on the island, and the recently honored preservationist shares her memories of the way things used to be.
As director of NC Sea Grant, NC Space Grant and the state’s Water Resources Research Institute, Susan White finds ways to put emerging technology to work researching the state’s coast.
Rachel Willis, a UNC professor in the American Studies department, is an advocate for the world’s transportation infrastructure to work with, not against, climate change and sea level rise.
Rick Luettich, director of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, has turned his lifelong fascination with water movement into a career as a well-known expert on storm surge, but he’s still working on better prediction methods.
Dr. Craig Harms of N.C. State’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology in Morehead City is not only one of the area’s top experts on how to diagnose and treat sick and injured sea turtles, he helped write the book.
