Ph.D. student Laura Anthony (advisor Dr. Sandra Brooke) has received NOAA's prestigious Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship! Laura's research focuses on how environmental variables impact the reproduction of habitat-forming deep-sea corals, particularly what variables drive the timing of spawns and the size of eggs. Understanding how slow-growing deep-sea corals reproduce is especially important as they are threatened by human activities such as bottom fishing and climate change. The Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship will allow Laura to study the reproductive biology of reef-forming corals in the Papahanaumokuäkea Marine National Monument. She is especially interested in how the reproductive mode and output of deep reefs are changing due to ocean acidification conditions in the North Pacific.