Wes Slaughter

Wes was born and raised in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, but got into freshwater science as an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, where he studied molecular environmental biology. Building off undergraduate assistantships working in the rivers of California’s North Coast, Wes worked as a fisheries technician with California Sea Grant and then as a field and lab technician with a small water quality monitoring non-profit in California’s northern Sierra Nevada foothills. Wes went on to be an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development in North Carolina, helping to integrate nanomaterial databases across the federal government, and then to work as a researcher in a biogeochemistry research lab at Duke University, supporting lab efforts as a data scientist and developer. Currently a PhD student at the University of Maryland, Wes is an ORISE Fellow at the U.S. EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program Office, participating in efforts to better understand and predict dissolved oxygen dynamics in the Chesapeake Bay.