Board Director
Bob Chen is a professor and the Interim Dean of the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research interests include carbon cycling in coastal waters, contaminants in urban harbors, the application of coastal sensor networks to societal needs, and designing sustainable shorelines. Bob is also dedicated to ocean and environmental science education and outreach as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion work at the local, national and international levels. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles in the area of coastal observations, carbon cycling, contaminant distribution and fate, and environmental education.
Bob is Principal Investigator of Cool Science (www.coolscience.net), an NSF AISL project that blends art and science and allows K–12 youth to create art that is placed on public buses to educate the adult public about climate change and extreme weather. He is also Principal Investigator of a NASA MUREP project, Partners Aligned to Heighten Diversity in STEM (PATHS; www.pathspartners.org), that aims to diversify engineering and NASA-related fields at the Grade 8–graduate levels in Massachusetts. He serves on the Boards of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and the New England Aquarium.
