A great benefit of working in a moderately sized or large marine program is that both principal investigators and students gain exponentially from strong interactions within clusters of faculty, postdocs, staff and students who have related research interests. At about 40 faculty, the School of Marine Sciences is one of the largest marine units in the country.
Clusters provide ideal sources of graduate supervisory committees.
The existence of a nucleus of faculty with overlapping research interests is in fact among the best criteria for choosing one graduate school over another. Furthermore, at the advanced graduate level, distinctions between research and teaching blur as students, postdocs, staff and faculty push the limits of existing knowledge. Many members of the clusters listed here co-teach courses that take advantage of their common interests. Two modes of cluster use by students complement one another. Students can fit into an existing cluster of collaborating faculty, adding faculty from other departments or they can build new clusters in their supervisory committees.