“I love marine invertebrates so much. They are just so cool and interesting. And I just want other people to love them too.”
Clearly, it is difficult to overstate how passionate Juliet Wong is about her work and her research as part of the Duke Marine Lab. The love of the ocean and its creatures started early for her.
Sometimes it’s hard to describe why our research is important, or why people should care. But you know, when you’re talking about people’s dinners or their livelihoods, people do care.
“My father is a retired family practice doctor, but he has always been an avid fisherman and now that he’s retired, he has a lot more time for fishing. He always would take me fishing when I was a kid, and I think that kind of instilled in me this whole desire for maintaining healthy oceans.”
Wong is an assistant professor of Coastal and Marine Climate Change in the Nicholas School of the Environment. She joined Duke after a postdoctoral fellowship at Florida International University, drawn by Duke’s explicit institutional commitment to climate research. “It was really important to me to be at a university where I felt like my work would be acknowledged and supported at the institutional level,” she explains.
For Wong, Duke’s Marine Lab stands out because of its deep integration of students at all levels—undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral—into the research enterprise. Unlike many other marine labs that focus primarily on graduate students or operate only during the summer, Duke’s lab offers year-round teaching and mentorship. Wong delights in this opportunity: “I can not only get out into the lab and the field, but I can also get students there. Being somewhere like the Marine Lab is a big deal for somebody like me, because it means having access to all these resources in one place.”
Her teaching reflects this same philosophy. In her classes, students learn not only from lectures but also from hands-on labs and fieldwork, collecting local organisms, observing them live, and studying their behaviors under the microscope. “You get so much more out of it, like getting to actually find and see those animals in their local environments,” she says.
The ability to move fluidly between the field and the lab is also central to her research program. Early in her appointment, Wong tapped into Duke’s Bass Connections program, which allows faculty to form interdisciplinary research teams with undergraduates and master’s students, a key factor for a junior professor still working to attract PhD students and postdocs to her lab. Through this structure, she quickly built a team to investigate climate change impacts on oysters. The project has since grown into a partnership with local oyster farms, expanding beyond Duke’s own teaching farm to include collaborations with farmers across North Carolina. This work addresses urgent questions about why oysters are experiencing unexplained die-offs and how changing environmental conditions affect their performance and survival.
“We know that oysters are very economically important to this region but they are ecologically important, too. They also provide a bunch of other ecosystem services. They improve water quality because they’re filter feeding. They make reef structures that provide habitat for other organisms. They’re important for stabilizing shorelines and preventing erosion, and breaking up wave activity from storms. Oyster reefs help protect people’s homes by attenuating wave energy.”
While we can’t overstate Wong’s passion for her ocean research, she also doesn’t understate the reasons for it. “There’s such a human connection to the ocean, to food. I did my Ph.D. on the red urchin, which is one of the main species harvested for uni, for sushi. Sometimes it’s hard to describe why our research is important, or why people should care. But you know, when you’re talking about people’s dinners or their livelihoods, people do care.”
Photos by Jared Lazarus/Duke Marketing and Communications