Rate My Professor Jessica Garwood

Jessica Garwood is an Assistant Professor in Oceanography within the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. She earned her Ph.D. from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2019, M.Sc. from Dalhousie University in 2014, and B.Sc. with First Class Honours from Dalhousie University in 2011. Garwood's academic interests focus on small-scale physical-biological interactions in the ocean, especially their implications for the transport of plankton, sediment, or other organisms in coastal settings. As a coastal oceanographer, she collaborates with engineers and governmental scientists to investigate the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems.

Garwood has secured major grants as principal investigator, including a three-year, $1.2 million NOAA Ocean Technology Transition grant to refine and deploy dissolved oxygen sensors on commercial fishing pots, providing near real-time data via apps to support fisheries management amid hypoxia threats to Oregon's $33-75 million Dungeness crab industry. She leads efforts on an NSF grant developing autonomous robot swarms to explore under ice shelves, enhancing measurements of ice cavities and ocean properties. Additionally, she is PI on a $1.2 million National Harmful Algal Bloom Observing Network award. In 2023-24, she served as a Research Advancement Fellow at Oregon State University. Her peer-reviewed publications include 'Estuarine retention of larvae: Contrasting effects of behavioral responses to turbulence and waves' (Limnology and Oceanography, 2022), 'Exchange of Plankton, Pollutants, and Particles Across the Coastal Ocean’s Land–Sea Margin' (Annual Review of Marine Science, 2023), and 'Chlorophyll shading reduces zooplankton diel migration depth in a high-resolution physical–biogeochemical model' (Ocean Science, 2025). With research cited over 280 times, Garwood advises graduate students, participates in university task forces on robotics and research computing, and delivers public lectures such as the 2024 Hatfield Marine Science Center seminar on coastal transport pathways.