Northeastern professor and coral reef expert Steve Vollmer was working as a lifeguard in California when he first learned about the Three Seas program that would change his career trajectory — and his life.
At the time, Vollmer — a surfer with a biology degree from Colorado — was talking with a coworker who was counting wave sets at Huntington Beach. He shared that he was applying to graduate schools in Hawaii and California, hoping to pursue marine biology.
There was just one challenge: despite his love for the ocean, Vollmer had no experience studying it.
“She said, ‘Steve, you need some experience. Go to East West,’” which is what the Three Seas program was called back then, Vollmer says.
Accepted into the program, he traveled the world and met scientists who inspired him to go on to get a Ph.D. in marine biology.
“It was awesome,” says Vollmer, an associate professor at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center who teaches a Three Seas course on coral reefs. “The program did exactly what I needed it to do.”
Since its inception 40 years ago, the Three Seas program has provided an immersive experience for generations of scientists, academics and policymakers.
More than 800 graduate-level students who have gone through the program have learned about everything from coral reefs to kelp forests by studying and diving in three distinct ocean environments, currently the Gulf of Maine off the Nahant campus, the Caribbean Sea off Panama and the Puget Sound in Washington state.
The accelerated program involves intense field work, although the field in this case is the ocean.
“You hit the ground running,” says Ashland Aguilar, who graduated from Three Seas in 2023 and is now a research assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
“Every day, you get to go diving. You’re in these really fun and cool places. It’s also hard because there are very intense deadlines and a heavy workload, especially in the beginning,” Aguilar says. “I was able to learn a lot and network a lot. That’s how I ended up at WHOI.”
Three Seas students spend the academic year together in cohorts of 20 students. The fall term is in Nahant and the spring term is divided between Bocas del Toro in Panama and Friday Harbor in Washington state’s San Juan Islands.
“We do a really good job of exposing them to a diversity of ecosystems,” Vollmer says.
“Where we are unique is that while we have competitors, a lot stay in one place. Or they might have a course that they go out to for two weeks at another location as kind of a field trip, whereas we are literally moving our program in three-month increments to different locations,” he says.
“The cohort mentality is central to the program because you’re working with the same group of people,” says Steve Doo, who graduated in 2020 and is assistant professor of marine science at the University of Hawaii.
“With this bond you have, you really are able to push each other to do things that you never thought were possible,” he says. “When I came into the Three Seas program, I had no aspirations at all of getting a Ph.D. or being where I am right now. It really opened my eyes to the possibility of a career in academics.”
With a few exceptions, all students graduate from the Three Seas program with 40 to 50 scientific dives under their belt, Vollmer says.
Students practice lifting 10-pound blocks of cement to get a feel for the scientific equipment they will be hauling in lift bags, starting with the murky water off Nahant before proceeding to the crystal clear water off Panama.
“I’ve done about 150 fun dives in my life, so I like to think I’m a pretty good diver at this point,” Three Seas student Evan Dogus said this fall as he prepared for an underwater navigation course dive. “It was a brutal awakening this semester, because you’re carrying all this extra equipment.”
Scientific divers have earned the sobriquet “Christmas tree” divers because of all the gear they bring into the water with them, Three Seas student Anna Dormitzer said this fall.
“You go into each dive with an objective, whether that be counting species or looking at the density of different species,” she said. “You’re basically doing science underwater. We did a starfish survey dive, which was fun. We saw a lot of lobsters on a night dive.”
Three Seas student Megan Hilbert says she enjoys the variety of locations as well as becoming acquainted with different types and sizes of flora and fauna, which in the San Juan islands off Washington might include spotting an orca.
“You also get exposed to different researchers,” which is great for networking and thinking of next steps in careers and life, Hilbert says.
“The Three Seas program prepares you for whatever your next thing is, whether that be a Ph.D. or work in industry,” says Mark Losavio, a 2019 Three Seas graduate who is now conservation policy manager for the Aquarium Conservation Partnership.
“I found myself always really enjoying the part of the project where we were trying to interpret our research so that it is meaningful to the public,” he says. “That kind of shaped my career.”
The original East West program that launched in the academic 1984-85 year offered graduate-level courses, but not a master’s degree.
Now, however, those entering as outside graduate-level students, Double Huskies or via Northeastern’s Plus One program can earn a master’s degree by following up Three Seas with a six-month research project.
This year, the program had students all over the world — in Guam, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Vollmer, whose latest research has focused on identifying disease-resistant staghorn coral, says joining the program in the 1990s lit his interest in the fate of reefs.
“I went in as a student thinking I’d love to study kelp forests because I grew up in California, which has kelp forests. I’d never seen a coral reef,” says Vollmer, an evolutionary biologist who studies white band disease devastating colonies of elkhorn and staghorn corals.
“Being able to live on a reef for three months and see how they work was invaluable,” he says.
When Vollmer was in the program about 30 years ago, the warm water destination was the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia.
But while that location has changed to Panama, the mission is the same, Vollmer says. “Over 40 years, the program has remained true to its core, which is to provide the best exposure to marine biology.”