Announcing the UC Davis Bilinski Fellows at Bodega Marine Laboratory for 2026-27
Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski’s life goal was to be “independent and challenged intellectually.” They strongly valued self-sufficiency, a sense of ambition, and above all, responsibility. Their legacy continued in their nonprofit corporate foundation that provided fellowship funds for post-secondary education for students who have demonstrated and will maintain the highest academic achievement.
Bilinski fellowships are awarded to outstanding doctoral students whose selected projects, based at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, exhibit innovation, collaboration, and are a key component of the student’s final dissertation. The 2026-2027 awardees featured here will bridge the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities in their projects. As a result, each recipient is awarded $25,000 to assist with tuition, stipend, and research expenses.
Meet the Recipients:
Audrey Deutsch
(she/her/hers)
Audrey’s research sits at the intersection of sustainable aquaculture and conservation while studying two marine species groups that are iconic to the North American West Coast: abalone and Pacific salmon. While these animals are an important part of their ecosystems, Audrey is also interested in the role they play in human coastal communities: food. For her project, Audrey will develop and publish a Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve cookbook containing recipes contributed by the scientific community at BMLR. The cookbook will also inform readers of ways to ethically forage and collect ingredients from the Sonoma Coast. The project will culminate in a community-wide taste-testing event.
Gwyn Chilcoat
(she/her)
Gwyn studies the paleoecology of the San Francisco Bay. With her Bilinski Fellowship, she will work to map and age ancient Olympia oyster beds beneath the Bay to create a clearer picture of what these communities looked like thousands of years ago. This information is vital for informing restoration of native ecosystems. Gwyn will create public signage in collaboration with Bay Area science communicators to encourage visitors to imagine what the Bay looked like in the past.
Julianna Porter
(she/her)
Julianna's project aims to add to the landscape of public programming at BML through the use of storytelling and visual media. She will pair graduate students at BML with scientific illustrators to create art inspired by their research. The graduate student and scientific illustrator pair will brainstorm collaboratively to translate science into art, but while the artists create their work, the graduate students will also work on scientific storytelling to communicate their science to a broad public audience. This project will culminate in a combined mini symposium and art exhibition at BML that will be open to the public.
Liyu Mekonnen
(she/her)
Liyu is a nearshore biogeochemist who explores the carbon storage potential of vegetated coastal ecosystems as a nature-based climate solution. Her doctoral research investigates how seagrass meadows, a vegetated coastal ecosystem that exists along nearly every continent’s coastlines, can naturally mitigate carbon emissions and ocean acidification through alkalinity production in their underlying sediments. The elements present in natural sediments hold great potential for applied artistry waiting to be revealed through precise physical or chemical manipulations, such as the high temperatures and precise oxygen levels used to make clay pottery. For her project, Liyu is working with local ceramicists at the Weekes Community Center to incorporate seagrass sediments into various clay pottery pieces that will be displayed in a gallery at Bodega Marine Lab and shared more widely through an interactive website. Her ultimate goal is to foster curiosity around seagrass meadows and build positive associations with the complex and variable chemistry used to elucidate their numerous ecosystem benefits and climate mitigation potential.
Michelle Napoli
(iti/’uh (Coast Miwok, Bodega Dialect); also she/her/hers)
Michelle is Liwanwalli, a Coast Miwok person from Bodega Bay, who is committed to Native language revitalization and Liwanwalli ways of knowing. Her research is to explore a methodology for strengthening connections in an ecology of relationships that honors the land and waters who are still holding memories and stories at the UCD Marine Reserve and Lab. This approach continues her work through the arts and includes natural relatives as the materials, teachers, and co-researchers. Michelle is looking to continue her interdisciplinary work of weaving together many intersections of knowledge and perspectives, such as with BML-based researchers, her communities, archived documents, family stories, and lessons learned from being on her homeland, Bodega Bay.
Natasha Dhamrait
(she/her)
Natasha's Bilinski project involves using weaving/woven fabric as a method to visualize data and science emerging from the Bodega Marine Lab (BML) and UC Davis. The natural history of the Bodega marine area, and research from the labs of BML is primarily communicated through scientific publications, which rely heavily on computers to generate and visualize data. By using woven fabric, our earliest form of computing/visualization, to tell biological narratives, members of the public and scientific communities will be able to interact with data in a physical form. They would be able to see (quite literally), the threads of how biological organisms in the Bodega Bay interact with each other and how the fabric of ecosystems may unravel with a single missing organism. To do this, Natasha is pairing five graduate students whose work focuses on the Bodega area with five experienced weavers who will creatively represent those students' research in woven form. Finished works will then be displayed in an exhibition at BML.