LSU CC&E Student’s Coral Research Earns Prestigious NSF Fellowship

Ben Farmer
Doctoral Research Assistant in the LSU Seascape Ecology Lab
Anticipated Graduation: Spring 2025
Hometown: Lexington, Kentucky

Benjamin Farmer, a doctoral student in the LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences, has received a 2021 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, for his research studying stony coral tissue loss disease, a mysterious and fatal coral disease, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, or GRFP, recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. Past fellows include numerous Nobel Prize winners.

After graduating with his bachelor’s, spending a gap year achieving his Divemaster scuba certification, and working at the School for Field Studies in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Farmer’s interest in studying corals led him to Assistant Professor Dan Holstein’s Seascape Ecology Lab within the LSU College of the Coast & Environment.

“I knew I was interested in coral reef ecology generally and also coral disease, more specifically, so the College of the Coast & Environment checked off a lot of boxes,” Farmer said. 

Farmer’s work with Holstein is a natural continuation of the research he began in the School for Field Studies, where he first began studying stony coral tissue loss disease, or SCTLD. This lethal coral disease was first reported in Florida in 2014 and has since spread throughout much of the Caribbean and is continuing to spread south. It affects more than 20 species of corals, producing lesions and mortality, and its cause is still being actively investigated by collaborators.

“This disease has really lit a fire under the coral reef ecology and conservation community,” Holstein said. “Coral reefs are already in real trouble due to rising sea surface temperatures and coastal development. The fact that a previously unknown coral disease can pop up and devastate already disturbed coral reefs is a real ecological and conservation challenge.” Holstein has received both NSF RAPID and Louisiana Board of Regents funding to study this novel disease.

With this fellowship, Farmer will develop sophisticated epidemiologic connectivity models to project the spread of SCTLD in the U.S. Virgin Islands. For the next three years, he will lead disease survey dives at unmonitored reefs from shallow to mesophotic depths (5-40 meters) and compare the model’s predictions to his field findings. The resulting models will provide a novel framework for understanding coral diseases and the complexities of its spread through a fragmented and already disturbed habitat.

“What our lab is doing that’s a little bit different is a spatially realistic representation of the disease’s spread. This has implications outside of just SCTLD. This can extend to other marine diseases which have complex epidemiology. The underlying drivers of disease spread we uncover could apply to other vulnerable ecosystems struggling with disease outbreaks in a changing world,” Farmer said.  

Farmer’s NSF research will advance the study of marine disease, which is currently at the forefront of coral reef conservation science as disease outbreaks increase in frequency and intensity as a result of climate change.