CES Student Named to LSU Tiger Twelve

Congratulations to Coastal Environmental Science student Sierra Moran, who was named to the 2025 class of the Tiger Twelve.

Sierra Moran’s resume is varied.

Since she joined the College of the Coast and & Environment as a Coastal Environmental Science major in 2021, she has conducted lab research, been a teaching assistant and held internships at the Water Institute of the Gulf in Baton Rouge and at the NASA-Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. She was in the inaugural class of the LSU Global Ambassadors – an opportunity which took her on a Spring Break trip to Ghana – and president of the student organization the CES Advocates.

This is not a comprehensive list.

Her latest achievement? Being named one of the Tiger Twelve, a distinction LSU bestows on twelve outstanding seniors who contributed positively to campus life, the surrounding community or society at large.

Of her many experiences during her time at LSU, Moran says working in a CC&E lab was one of the best. She worked on a project with Oceanography & Coastal Sciences Professor Sibel Bargu Ates and Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences Brian Snyder.

“It was my own project, and I tailored it based on Dr. Bargu and Snyder’s insight and suggestions. I’ve always been interested in carbon sequestration and Dr Bargu studies algae and Dr. Snyder studies carbon sequestration,” she said. “So we kind of combined the two things and we looked at how algae can be used to capture carbon.”

Moran noted her work in the lab taught her persistence. “[I]n the lab, the first time you tackle an issue, the way you’re going about it is probably not going to be what you end up publishing. Sometimes it took several tries not to get the results you want, but to get any results at all,” she said.

Algae unintentionally became a focus of her NASA internship as well, when she realized the canal around the Michoud Assembly Facility were filling up with algae, which could clog the pumps and create problems. She brought her findings to the attention of the leadership and helped implement a plan to fix it.

The aquatic plant may continue to play a role in Moran’s future. “Algae is a huge market right now, for climate change research, for biofuel production and for food production, and I don’t think there’s a whole lot of people that work on algae in a positive way.”

How exactly that will look, Moran is not sure, as she hasn’t settled on the direction she wants to take.

In the meantime, she will be adding yet another experience to her list after graduation, when she moves to Dublin, where she has been accepted into a one-year Environmental Sciences Masters program.