Nearly every morning when she was a doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), Nicole Nakata, Ph.D. '23 (biology), would cross the street from the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) in Charleston, Ore., to the high-tide line of the Pacific Ocean. Her job was to catch microscopic brittle star plankton larvae from the incoming tidal current and bring them back to OIMB's labs to analyze under a microscope.