Dr. Melissa Duhaime is extensively quoted in Quanta Magazine about her research aboard the Tara, a 36-meter schooner, which sailed from Chile to Easter Island – a three-week leg of a five-year global scientific expedition.

Duhaime, who is an assistant research scientist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, spent the voyage battling an endless bout of seasickness.

To Duhaime, who is now at the University of Michigan, getting a glimpse of the ocean’s virosphere made three seasick weeks in a darkened metal hut worth the discomfort, states the article.

Duhaime and her colleagues joined the Tara Oceans Expedition to collect ocean viruses on a scale never attempted before. They gathered enough samples to confidently estimate the total number of distinct populations of viruses in the sunlit upper reaches of the ocean. Out of the 5,476 populations they identified, only 39 were previously known to science, according to Quanta Magazine.

Read the full Quanta Magazine article, May 21, 2015