The Packard Foundation 43d ago

Inspired by creatures like jellyfish, sharks, and rays that already navigate the ocean with ease, Nicole Xu, a 2025 Packard Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder, and her team are building bio-inspired robots to monitor the ocean and track the effects of climate change. These robots could one day document changes in ocean temperature or acidity driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere. With the ocean producing half of the Earth's oxygen, supporting a wide variety of marine life, regulating our climate, and providing food and jobs for billions of people, it’s important to understand how it’s changing. Better tools for monitoring ocean health can deepen our understanding of how human activities are impacting nature and inform programs and policies to protect and restore the ocean for the communities and ecosystems that depend on it. The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering provide $875,000 over five years to promising early career scientists like Xu. The Fellowships were inspired by David Packard’s passion for science and engineering and his commitment to strengthening university-based science and engineering programs in the United States. Recognizing that the success of the Hewlett-Packard Company, which he co-founded, grew from breakthroughs in university labs, the Fellowships were founded to seed the experimentation and discoveries that would lead to the innovations of the future. The funds are unrestricted, so Fellows can pursue new ideas with complete flexibility. For Xu, that's meant freedom to explore high-risk projects without proven applications, like growing corals and sea sponges in the lab using tissue engineering for potential habitat restoration. Learn more about the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering: https://www.packard.org/approach/fellowships-for-science-engineering/