For a seven-day stretch this summer Noah Reardon ‘17 will be waking up alongside a 31-person science team, 17 crew members and seven other incoming high school seniors from around the country on the 211-foot research vessel, the EV Nautilus, somewhere in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

This endeavor will conclude the five-week Ocean Exploration Trust Honors Research Program at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography (URI GSO) that Reardon was one of eight high schoolers to be accepted into.

“Learning all of the science will be awesome, but meeting the people in the field and in the program will be the most beneficial,” Reardon said.

One of these people that Reardon will be interacting with is the program leader and Director of the Center for Oceanography at URI GSO, Dr. Robert Ballard, or more commonly recognized as the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.

“I haven’t studied too much yet with ocean exploration so I’m very excited,” Reardon said. “The nice thing about the ocean exploration and oceanography is that it ties in a lot of other technology like remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs).”

Focusing on geology, biology, archaeology, chemistry and computer science, Reardon and the crew will be exploring new realms of oceanography and how it relates to exploration, according to oceanexplorationtrust.org by attending lectures and shadowing graduate students.

“In sixth or seventh grade I did a robotics merit badge [for Boy Scouts] and got interested in Mindstorms NXT, a Lego robotics kit, which just progressed from there because I had some programming experience,” Reardon said. “I heard [Ballard] talk at a STEM convention which got me interested [in the program].”

Reardon has been on Science Olympiad all three years at LT and has worked with Chris Lacny ‘17 for 200-300 hours this year alone for not only the club, but a couple other projects together. The duo placed first in a competition at the state Science Olympiad tournament at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April for a robotic arm they created.

“We both work until the job gets done,” Lacny said. “[Reardon] is very good at coming up with creative solutions to problems as well as learning and picking things up quickly. That’s one of the most important skills going into any kind of new environment, so I think he’ll do excellently.”