Aisharja Chowdhury is a senior undergraduate student in the University off Chittagong, who is taking her major in Marine Science at the Institute of Marine Sciences. Her research interests lie in the field of oceanography. Particularly, she is interested in understanding the environmental functions of the tropical coastal habitats. She is currently investigating eco-morphological factors that determine the natural succession of seagrass meadows under monsoonal climate and their role in structuring coastal ecosystems. Her research also aims to develop a comprehensive management plan to protect the ecosystem services received from seagrass meadows and to confer seagrass resilience in the face of rapid and global environmental change.
Aisharja was one of the active members of an oceanographic survey with R.V. Pelican that monitored ecosystem health and assessed the impact of
Rampal Coal Power Plant in Sundarban coast. She led the plankton monitoring team and was involved to measure primary productivity and counted plankton diversity. She is also working with OiLAB coastal habitat model development group and joined oceanographic surveys to facilitate hydro-morphological data through various instrumental operations. She has received training on ‘Marine Data 4 Baltic Sea using Jupyter Notebook, R, and QGIS’ from Copernicus Marine Service and Mercator Ocean International (EU). She has keen interest to improve her analytical skills for ocean model development that can translate bio-physical processes in the Bay of Bengal.