At the Great Lakes Research Center, our work is never done. With so much left to discover about the Great Lakes basin, we continue to depend on our visiting scholars and corporate partners to keep us moving forward. We invite you to explore the research, labs, and resources our Center offers—and to join our team. Together, we can further our understanding of this valuable natural resource.
Access to High-Tech Resources
By partnering with the Great Lakes Research Center, visiting scholars gain access to a variety of cutting-edge tools.
Equipment available to all researchers, visiting scholars, and industry partners includes:
- Subsurface research vessel fleet
- IVER 3 fully autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)
- Outland Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs)
- VideoRay ROV
- Surface fleet
- Two mass spectrometers
- Three automated coastal environment-monitoring buoys
- Superior high-performance computing cluster (with approximately 1,200 processors in parallel)
- Mesocosm (consisting of thirty 1,100-liter water tanks)
- Autoclave equipment sterilizer
- 80-square-foot Science Cave wall (a flat-panel display for educational outreach and research findings)
Cold-Regions Research
You don’t have to venture to the Arctic to have amazing winter research opportunities. At the GLRC, we specialize in cold-weather research. With an average annual snowfall of 250 inches, countless crisp days, and a handful of blizzards each winter, Center researchers study above, on, and below the surface of the Great Lakes in all seasons.
Current cold-weather research projects include:
- Nutrient cycling in ice-covered near-shore streams
- Impact of wind, waves, and ice on offshore structures and instrumentation