UMD Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Major Felix Gomez Awarded Prestigious NOAA Hollings Scholarship
As a newly named NOAA Hollings Scholar, UMD sophomore Felix Gomez is building a career at the intersection of art, science and the sea.
University of Maryland sophomore atmospheric and oceanic science (AOSC) major Felix Gomez will tell you that much of his research is just art by another name. For years, he thought he would become an artist—until one day he found himself drawn to oceanography and the beauty of movement in water and air.
The swirling satellite imagery, the temperature gradients spreading across a map, and the slow, visible churn of water responding to decades of warming—for Gomez, there's something in those patterns that speaks the same language as painting, even when the tools are Python scripts and Linux terminals instead of paintbrushes.
This year, Gomez was named a recipient of the 2026 Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), alongside six other UMD students. The scholarship provides up to $19,000 in financial support, professional development opportunities, and a 10-week paid summer internship at any NOAA facility across the United States. This class—the second largest ever at UMD—brings the university's total number of Hollings Scholars since 2008 to 55.
"I feel incredibly grateful to have received this scholarship, especially alongside some of my AOSC peers," Gomez said. "I spent weeks writing, editing, scrapping, rewriting and re-editing my application essays, and I'm so happy that all my hard work paid off. I think the internship is such an exciting opportunity to do some real hands-on learning and get to know what it's like to work out in the field."
Working with AOSC Professor James Carton, Gomez analyzes how sea surface temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay have changed over the past several decades. The work involves processing ship intake and buoy readings from a remote Linux environment, where he's been building skills in Grid Analysis and Display System (specialized software for accessing and manipulating Earth science data) and Python. The project will soon expand to incorporate satellite imagery from Landsat 8 and 9, which will significantly widen the scope of what Gomez can observe.
"Felix has made striking progress using somewhat neglected satellite datasets to document the gradual summertime warming of the surface waters of the Bay," Carton said. "This warming has long-term consequences for the health of the Bay and its fisheries, and so Felix's work has the potential of creating a new tool to track this key resource."
But Gomez's interest in the Chesapeake Bay goes beyond the data. He's drawn to the communities and ecosystems the bay sustains, and to the way changes in water temperature ripple outward into important questions that are biological, economic and deeply human. Gomez says that he wants to anchor his work in real places and real conditions, especially in coastal or estuarine environments.
"Other than my work with the Bay, I'm also interested in ocean-ice interactions and paleoclimatology," he said. Paleoclimatology reconstructs the Earth's climate history over millennia using a range of natural records ancient pollen, tree rings, sediment cores, ice cores and more. For Gomez, it's the cores in particular that hold a special appeal: "I just find them super fun."
With his Hollings Scholarship, Gomez hopes to intern at NOAA's National Ocean Service or Chesapeake Bay Office to continue his research on water temperature and its impacts on coastal communities. He wants to work aboard a research vessel at sea to learn how instruments work and better understand the observational infrastructure from the inside rather than just consuming its outputs.
"One of the datasets I use comes from the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System, which is a NOAA program," Gomez explained. "It would be really cool to work on something like that from the other side."
Although Gomez spends much of his time on his research, he continues to connect his love of art and science in other ways on campus. As a member of UMD's Arts Scholars program, Epsilon Eta (a professional environmental fraternity on campus) and the student chapter of the American Meteorological Society, Gomez feels well-positioned to make his mark in both worlds. He's currently designing and painting a 70-square-foot environmental mural for UMD's Terp-to-Terp campus donation program, using images of native plants and animals to make the case for more sustainable habits. He also teaches basic robotics and electrical engineering to K-12 students at the Aurora STEAM Lab in Columbia, Maryland, during his winter and summer breaks.
From his experiences in the lab and beyond, Gomez believes that science doesn't end when the data is collected—communicating findings and making them understandable and compelling to people outside the research is also part of the work.
"Effective environmental science must be paired with public-facing communication to inspire change," Gomez said.
The next few years will be extremely busy for Gomez, but he can't wait to jump right in.
"I feel like I'm getting a lot more fulfillment in learning how the world works. I'm super happy to be where I am now," Gomez said. "I'm really looking forward to what's coming in the next two years."
