As a PhD student at MIT, I was selected to participate in the Summer Course on Polar Biology, an educational program for early-career environmental scientists that is fully funded by the National Science Foundation. Through the course, I spent 5 weeks at Palmer Station on the continent of Antarctica, and went on research cruises in the surrounding Southern Ocean to sample the water for Antarctic phytoplankton. I took this image of the photosynthetic pigments of phytoplankton to measure differences in their photosynthetic activities during the day and night.