Shorewood grad awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Eckerd College Associate Professor of Computer Science Michael Hilton and Mark Yamane ’22 worked together during Mark’s undergraduate years on research. Photo by Angelique Herring ’19

Mark Yamane has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

One of the country’s most competitive honors for emerging STEM researchers, the program selects approximately 2,500 students each year from a pool of nearly 14,000 applicants and provides up to three years of financial support for graduate studies and research. Since its founding in 1952, the program has supported more than 70,000 researchers, including dozens of Nobel Prize winners.

Mark attended Meridian Park Elementary, Einstein Middle School, and graduated from Shorewood High School in 2018. During high school, he was involved in wrestling, drumline, and robotics at Shorewood.

Following Shorewood, he studied marine science and computer science at Eckerd College on Florida's Gulf Coast. Through on-campus research, he gained field and lab experience analyzing water samples and manatee gut contents for microplastics, and conducted independent research for his computer science thesis, applying the full scientific method and developing machine learning models.

After graduating from Eckerd in 2022, he spent three years working as a research software engineer in a fisheries acoustics lab at the University of Washington before transitioning into the school’s aquatic and fishery sciences graduate program.

His current research compares acoustic data collected from autonomous underwater gliders with data gathered from traditional ship-based surveys—work that could help make long-term ecosystem monitoring more cost-effective and accessible.

Looking ahead, Yamane says the fellowship will allow him to focus more fully on his research before sharing it with the broader scientific community.