Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant is excited to announce Georgia Tech student Spenser Wipperfurth as the 2025 finalist for the National Sea Grant College Program’s John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship.
This year-long prestigious fellowship matches current and recent graduate students with hosts in the legislative and executive branches of government. Since 1979, the Knauss Fellowship has supported more than 1,680 early career professionals who have significantly contributed to environmental policy and management and built lasting careers.
2025 Knauss finalist Spenser Wipperfurth.
Wipperfurth received her master’s degree in water resources engineering and an MBA from Georgia Tech, where she studied coastal processes, resilience, ecosystem damage mitigation and community response to climate change. She has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This past summer, Wipperfurth served as a summer scholar with the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program. The experience allowed her to apply science and policy in addressing ocean energy and shipping regulations on the U.S. East Coast with Department of Energy officials and policymakers
She also has five years of experience working as a water resources engineer, which helped shape her understanding of how water is modeled and managed by relevant authorities. She now hopes to apply her knowledge and experience by focusing on the future of resource management, opportunities for innovation, and how to best support coastal communities.
“I have spent most of my life and collected most of my important memories on or near the water, on the rivers and lakes of the Midwest, the waterfalls of Peru, and now the Georgia coast. As a community member, I consider safe access and generational protections of water resources for myself and my neighbors as a critical part of building and maintaining healthy and hopeful lives. Since most humans live near coastlines, protecting, understanding and managing those coastlines are critical for protecting their residents. The Knauss Fellowship will give me a space to dream with those already working on these solutions and help me to further develop a network of mentors and peers to work alongside and learn from.”
Wipperfurth will join a cohort of 88 early career professionals from 70 universities, representing all eligible Sea Grant programs. Knauss Fellowship finalists are chosen through a competitive process that includes several rounds of review at both the state Sea Grant program and national levels. Students finishing Master’s, Juris Doctor (J.D.), and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees with a focus or interest in marine and coastal science, policy or management apply to their state’s Sea Grant programs. If applicants are successful at the state level, their applications are then forwarded to a national panel of experts who select the finalists.
This fall, the finalists will participate in a placement week to get to know each other and interview with several executive offices to determine where they will spend their fellowship, which begins in February 2025.