Through this program, elementary- and secondary-school teachers participate in field research with National Science Foundation-funded scientists, experience total immersion in research projects, and take what they have learned back to share with students and other teachers. The goal of the program is to help teachers to understand the scientific process, what it means to do science, and that science is ever-changing and often tedious and repetitive. Teachers are involved in planning the project and sit on the advisory board with scientists, helping to shape the program.

In summer 2002, Carvellas went to sea aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy for a 40-day cruise departing from Nome, Alaska. The cruise was part of a 10-year project, the Shell Station Initiative, looking at carbon cycling in the Arctic Ocean. During the cruise, she was responsible for being part of the research team and for posting daily journal entries and photographs on a Web site to be shared with students (http://tea.rice.edu/tea_carvellasfrontpage.html). As she explained, she worked with one of the principal investigators on board to “translate the science done on the cruise for the general public to understand.”