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About the Hollings Marine Laboratory
Overview
The Hollings Marine Laboratory is built on an approximately 8-acre site within the Fort Johnson campus of the South Carolina Marine Resources Center in Charleston, South Carolina. Dedicated on December 21, 2000, the laboratory is a facility that promotes collaborative and interdisciplinary scientific research to sustain, protect, and restore coastal ecosystems.
The HML approach brings basic, applied, and medical researchers together to work collaboratively on factors that affect the health of coastal waters and humans who live in or visit the coastal zone. The HML paradigm is based on four central premises: (1) modern marine research is increasingly complex, necessitating an interdisciplinary approach; (2) no one organization possesses the breadth of intellectual capital needed to address the increasingly complicated coastal issues facing society; (3) the interaction of the research findings of scientists from different disciplines and institutional backgrounds often results in significant synergy, leading to unanticipated advances in, and applications of, human knowledge; and (4) involvement of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students, distinguished visiting scholars, and resource management practitioners in research related to NOAA’s missions provides invaluable long-term benefits to the nation.
Although the HML is a NOAA-owned facility, it is a fully collaborative enterprise, governed by the five partner organizations through a Joint Project Agreement (.pdf). Scientists from all partner institutions work side-by-side in the new laboratory, taking advantage of each other’s special expertise.
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