KINGSTON, R.I. – June 2, 2025 – Building upon previous research, University of Rhode Island Professor of Ocean Engineering and Oceanography Brennan Phillips and a multidisciplinary team of scientists will use cutting-edge technology to learn new information about fragile deep-sea organisms and possibly discover new species.

The team will receive $2.2 million over three years from the Ocean Shot Research Grant Program, an initiative to encourage bold research in ocean discovery and technology through the Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s Ocean Policy Research Institute, supported by The Nippon Foundation.

In addition to Phillips, the team is led by John Burns of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, and includes Robert Wood from Harvard University, David Gruber from Baruch College, Kakani Katija from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and Dhugal Lindsay from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

“I’ll be collaborating closely with Robert Wood’s Microrobotics Laboratory at Harvard to develop a biopsy/preservation device,” said Phillips. “The lab came up with the rotary actuated dodecahedron design for our last project. Our team at URI worked with them to turn that design into a large-scale oceanographic instrument that could work in the deep sea.”

Phillips and the team will reimagine the novel, origami-inspired robotic encapsulation device used in the “Designing the Future” project by outfitting it with a biopsy tool, modeled on the biology of the mantis shrimp, that can non-destructively sample gelatinous organisms floating in the water.

The technology Phillips and his colleagues previously developed and used for the first time was chronicled by URI and in the journal Science Advances in 2024. The articles described the results of the first application of the device, which included the characterization of four deep-sea animals with unprecedented levels of detail, down to the genetic level.

The goal of the new device will be to enable “catch and release sampling,” where the researchers can enclose an animal in an underwater chamber and use various sensors and devices to collect tissue samples for genetic analysis before releasing the animal unharmed.

Phillips has a master’s degree in biological oceanography, so he knows more about biology than the average engineer. But to prepare for this project, he learned a great deal about genetic research. For example, to perform a proper biopsy of a deep-sea jellyfish, only a small amount of material is needed—about the amount of toothpaste you might squeeze onto your toothbrush, or less.

“The time we take to collect the specimen and preserve it also means a lot,” said Phillips. “If we can get the tissue into preservative within a minute or two of collecting it, we can get a full genome expression, including the ‘junk’ DNA that can tell you a lot about how the animal is stressed, what its metabolism is, etc. We’re trying to get the most amount of information from the smallest amount of tissue, so we need to take extreme steps to get that tissue into preservative immediately to ensure it makes it to the lab in its most pristine form. This takes place at depth, in the ocean— making it more challenging.”

Phillips is excited to work with Woods’ robotics laboratory again.

 When it comes to taking a deep-sea biopsy, Phillips says, “They came up with some incredibly innovative ideas to pull off what most people might consider to be impossible.”

Making such devices work in deep-sea conditions—or making the impossible possible—is Phillips’ area of expertise. 

“At URI, we excel at that type of research,” said Phillips. “We can take brilliant concepts from a lab such as the Harvard Microbotics Laboratory and adapt it to perform in an extreme environment for a unique and important purpose.”

Other members of the research team will design software to process the complex data produced by their cutting-edge imaging systems. The goal will be to develop new algorithms for processing multidimensional imaging data and artificial intelligence tools to automatically identify the animals they image. They will also deploy a new shadowgraph system that essentially takes pictures with shadows to capture the internal structure of the animals, which will help with taxonomic classification of new species.

While the project is in the conceptual planning stage, Phillips expects to have a working prototype in the laboratory by this winter. According to Phillips, the first expedition is likely to be in late 2026, somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean.