Introduced by her friends as “the ocean person,” Katherine Ball has spent much of her life near the water. When she was 10 years old, her grandmother gave her “Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion,” a book about oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and his marine debris study. It was then that Ball knew she wanted a career related to ocean studies. “I get so excited about the ocean,” said Ball, a Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology PhD student at Arizona...