“Swimming with seals through a kelp forest was when she fell in love with the underwater world…”

Hannah Douglas, 23, from Co. Wicklow has been awarded the 2022 European Our World Underwater Scholarship®, one of three global SCUBA diving awards funded by Rolex each year.

The objective of the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society®, set up over 50 years ago in the USA, is to help to develop the careers of young people who are talented, passionate divers with a strong academic record and a deep-seated desire to build a career in our industry.  Three scholarships are awarded each year, one in the USA, one in Australasia, and one in the EU.  The scholarship can sound too good to be true as each individual spends a year on the road, diving and working with, and most importantly learning from and contributing to the work of leading divers, academics and conservationists around the world.

Hannah’s love of diving began during her Transition Year, when she completed an Open Water Diver course with Ocean Divers in Dunlaoghaire, at the end of which she experienced her first boat dive off Dalkey Island. It was on that dive, swimming with seals through a kelp forest that she fell in love with the underwater world and decided to study Marine Science at NUI Galway.

During her undergraduate studies she continued her SCUBA training, and under the guidance of kelp research specialist Kathyrn Scheonrock, became a NAUI-certified Scientific Diver. Subsequently, she worked on multiple scientific field research projects. Including her own final year thesis, focused on Pachycerianthus multiplicatus (Firework anemones) on the West coast of Ireland with the help of Seasearch Ireland, a citizen science diving organisation.

A passion for sharing the underwater world with others led her to complete her PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor qualification in Water World, Co. Kerry in 2021. In Summer of that year, as part of their bursary programme, she worked as a Communications Content Creator for the Marine Institute, Ireland’s state body for marine research and development.

In the long run, Hannah Douglas aims to continue studying life in the ocean while broadening her knowledge of economics and politics by delving into the world of resource management and legislation.  Alongside many other marine scientists, she fervently believes that ‘you can only love what you know’ and a global awakening to the beauty of our oceans is what is needed to drive the protection of marine biodiversity.

The ultimate objective of the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society®, is to keep talented young people in the underwater industry to drive it forwards, and it works. Scholars who graduate from this unique program go on to become underwater filmmakers, eminent underwater archaeologists, highly successful diving educators, hardware designers, leading conservationists, leading marine biologists and policymakers and explorers, all in our underwater world.

The organisation is run exclusively by volunteers including a healthy number of previous recipients of the scholarship who want to give something back to the Society which has supported their career development in such a meaningful way. The diving scholarship is supported by Rolex and is the watch brand’s longest continuous running involvement with any sport.

Hannah Douglas will attend the OWUSS award ceremony in New York in June and after that she will begin her scholarship studying underwater videography with Saeed Rashid in Northern Indonesia. During the year she will be tasked to produce articles and publications about her experiences, culminating with an end of year short film.

You can follow Hannah’s journey via the OWUSS EU Scholar Blog or on Instagram @subsea_rose and find out more about the OWUSS Scholarship at www.owuscholarship.org, and on Instagram @owuss_.

Header Image by Nadya Helmer