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A 22-year-old fresh out of Florida Institute of Technology, Kent Carpenter, Ph.D., landed what he calls “the best job there ever was or ever will be in the Peace Corps.”

Carpenter was placed in charge of coral reef research at the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources in the Philippines. He scuba-dived around the Philippine archipelago and saw how pollution and destructive fishing methods had degraded the reefs.

That experience shaped Carpenter’s career, which focuses on the environmental challenges to fish in Asia. This semester, he’s in Vietnam for his second Fulbright fellowship to determine whether, in its rush to modernize, the country has significantly reduced the diversity of fish species in its waters.

The Mekong River, which flows through Vietnam and five other countries, has more fish species than any river other than the Amazon, said Carpenter, a professor and Eminent Scholar of biological sciences who has taught at Old Dominion 91����Ƶ since 1996.

Fish have swum hundreds of miles to interbreed, but the construction of hydroelectric dams has stunted their journeys.

“If they lose genetic diversity, they lose the ability to adapt to a changing world,” said Carpenter, who in 2020 received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the 91����Ƶ Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

Carpenter visited Vietnam previously to collect tissue samples. During his Fulbright fellowship, from January to June, he will analyze the results. Carpenter’s first Fulbright, in 2011, allowed him to study the diversity of fish in the Philippines.

This semester, Carpenter also will teach his online Marine Conservation Biology Course to undergraduates and graduate students at both Old Dominion and Nha Trang 91����Ƶ. 

They will view class sessions at different times, but they will interact in discussions online. Carpenter also plans to meet in person with the Nha Trang students every week. “I want them to understand what the challenges are to biodiversity,” he said. “As an educator, I always aspire to inspire students.”

Carpenter has received more than $12 million in funding for his work. In a project financed by a $4.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, he compared recent tissue samples from fish in the Philippines with those collected by a U.S. research expedition in 1908. “We found a decrease in genetic diversity after more than a century of extreme exploitation and habitat destruction,” Carpenter said.

He’s mastered the Filipino language of Tagalog, but he wasn’t as hopeful about Vietnamese. “I’m not good at tonal languages,” he said. “I was a bass guitarist in rock bands, and that ruined my hearing a little bit.