 and introduce myself. So I'm Jen Mixes-Olds. I am the chair of this committee, the committee on ocean acoustics education and expertise. And today you are all part of the higher education and training programs information gathering panel. This is the third panel in a series of five. And this is specifically looking at higher education and training programs in ocean acoustics, acoustics and supporting disciplines. I always want to make sure that we highlight the supporting disciplines because that is an integral part of any acoustics education. So I am going to turn this over to Caroline for some logistics and then I'll jump back in and introduce the committee. Thank you everyone. Yes, I'm Caroline Bell and the study director from the national academies for this project working closely with Jen and the the rest of our committee. Just a quick virtual meeting logistics slide. We ask that everybody please meet yourself unless you are speaking. Use the when we get to the question and answer portion please use the raise hand or chat feature. We will be taking questions from the committee first but if there is time at the end of our committee asking questions we will take questions from the public and also if public audience has questions that they would like to put in the chat national academy staff can work to follow up with you on your questions after the meeting as well as if we do not get to them and then we would like you especially if you were asking a question to turn your camera on when you're speaking to support a sense of community in our virtual meeting environment. And then finally to let everyone know the meeting is being recorded we will be posting the meeting to our project website following the probably next week it'll be up on the project webpage and also sharing with one of our committee members who cannot join today. So with that I will turn this back to Jen. Awesome, thank you. So I do want to thank all of our speakers and the public that is joined because the goal for today's meeting is to collect information and perspectives to inform the committee's report. And so this is as I said the third out of five information gathering panels that we're having specifically we have professionals here in the acoustics and ocean acoustics workforce to talk about higher education and training programs. One thing that I can share with you already that I've learned through this committee and its previous information gathering panels is that higher education and formal education is something that we do really well in some aspects but these training programs for more marine techs related to calibration methods and technologies are some things that our nation doesn't do as well. And so I'm very interested to learn more not only about formal education opportunities but about training programs and opportunities outside of a traditional higher education establishment. And we'll be really focusing on some of the successes and challenges in higher education and training programs. The next slide. I'd like to introduce the committee. Again, I'm Jen Mix as Alds. I'm the chair. I am from the University of New Hampshire where I'm the center director for the Center for Acoustics Research and Education. I'm just going to read off the rest of the names so we can give ample time to allow our panelists to introduce themselves. Joining me on this committee is Andrea Unguylis from Penn State University. We've got Art Baggerer from MIT. Lisa Hoddling from Idaho's Education. Rujan Lee from the University of Washington. Carolyn Ruchel from the US Geological Survey. Gail Scoproft from the University of Rhode Island. And Preston Wilson from the University of Texas, Austin. And so here is the statement of task for the committee. As part of the national academy's process informing the committee, the statement of task was formed in conjunction with the national academies and the sponsors of the committee. I'm not going to read this word by word, but you can see that there are really four different tasks and areas that we're focusing on, education, workforce demand, competencies required to meet that demand, and then strategies to raise the profile careers and ocean acoustics. I think today's panel with the speakers and panelists that have been selected, we're really going to have a deep dive into number one, the examination of ocean acoustics education and identification of competencies required for different levels of education training programs. Number four is an outreach. We'll have a future information gathering panel on number four. And one of our first information gathering panels was really focused on number two, understanding the demand for acoustics expertise in the workforce both today and anticipated over the next 10 years. So that's how this information gathering panel fits into the other fives. Here's the next slide. Here's a list of what the report will include. We are doing a detailed analysis both through the information gathering panels and through the survey that has been sent out on academic institutions that offer courses in ocean acoustics, public and private sector professional level organizations, and I'm going to say professional societies that require or even offer educational opportunities in ocean acoustics as part of their operations and workforce. Is it going to be a key chapter training programs again highlighting this outside of the traditional higher education opportunities and then looking at current acoustic programs and our job really is to make recommendations on what the next 10 years might look like. And so that's where everybody's words today will be captured and considered for inclusion as part of this report. Part of the process in the National Academies is once the committee puts together the report it will be reviewed by external reviewers and that feedback will be taken into account before the final draft or the final product is produced. And last slide before we here's our agenda. So this is the higher education training programs panel. I'm going to allow each of the four people to introduce themselves in just a minute. After the introductions each person will have about one to three slides. And then we'll go into a question and answer period that's going to be started by the committee members and public please if you do have questions use that chat feature question and answer feature within the zoom program to get your questions in there too. So we're going to start with John Buck. I'd like to introduce Dr. John Buck. He's at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He's worked there for as long as I'm in my career because he was one of my first master's advisor. So it's great to have him and speaking about higher ed on this community panel. So John I'm going to let you introduce you yourself, your university and your programs. All right. Thank you very much Jen and thank you to all the committee for inviting me to speak today. Again my name is John Buck. I'm the Chancellor Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. For those not familiar with our campus UMass Dartmouth is a public doctoral research university on the southern coast of Massachusetts. I sort of included a map to help you orient us. We are between the Naval Undersea Warfare Center over in Newport Rhode Island and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Constitution over on Cape Cod closely connected with the cities of Fall River and New Bedford in Massachusetts. UMass Dartmouth is the smallest of the five UMass campuses but we've always had a disproportionate impact in marine science in general and ocean acoustics. Specifically the first PhD program on our campus was in electrical engineering and it was followed shortly afterwards by a PhD in marine science. We are usually one of the top two universities supplying engineering talent to the Navy Nuiq research facility in Newport, neck and neck with the University of Rhode Island competing from that top spot in many years. And also importantly we're rated one of the top two universities in Massachusetts for social mobility by US News and World Report. Roughly half of our undergraduates are first generation students going to college in their family. Next slide please. The ocean acoustics activity and related activity on our campus is highly concentrated in the electrical and computer engineering department. For a relatively small campus and department I'm lucky to have this critical mass of three of us who are all actively researching and actively funded by the Navy in ocean acoustics research. Professor David Brown is an expert in acoustics transducers already a field identified as a critical national need about five years ago. My expertise is in array signal processing and animal bio acoustics. Professor Paul Gendron is an expert in underwater acoustic communications and both Dr. Brown and Dr. Gendron bring expertise to our students in our campus from their previous employment at DOD labs before coming here. This means we're able to offer a really strong foundation to our students in classes like the acoustic and electromagnetic waves is required of all masters and PhD students in our program. And if truth be told since we're on the record here that's about 80% acoustics when David Brown teaches it out of the fundamentals of acoustics book by Kinsler Fry, Coppins and Sanders. And so there's a strong list of courses there. Our graduate enrollments are listed here along with our graduates. That's the total enrollment. The ocean acoustics related graduates are probably between a half and a third of that in any given year. And the committee had asked us to reflect on the sort of 10-year horizon for our program. And to do that I wanted to put in perspective that last year we're very fortunate to have the support of our dean of engineering and also our provost and vice chancellor for research to have a tenure track position open where one of the preferred hiring areas was in marine related electrical engineering and ocean acoustics. I chaired that search. David Brown served as one of the members. We worked very actively to get the word out about that relatively rare tenure track position. But in the end it was very frustrating. We didn't have any candidates who were qualified enough for that position to make the cut for campus interviews. So that we did hire her to be clear. An excellent faculty member I'm looking forward to her joining us in the fall. But her specialty is in optics and optical signal processing. And so this was really a contrast from the last two times I chaired searches 10 and 15 years ago. We had multiple finalists who were strong candidates in ocean acoustics. And why that's important is the three faculty members you're looking at there. I am the youngest of them. I'm 55 years old. Which means there's just an academic time scales. There's just barely enough time for us to mentor the next generation of faculty through the six-year tenure cycle and get them established as mid-career researchers before some of us are retiring and winding down. So it really is a critical window in the next few years for us if ocean acoustics is going to persist having the large impact in our campus it has had. We teach a good range of courses but not nearly as many as I had as a graduate student in the early 90s in ocean acoustics at MIT and Woods Hole. And so I think I mean that the rest of the slide I think speaks for itself. So I'll stop here and wait for your questions. Thank you. Thank you, John. We're going to move on to Dr. James Miller. Jim is at the University of Rhode Island where he's a professor and current department chair. Jim? Thanks, Jen. Can you hear me? Yes, you can. Great. Great. Thanks again to the committee for inviting me and to let your committee and the interested public in the University of Rhode Island. I just wanted to start. We're in the midst of an experimental campaign now that is involving ocean acoustic experiment off of the New England Seamounts and we have students in various cruises and everything. I just wanted to show you some of the students who are out there either right now or just got back on the RV Armstrong and Endeavor. So that's very exciting. Next slide, please. So ocean acoustics has been a key component in the ocean engineering graduate program. In our program here at URI, ocean acoustics is predominantly in ocean engineering, which is one of 13 programs in the world accredited in ocean engineering. We're the oldest ocean engineering program in the United States. With the graduate program, it's ocean acoustics has always been part of it. And in 1995, we began producing BS graduates and Laura Van Uflin, who is, you see on the right, is one of our, I think she spoke to your committee recently. She teaches the undergraduate course in ocean acoustics and she's extremely popular and very effective. Also on the right is our research professor, Professor Gopu Paddy. The slide there that you see in the middle that the numbers there is ocean engineering student head count in all degrees in all areas. So we're steady at about 180, 185 students. We are 10 tenure track faculty, actually 11 as of yesterday, we just closed on a deal. Two research faculty and six joint faculty members. We have strong joint faculty members with the graduate school of oceanography and civil engineering. In the field of ocean acoustics, we've, in the last three years, we've graduated 25 students who specialized in ocean acoustics through their capstone, 15 master's degrees to PhDs. And like I said, we have three tenure track faculty members who do, and we're mostly a go to sea experimentally oriented department. Next slide, please. Our curriculum is, like I said, Professor Van Uflin teaches our introduction to underwater acoustics. Dr. Steve Crocker actually is one of our adjunct faculty members. He teaches a very popular solar systems engineering. He was at Newark for many years, and now is at Michael. And our undergraduate, we always offer a capstone in specializing in underwater acoustics. This year we have eight undergraduates out of the 30 or so in the senior class. And then we teach a number of different courses in acoustics, including transducers, marine biocoustics, underwater acoustics too, which is really a beamforming class and ocean acoustic propagation. I think that's, what's the next slide? I think I just answered the questions. Oh yes, this is very exciting. We are, our facilities here on the big campus of the University of Rhode Island on Narragansett Bay are old, mainly built in the 70s. In November, last November, the Rhode Island voters approved $100 million bond to do Bay campus improvements. And some of that, part of that is going to ocean engineering complex, which will go to build a new tank building with a 100 meter long wave and tow tank, and also a new acoustic tank 30 feet by cubed. That renovation is actually, you might be able to hear the backup signals that they're starting to build some of that already, but we expect this building to be completed in 2627. And I think that's going to complete, I have a slide with the answers to your questions, but I'll stop here. Thank you, Jim. Our next panelist is Dr. Dan Brown, who's an assistant research professor at Penn State. Turn it over to you, Dan. Introduction. I appreciate it, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak here. I think the two panelists that have gone before me have done a really nice job kind of outlining the pipeline that we need to have for graduate level education and undergraduate level education. I wanted to try and pay a little bit more attention to the training piece that you had mentioned kind of in setting this up. As I look at it, we have kind of a lack of expertise within ocean acoustics, researchers, and practitioners that are across our universities, our laboratories and industry. And I think one of your earlier panels probably would have touched on that lack of a workforce. And so we need to both address the pipeline of new students that are coming in that can be early career hires, but also address the on-the-job training or the training that can go on for people that are working within these industries. And I think to be honest, I'm personally a really good example of this. I've been working in these ocean acoustics-related fields for 15 years, but my actual degree that I had coming into these fields was a master's degree in physics where I studied thermal acoustics. And I went to work at a Navy lab. They sent me down at a desk, and I spent a year of on-the-job training trying to self-teach and work with the people there to come up in my skill level to be able to be able to work. I eventually was able to move to Penn State that had a resident program where I could pursue a PhD. But that's a pretty unique situation where someone can be in residence as a graduate student while working full-time. And I think the thing we need to start thinking about is trying to addressing these expertise gaps through training that can be made available for people that are currently practitioners, current engineers, current scientists within the ocean acoustics community. And in trying to think about different models that could fit that, I think of three different levels that we can try and meet those needs at. And I'm going to apply like specific examples of each of these. I'm calling out a specific institution in each case. I'm sure there's a broader range. So if I'm omitting someone, if I'm omitting someone, I apologize. One, starting kind of at the easiest, most accessible level was something that I know I took part in as a new person in ocean acoustics, was leveraging things like tutorials that are specifically offered at the oceans, IEEE Oceans conferences. This gives us an opportunity and gives someone new to a field, an opportunity to get a highly focused set of lectures directed at a specific topic, kind of a small nugget of information that can be delivered without requiring an enormous amount of investment in their time. You're already at these conferences and so you might as well be able to leverage these. The next level up that I think are more intensive in-residence short courses. And the example that I would call out for this would be the University of New Hampshire Mass Program. It's actually running next week and I'll be one of the lecturers at that. Jen, I believe you will be there as well. This is a really nice example of a kind of education that can be provided as an intensive onboarding session for people that are already working within the field of ocean acoustics. You come for an in-residence, highly focused one week set of lectures, seven hours a day of lecture across a broad range of topics. And for someone that is just beginning in the field that maybe doesn't have the lexicon or the vocabulary or an understanding of kind of the breadth of topics, that's the kind of thing that can help an up level of person and help them make a leap forward in their understanding of ocean acoustics. But as I look at that example, you know, it kind of points to the need for something potentially deeper than that. And a corollary that I think of is the radar lectures that are offered by a group like Georgia Tech. So the Georgia Tech Research Institute offers a pretty expansive set of highly focused short courses that can be in-residence short courses across, if you go look at their website, across 34 different areas. And this is a gap that I think we have today in being able to train our people that are working in these fields. There isn't this availability for a more deeper focus set of courses on specific topics of interest. And finally, I think the last model that one would think of would be full degree granting programs that have been adapted for the working professional. So an example of this would be the Naval Postgraduate School. They offer the ability to have to have degrees as a working professional, either as a member of the Navy or a civilian working for the Department of the Navy. And so that's somewhat restricted to those groups of people. The other example would be the institution that I'm based at, which is Penn State University, at Penn State in the Graduate Program of Acoustics. We have a fully adapted distance education program where students can receive a master of engineering without having an in-residence portion here. And when I teach courses in the fall of every year, roughly 50% of the students participating in my course are working through this distance education program. So we're almost 50-50 split across the majority of our classes and they're offered in this kind of hybrid fashion where the distance student is receiving the same lectures that the in-residence students are. The advantage of this is those distance students can sign up for just a single class at a time. The lectures are presented live and they're recorded. They can consume the material on a time scale that works for them. So in this sense, I think as we think about training these working people, these people within the Ocean Acoustics community that want to improve their knowledge or improve the expand the topics that they know about, we need to think about different tiers of different tiers of intensity, different tiers of commitment, and then how to make those things more widely available so that we can meet people where they're available and where they have time. Thank you, Dan. Next, we're going to go to Keita Jones from the Acoustical Society of America where she serves as the Education and Outreach Coordinator. Keita? Hi, yeah. Thanks again for having me. So I'm a little bit different than the previous panelists in that I kind of straddle education and outreach as you might have guessed. So first, I wanted to just tell you a little bit about what I do as the Education and Outreach Coordinator for ASA. So just generally speaking, I promote and assist with all education efforts across the society. So I've listed a couple of the committees here like Education and Acoustics, Women in Acoustics, Student Council, the Committee to Improve Racial Diversity and Inclusivity, and all 14 technical committees and a bunch of other administrative committees in there. And so I just wanted to highlight that, and I've kind of bolded here some of the technical areas that I think are the most relevant to this group. But I actually have a background in linguistics, so I kind of fall in the PNP and speech communication side. So my expertise is not in ocean acoustics or maybe kind of the main related fields, but I do work a lot with how we can reach students who are interested in acoustics, who want to pursue acoustics, how we support those students more generally speaking. So next slide please. So I wanted to list here, this is a long list and I'm not going to touch on all of these things in this just brief overview, but if anyone has questions, please feel free to reach out. But these are the ways that ASA tries to encourage and support students that are pursuing acoustics. And on the left you see the programs that I'm primarily working with as support staff are the kind of generalized acoustics initiatives. So these are for students who are interested in acoustics in a more broad sense. They might not know what area of acoustics they want to pursue, and they might not really know what acoustics is to begin with. And so we have a lot of programs that are designed to be the gateway into acoustics. On the left hand side of the slide, you'll see acoustical oceanography or related fields that are more specific to the interests that this committee is discussing. So one of these things ASA will co-sponsor specific topics, whether that's a workshop or a conference or a meeting, a tutorial, these can be co-sponsored by ASA, considering that a big often a barrier to education is funding. So that's financial support is really important. We also have occasionally webinars or tutorials or workshops that are focused on acoustical oceanography topics and related topics. And of course there are the special sessions that are organized by the TC's and those often include special workshops or tutorials that happen at ASA meetings. Next slide. So I thought I would answer one of the questions that was posed to us by the committee members that I see from my perspective. So some of the challenges that we face in just promoting acoustics education to begin with is that as you may have noticed from some of the previous panelists, acoustics is what I call a discovery field. That means that unless students are, it's very rare for students to intentionally pursue acoustics at the undergraduate level. So that means they attend whichever college they'd like to attend and then they may be discover acoustics as juniors or seniors or maybe they don't really figure it out until graduate school or in some cases as you just heard until they're in a career. So that's a really big challenge that we're meeting when it comes to how do you make sure that a student who's at an institution that doesn't offer ocean acoustics finds ocean acoustics. The other thing is really a big one and I think that this is partially what this committee is addressing is that developing, maintaining and improving the acoustics education landscape is time and labor intensive. I am a full-time staff at ASA so I am paid to think about and work on education efforts from within ASA. However, many people working in this area are doing it purely as volunteer work in addition to a full-time job and so we need to think about how we're allocating resources to actually improve the education landscape. I know that was maybe a lot in a short amount of time but of course I'm happy to speak about any specific ASA programs. Thanks. Thank you, Keita. That was excellent. You jumped in and started with our challenges already and those were very insightful comments. Thank you. Our final panelist is David Hunter from the U.S. Naval Reserve Meteorology and Oceanography C-School. For David, I will turn it over to you for your introduction. Okay, well thank you. Thank you all for having me to make sure and is my slide being shared? It's not yet. Hold on just a second. Oh, I didn't hear you. There we go. Perfect. Okay, so my name is David Hunter. I am with what's called NR Cinemak Navo and I feel like I'm different than everybody. I am probably on the other side of the spectrum from all of this. I'm a Navy reservist. I've been in for 23 years. Typically right now I work out of the Naval Oceanographic office. My formal academic training training similar to Keita Jones is not acoustics. It's chemistry, material science and toxicology. So I'm kind of a weird duck on all of these things. So I'm just going to give a little background for those who don't know about the Naval Oceanographic office. We're located in the Space Center in Mississippi. We are one of the, I would say one of the scientific arms of the U.S. Navy. We have about 1,000 civilian and military. That slide might be dated because things in the world have changed. We've actually arrested some people to other parts of the country and world. We are part of a larger group of different divisions like the ocean, if you see on the side and you've got the nook, which is the operations and oceanography command, which kind of handles tactical stuff, Joint Typhoon Warfare Center. Finmock is a Fleet and America Oceanographic office, which is out of Monterey, California, next to Naval Coast Graduate School. Navajo, of course, and we've got our Fleet Weather Centers, both in San Diego and Norfolk. And then NOAC Yakuska is our anti-submarine warfare branch out of Japan. And then the U.S. Naval Observatory in, we'll be wrong, Washington, D.C. or Virginia. But we, Naval Histographic Office does a survey, a model support, DOD support. We grab a lot of data and we process it and we use it for different people who need it. This is just very general. I was trying to make the slide to answer questions. We have lots of different acoustic products that we use. We're more of end-user, so we're the people at the front line dropping something in the water. We're putting an array behind the ship to actually find out data during a survey. Our people are usually enlisted or officers. Some of us do have formal training in acoustics at the officer level. But like someone said before, I would say the majority of our formal training happens after you get into the field. Find out that it exists. And then as part of your training process, you go to probably moderate the Naval Histographic School or Scripps or Woods Hole or something like that as a side thing, as a side process. Our training at the enlisted level, and I bring that up because we are the end-users. We're the ones who are essentially putting pieces of equipment out in the water. We're bringing data back in. We're post-processing. We're working with the civilians and the officers. And we are typically the ones on a watch floor briefing people. So our training is a little bit different. So training in the Navy starts out. Big Navy is the Naval Aviation Technical Training Division. They handle everything from someone who's going to shoot a gun to someone who's going to do IT to weather and oceanography. Weather actually for the Navy is part of intelligence now. So I'm actually also connected with the Naval Information Warfare Training Group. And that's where I train out of. I do oceanography for them. But as someone also mentioned, the Naval Postgraduate School is an option that we have. They're a certificate in ASW that has a strong hydro-acoustic component. And then there are graduate degrees, both masters and doctoral and ocean acoustics with Naval Postgraduate School. So our enlisted level is for what's called the J00 Alpha Naval Enlisted Classification. It's a meteorological and oceanographic forecaster. It's typically required for you to go on orders anywhere to brief anybody. You have to have it. It usually starts with a school, which is three months. It's basic observations, meteorology. What is a wave? What is a cloud? That sort of thing. And then there is a follow-on C-School requirement that's about nine months. And you can see what that undergoes. As I'm a reservist and reservists have civilian jobs, we had to come up with an alternative for them. That program is over two to three years. It has a bunch of online prerequisites through METIT, the comment program, and some things to Navy. But that is an alternative. So the oceanography section that I teach is very general. It goes into history of oceanography, geophysical, biological, physical. And you can see that a small component is hydro acoustics and applications related to hydro to acoustic oceanographic models. So I bring that up because out of a nine-month course for C-School, I would say for the nine-month course, it might be a week to two weeks on oceanography. And in the reserves, we have several prerequisites, but it also is a two-week component for oceanography. And then of that two-week component, you've got just a few days to go over, you know, summary theory and, you know, that sort of thing. Some of the training, and I bring this up for the civilians and folks who work actually work at the Naval Subgraphic Office. Someone stated they put you at a desk and they start you working on the equipment. They start training you on acoustics, oceanography. We have a lot of people who come in with degrees in mathematics, electrical engineering, and they do have an understanding of, you know, signal processing or how a wave moves through the water. But their understanding of it in the media of the ocean or another liquid medium is not there. They do have formal academic training where they have people who will essentially be assigned for two years to go get their masters and beyond on the clock, so to speak. Specialized training, and then there are partnerships that they have with Southern Mississippi University. I believe they still have one with Scripps where they do something, and in the past they had one with Whithole, and then obviously Naval Postgraduate School. And this is just what I came up with on challenges. One is just the awareness that hydro acoustics exists. I mean, I found out about it because I was on an ASDF and watch floor as a guy who didn't know anything, and I always tell the story of something happening under the water and the models didn't matter. It was actually going on in real life, and a bunch of subject matter experts walked out, started drawing equations and formulas and discussing models, and I spent the next two days googling everything that they talked about because I had no awareness of any of it. But I do bring up also the equipment part of it in the buttonology. You have these pieces of equipment. Someone has to click a button. Also a lot of the equipment that comes from the vendor. The interface for that equipment is not always that great, so you have to find someone who's going to create an interface that's going to be useful. And then just things about maintenance, keeping things going because, you know, you've got the research side, but if we have a bunch of pieces of equipment out doing things in the world, someone has to take care of that logistics. And the other thing I bring up, which is good or bad, we've got a lot of people who've been doing it for a very long time. And sometimes that creates legacy effects, and sometimes it creates administrative and information silos. We have a lot of, I don't want to say too much about this, but, you know, naval oceanographic offices and government agency. And sometimes people get kind of caught up in their kingdoms, and they're not great about sharing their data or their information or their knowledge. And that becomes an issue. And that's about all that I have. So I'll just stop sharing. Awesome. Thank you very much. We have a very diverse panel, which is great. People are coming from formal education places, training programs. Dan highlighted short courses. Kita highlighted a number of different educational opportunities through ASA. I think you guys did a good job already addressing one of the, I think the six questions that we sent out to you early, which was what types of educational programs are you involved with? I think everybody did a pretty good job sort of describing that. So before I move on with a second question, as we move into the question and answer period, did anyone want to add anything about the question types of educational programs you are involved with that you haven't touched on as part of your introduction? Okay. I'm seeing silence there. So we're going to move right on. Now I'm going to ask you guys to reflect on your programs. So what are your programs doing well to recruit and retain students or trainees? And I'm going to add a second onto there is where do you see the low-hanging fruit would be for improving an area to recruit and retain students? Jim just unmuted. Yeah. So the field of ocean acoustics has been affected by world events. You have a U-shaped demographic in terms of interest. There is John Buck and Jim Miller with gray hair, and then there's a whole bunch of young people. And I think the challenge is the middle, as people like me retire, recruiting, and John talked about the struggles to recruit new people is how do we fill that U-shaped bowl here? Because we had the Cold War and then we had ASW was out in the desert somewhere. And now all of a sudden ASW is everybody's excited about it. So that's why your panel has been formed, one of the reasons. So I think it's that middle. I can recruit lots of people, but I'm getting old and five to 50 years from retirement, depending on how long my last. I think the U-shaped bowl here is a tough one. I think Hita kind of alluded to that too, getting students aware earlier. How do we do that? Well, John, you just unmuted. Kita's remarks did bring one thing that I think falls within one of the other charges of your committee. There's one place where nationally we're not doing a great job that is the open access long before anyone knows what calculus or differential equations are, which is music education. Music is where everybody not or most people encounter music for the first time, or acoustics for the first time. And I've seen that over the 27 years I've been teaching the intro classes that when I started, I could say show a spectrogram, a plot of energy against time and frequency and say, this is a mathematical version of a musical score. Ask how many people knew how to read music and half my class would raise their hands. These days I'm lucky to get three. And the same thing, I'd ask a question about why does a piano and a trumpet playing the same note, the same pitch, sound different? And students have very little idea about that anymore. So I think one of the sort of gateway to acoustics has been the collateral damage and the reduced funding of music education, even in the primary and middle schools, as a place where people get excited about acoustics and music. Certainly my own experience was why I wanted to go take acoustics electives. It was not that I wanted to go eavesdrop on whales and submarines. It was that I wanted to understand how to build a better speaker or how to make a graphic equalizer work and things like that. And so I think maybe something the panel can highlight is that people can discover it at a younger age and I think we can promote that more. I mean, I think the other thing we can do better about this is reaching out. My university has recently been aggressively participating in programs to connect to some of the community colleges and state colleges around us in photonics and optics, which is growing rapidly in Massachusetts for these sort of three plus two masters programs where people start in physics or something. And I think there are probably ways we could be doing that better, not just at UMass, but in other schools in building that gateway and making these people aware of them at the satellite campuses and not just at the flagship URI campus. And then the last thing I would mention is hands on really worked. I think Jim highlighted this and Dan to an extent too of getting, like our senior design groups, one of the benefits of having that concentration is roughly half of our senior design projects in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering often have some kind of marine science component, even if it's not directly acoustics and that gets students excited about it, it gets them connected to some of the companies and labs sponsoring those projects and having those things with hands on things or even, I get a lot of mileage out of microphone arrays because as Jim can tell you more than I can, it's expensive to hire a boat for a day and put equipment off the side with students, but we can students can make a lot of educational mistakes with the 30 element microphone array in the field outside the lab and learn a lot about basics before we spend money getting them involved and it still hands on enough they get excited about it and challenge, right? I think those are things even for the ocean acoustics community, you know, connecting to air and musical acoustics can only yield dividends. Thanks, John. Those are very insightful comments. I echo the interest in music. So many people that I know of in acoustics started with an interest in music and retain their interest in music, even in a very highly technical field. If I get up and say I'm going to talk about the Fourier series, they all go to sleep. If I get up and say I'm going to explain to you why a piano and a trumpet sound different playing the same note, I have their interest. Very true. Hida has her hand up. Yeah. So one of the things that I was going to mention is that a lot of what I do is exactly what you were just talking about, John, which is how do we actually reframe what acoustics is because we know that people are interested in it and whether you're talking to high school seniors that are going into college or you're talking to college graduates who are about to enter the field. If you use a phrase that they are unfamiliar with, they're not interested in pursuing that, whether it's for their undergraduate career or it's for their first time job out of college. So if you are using terminology that's familiar to ocean acousticians and you're trying to intrigue, say, recent engineers, you need to use language that appeals and is understood by engineers. If you work in an industry that has training on the job and you know you're going to be getting candidates who don't have specific training in ocean acoustics, then I think you should be changing your job calls to reflect that need or want or desire to say, do you have a background in physics? Then you are actually a good candidate for this job, even if you don't know what the word acoustics is or you're not really familiar with what kind of work is going to be done. And so I think that is actually a gap that can be filled pretty quickly, which is industries who have these open positions and already have a framework for training need to make that abundantly clear to job applicants. Of course, not all industries have that framework to train people on the job and that is going to put off some potential job candidates. Maybe they can slog through on their own by doing their own tutorials and finding the resources on their own, but that's a pretty heavy lift if they could just apply to another job that already matches their expectations of what the job will be. I was also just going to add on that, you know, John had mentioned the musical connection and that someone on the watch floor actually explained Fourier to me and used music and I swear angels appeared over his head and I wanted to hug him and this was, you know, I literally went back to my home after that training and pulled up linear algebra and read it with a new, entirely new look. But I also wanted to mention on the marketing part of it and the education some of the connection to just natural systems. One of the things that I do when I try and train people because they just don't get it is I try and frame what we do from a tactical standpoint. The Navy is in terms of dolphins and whales, you know, active and passive types of sonar systems and, you know, predator-prey relationships and it seems like sometimes they get it if you think about the deep layer where oceans are looking for a mate, long, you know, long distance traveling of a low-frequency signals but I talk about a whale looking for a girlfriend. They seem to understand that a little bit better than me talking about, you know, a signal and dolphins looking for preys and clips, applying it to what we're doing in the sun. So I think there's something where we have to kind of think outside the box and, you know, there's a very formal technical learning part of it but if we can involve something like connecting it to music or connecting to nature it seems like people they connect to it a little bit better. I'm going to go with our Dan had his hand up first and then I see two hands up in the committee panel so the committee members so I'll go from Dan and then Lisa and Andrea. Go ahead Dan. Just to echo the same comment that everyone else is saying I'm actually on the admissions committee for the acoustics program at Penn State and I would say maybe one in 20 applications don't explicitly mention their love of music as the reason they are applying to a program specifically to study acoustics. It is it is almost a uniformly unifying topic and if anyone's ever in state college for the fall acoustics party where the acoustics program has their jam band I can guarantee you Penn State's acoustics jam band is better than everybody else because everybody loves music in the in the acoustics program. So yeah I think that that is one real way to draw people in to a point that to a point that Kita made though that I think is really nice like trying to draw people in from fields like physics or fields like applied math that can come in and maybe they don't know acoustics you described the slog that they might have to go through if they can't self-study. I think that is the role of these kind of like on-the-job training programs that that need to exist and one of the real challenges that I see though in that is the there's an enormous amount of inertia in getting one of those programs stood up so I look at the UNH mass program the number of people that have to prepare multi-hour presentations to establish a one-week program is a really high bar to jump over for that first program and then making sure that that you can get enough students advertised widely enough that you can get enough people in to make it go. I think these are the kinds of things that getting them started are very difficult and and it's a difficult it's a difficult path to fulfill this kind of educational gap that we have but once they're established then I think the way they go around is by word of mouth very frequently right we we see through that program certain industries are going to send three or four new hires every single year to this program and they're using it literally as their background training program for for their employees there's there's certain companies that I know every year when I go there I'm going to see this list of people I do think though in in in hearing those students talk there's a demand for for an even wider an even wider set of training opportunities but the the inertia to get that new course stood up is is quite high. Thanks Dan yeah I see the same thing with the SEA BASC course it's for grad students and it's marine bioacoustics as opposed to underwater acoustics I should say it's bioacoustics not just physical acoustics underwater so I hear you on that and I would agree that the marine bioacoustics course again word of mouth. I'm certain Jen that if you ask those students hey would you like to have one week on this narrower topic almost invariably you would hear yes but the the inertia to do a week on that topic like the the startup cost in terms of people's time to get that built because we're all doing this on nights and weekends building those decks that that's a very high that's a very high cost and an impediment to kind of growing the list of things that can be offered in this way. Liesl shook her hand down I still have the same question I just was in anticipation so I didn't leave it up. Oh okay did you have a question Liesl? I do yes and and this is slightly off off script but given that we have thousands of men and women separating and retiring from the Navy every year with a lot of this knowledge what could we do to build better bridges on ramps crosswalks however you want to frame it to get them into the workforce to fill this trough in the U shaped curve that's been described. I think they are doing some things but I do think at least for the Navy side I have a friend he actually works for a naval research laboratory he does some cross side stuff with our unit and he actually came into the oceanography side from originally biomedical engineering and he got a for masters I mean a PhD in mechanical engineering mostly geophysical and geofluid and that sort of thing. I think there just needs to be a lot more marketing and awareness which connects to a lot of these university programs to let them know the opportunities and what is going on I really don't think people know by and large and I don't know how to get it out there all the things that are happening inside some of our doors some of the research projects and some of the presentations that I've seen just walking around the halls of Navo and also Finmuk over in Monterey. A lot of really cool things and I'm not sure the answer is I've been actually talking with someone at Navo about how do we get that word out a little bit better and they are doing something. Other panelists? The other two thoughts on that one I think Jim already touched on that some of us are are opportunistically hiring some of those recent retirees into teaching you know courses for us along the ways we've handled some of our staffing shortages we hired Dr. Holly Johnson for the last year as a part-time instructor who had just retired from the sonar and signals group and the other one I wanted to highlight is either just come out or will come out soon Dr. Steven Garrett who retired from both work at both Penn Statement and Naval Postgraduate School has taken up a hobby substitute teaching high school shop and physics classes and brings a lot of his experience from acoustics and things into those classes so I think you know it's hard to he said he's the only real scientist many of them have ever met he's having a blast he talks about bringing in his notebooks I would highly encourage the committee members to go look at at Steve's I think it's an acoustics today either the most recent issue or the one coming up I got a an advanced copy Steve had asked me for some some feedback on it but if it hasn't come out yet it will soon and I think that's something you might explore is another way we can help you know as Kita says help that push that discovery process earlier into the high school or even middle school thing so I think that another strategy based on Wiesel's comment that we could bank on I think Jim had his hand up next for answering and then Kita and then we'll go back to the committee for another question great I I least those quite a question is fantastic we've been thinking about it how to exploit the folks that are retiring from the navy from both civilian and military one of the things we've been thinking about here is certificate programs online certificate programs you know every gray haired professor in this country now knows how to do zoom that we can do online instruction so we're thinking of you know and and we're getting pressure from our administration to make money and stuff so we're and I'm my I've been thinking in my head about what the next hire is going to be I'm thinking of hiring a professor of practice or teaching faculty to help with and this this teaching faculty could could come from the navy you know retire recent retire so that's that's one approach that I didn't get to in my presentation but that's that's on my list of things to talk to my dean about so thank you for that idea that was fantastic and I captured it too thanks Kita how do I end up next to answer this question yeah I was just going to mention that I I don't know if anyone is doing this in ocean acoustics specifically but I have heard of success in programs where they basically have um hot they they hire kind of early career or mid career um individuals to fill to to begin filling the the positions that perhaps are about to the folks are aging they're retiring out and the idea though is that you match the person who's going to be leaving with the person who's coming in and that way for the next five three to five to ten years they actually work together um so that the person who's leaving doesn't take all of their institutional knowledge with them and that the person coming in isn't coming in and having to start from scratch because the position has been vacant for one to two to five however however long and so basically the idea is that whoever's may be retiring soon you get it on to the the um committee earlier right so instead of them saying I'm going to be retiring next year you don't want that to happen right you you want to know that somebody's going to be leaving within five to ten years so that you can have these types of programs in place so that you don't have that as uh Jim was saying the kind of u-shaped trough right where you have people that are leaving and there are people coming in but they're you know undergraduates or they're maybe even high school they're not going to be ready to fill that gap right away so we there's this idea is that you can actually look into as I mentioned before adjacent fields right so look at people who have maybe a baseline skill set that can be trained to fill the position of somebody that's about to leave thank you I'm gonna I'm going to move on to Andrea she's had her hand up patiently with that question yes thanks Jen um and thank you everyone for your insight it's been amazing to kind of hear all your perspectives I'm going to switch gears a little bit and kind of go back to um something Dan was talking about in terms of um I guess I'm going to call it short form content right so like more specialized educational opportunities and I'm curious particularly from John Jim and Dan how your institutions are either um equipped or interested in pursuing those sorts of opportunities of developing this kind of shorter form content that may pull in students from different places since we know that it's also a numbers issue here to get enough of a critical mass to run these types of programs I'll jump in I'll jump in first if that's okay oh no go ahead Jim uh I I think that the the week-long courses the ones that Jen has done and the best and are just fantastic introductions um I think there's the next level would be perhaps certificates uh which could be three courses I talked about those in a few minutes ago online um arranged in a way that is convenient for people who are you know working or have families uh so this short this short form uh is is really interesting there's there's opportunity and acoustics we're so small that you know other bigger programs are doing it but I I think that's a great idea and we're thinking about it so thank you for that yeah I'll I'll echo what what Jim said I do I do think um I do think a number of our institutions see this as a as a path that we can move forward with I I also think it's a knock-on effect of of the pandemic is that all of us as Jim has said all of us learned how to use Zoom and so so in terms of being able to open up um open up the opportunity for a larger number of people to participate in a course I think it gives us a path where all of us can see something saying like okay there'll be enough interest or there will be enough people we're not having to travel all the way to Penn State they're not having to travel all the way to Rhode Island um in order to in order to consume this course maybe we could offer it in a in a hybrid format so I do think um I do think there is I I think respective institutions understand there's a demand signal for it that I think it's it's at some level it's what I what I spoke to Jen about a moment ago it's it's getting the critical mass of the lecturers that are willing to build the content to then be able to offer it the first time because once once you offer it once it's very easy to run the course again and again it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling thing just a couple thoughts under responding to that um that's maybe like different from Dan and Jim's perspective which is one of my other uh active hobbies is engineering pedagogy uh and and all the best data in my own research and others I've read says those you know traditional lecture classes are better than nothing but only barely and I've become a huge proponent of active learning um and and that so I haven't participated in those courses because I think those sort of big slide deck things are I mean for really expert learners they people who are expert learners they can pick up a lot if they can understand how to transfer it on to existing conceptual frameworks but I think for the most part um they're dangerous and I don't know that that they make people think understand what they think they understand more than they do it's called the illusion of knowledge often in pedagogical literature uh and and I've been busily giving it away for 10 years on my youtube channel so rather than treating it as a cash cow and trying to sell it to my my dean or my my provost um and I think some of that is as umass lol has really always already established itself in the umass system is the the 500 pound gorilla in online learning um but you know I I found a bunch of the things I put online just to continue my flipped classrooms uh during the pandemic in array processing have become huge you know it was never actually intentional I was just putting up for my students and conferences I now have people coming up and introducing themselves to me saying that particularly in array processing whether there's graduate acoustics related classes there's very little there uh and to a lesser extent my undergrad signals and and signal processing classes but I think you know maybe there's there's more opportunity in conversations about but what if what if some of these you know and I guess the other distinction make before we went into that is as you know a zoom recording of a lecture is not necessarily a quality online learning experience there's a lot of things you need to think about what works in online education and what makes the best pedagogical outcomes isn't just a recording of you doing with what's in the room the same way that you know a stage actor doesn't necessarily translate to movies or tv shows well there's a different subset of skills and interactions that you have to build on um so those you know I think those are all important things but that said I you know I think there's opportunities that either some of these retiring personnel could be recording things um or you know there could be funding opportunities for for you know the the government to identify people to start putting you know if it's not going to be necessarily like you know Dan said getting over that hurdle on your own time but it's a grant you know that someone gets funded for four weeks of their salary to create that slide deck and to put and maybe as part of that to put it up for free on a you know a streaming service whether it's youtube or whatever comes next I think those are all important parts of this conversation Kida you had an answer to this question too yeah I was actually going to kind of echo John's statements here which is it's really great to improve and increase access by having online virtual content but this also is really um to Dan's other point this is always a heavy lift I can speak to ASA's most recent effort which is we've created um an undergraduate research program which is a lot of work right like it's a lot of time it's a lot of funding that we have to secure we have a short course component of that and it's all well and good but John's last point of we I would really argue that we cannot keep asking people to do this on a voluntary basis you cannot ask faculty you cannot ask really I would argue retired folks to do this for free because it is a full-time job to make a quality educational product even if it is reusable because that kind of actually takes even more labor to make sure something is a bit more evergreen so I would caution people from just saying I'm going to create some slides that will work for you know the next five to 10 to 15 years because I as somebody who is really interested in quality education and the theory of learning as John mentioned generally that doesn't work and so if you're going to come up with short courses tutorials webinars whether it's in person or virtual I would argue that one of the gaps in this is that we are asking people to do it voluntarily and that we're asking non-experts in education to come up with education content when they themselves are not trained to be really good educators in these modes lots of people can say I've sat through a lecture that was awful and I didn't learn anything whether it was in the classroom or virtually and a lot of people can say I sat through the best lecture I've ever sat through and I learned so much and usually the difference in that is somebody who comes in with and with the educator in mind right they they want to educate they want to train they they're aware of their learner's needs and wants and desires as opposed to one of my common quotes is oftentimes professors like to profess we need teachers who know how to teach professing is great in a lot of ways but professing doesn't help learners learn thanks Gail you've been patiently waiting for the question go ahead yes thank you everyone for your spending time with us today this has been really great we have come to an understanding that recruitment in ocean acoustics and in acoustics in general is an issue while at the same time workforce needs are growing specifically in the U.S. but also worldwide so looking at this from the other side of the coin do you think that if we could get students interested in careers in this discipline earlier on so that they were applying for an education do we have the capacity in our country to handle an influx of students who want a degree in ocean acoustics does your and I'll say just even looking at your own institutions do you have the capacity to handle you know a wave if you will of students I mean I think we certainly do on the sort of next 10 years I said I'm not sure beyond that we certainly have a capacity and and a public institutions of higher ed I'm sure Jim and Dan can speak to this too you know demand creates capacity that you know if we have people coming in you know the best way to get a line the faculty line to hire a new faculty or build on that is for them that for a program to be bursting at the seams you know that our nursing program is similar and that their biggest challenge is finding the professors they can they always have more qualified nursing students than they can fit in the classroom so every time they get a chance to hire someone good they're very have a very strong argument to go the dean and the provost so I think the wave I would be surprised if the wave can build faster than we can grow capacity I think we have punnett we have excess capacity now and many other programs do I agree with John I think if students were coming in and there was a sizable number asking for course and x we would teach the course right we would we would the course again develop and if it was large enough that the current faculty if the demand was large enough the current faculty can't handle the workload the faculty would grow I can't remember if it was Jim or God one of you said you know these courses are taught every two to three years on a rotating basis if the demand grew it would be these courses are taught every year or these courses are taught every you know every one to two right and you would just you would run the courses more often and you would bring uh you would bring faculty on to cover them I will say that our administration appreciates acoustics and appreciates the needs of the local economy the defense industry mainly defense so we're very lucky here at University of Rhode Island that we have both in the graduate school of oceanography in the college of engineering deans who who who understand that and our president um so we've been we've been lucky and I think if if the demand if we do get an uptick and our actually our freshman class just doubled our incoming freshman classes double last year so I don't know if that's the wave that's coming I'm scared of it um and we're going to do our best to handle it um so so we we we if like John if if if there is demand we will meet it and we'll figure out a way so uh that's a great problem to have I'd much rather have that than you know the the other the other side where everything's dwindling down in your clothes and that's awesome I'd rather let's burst let's let's grow and big and everything and we'll we'll find a way to put 300 students in a in a in an auditorium and you know I I don't think that's the best way to learn either but thank you okay um David you had your hand up for this question um I was going to say I think there's definitely demand and I mean there's dov but if you look on the commercial side uh you know ocean exploration and you know uh to say it you know I remember someone had told me probably 15 years ago and this was on the military side he said climate change is also changing the landscape um especially in the arctic so I underwent a lot of training in the art in in arctic meteorology and and understanding that environment because there was an understanding that was going to become a landscape that was going to be open for business for lack of better terms I think that creates demand as well um one thing that was just a question that I just kind of jotted down as everybody's talking about training something that we're doing I work in in utilities water resources as a civilian and one thing that we talk about a lot is um essentially the digital twin and virtual environments that you can go in and do things have something go wrong and you're actually in the interface and it's just more maybe a question uh is there any opportunities for some sort of virtual ocean environment that you can stick a student in have them do things have them put a piece of equipment and have things go wrong um and and learn from it and I I just don't know if that exists I'm just curious okay thank you I'm rigorously taking notes here as as people are speaking um next question looks like Carolyn RuPaul uh that was a really interesting idea you just posed David um so obviously I work for civilian agency but a lot and I'm sorry for the committee because I'm sure I sound like a broken record on this but um a lot of jobs in the US and ocean acoustics are either at civilian agencies that can only hire us citizens or somehow related to the military or you need clearance because you're a professor working on research for the military or whatever so my question is actually our um obviously David is only dealing with us citizens but the rest of you what is the the sort of composition of your graduate programs and and are you seeing that there's a problem getting us citizens um in these programs who are then going to go out and be able to take a lot of these jobs that are available thank you I could speak to that our campus our our graduate program lately for even pre-covid is more than half US citizens we have an accelerated bsms pathway that retains a lot of our top students for those degrees um and you know even my own group I think that my phd uh graduates are roughly half US citizens um so I think that's actually less of an issue than it was 15 or 20 years ago when I started as a professor um but I think that's another part where where the social mobility is important that we're tapping into a pool of people that historically weren't getting STEM degrees um and many of them are very uh excited about the opportunities in these fields that are predominantly US citizens I just you know another quick anecdote I had a an undergraduate that I mentored did some research internships with me who got a job at one of the navy research labs um one of the dod labs um and they told her what her salary was and she didn't know what that meant she asked them what the hourly rate was like no one in her extended family had ever had a salary job and they were like well we can like we can get a calculator and tell you what the hourly pay is but you know so those are the people who I think you know the US citizens that we are when things succeed are opening up horizons for and opportunities for um and at least for us and and I think there are other schools focused on on the social mobility and and and these underserved populations uh you know I think we have a lot of great success stories in addressing that what was a big challenge I think in my experience 10 to 15 years ago the the flip side is is uh you're no longer guaranteed to get the US citizens coming out that the detriment of the dod labs has been that every smart assistant without naming brand names has a raise in it now and so it used to be that my students who are US citizens in a race were going to dod contractors for dod labs uh now those labs are having to outfit amazon and apple for people with array expertise uh and that has been a different challenge than we've been used Dan and then Jim okay Dan yeah so I think in in looking at the program at Penn State the applicants are are um more than half slightly more than half US citizens so I think there there's a there's a decent decent number there to draw from the number though that are applying that say hey I want to work in open acoustics that number is incredibly small right so it becomes a recruitment it becomes a recruitment problem for a recruitment effort on the part of on the part of the professors in the program of meeting with students kind of educating them about what why they might be interested in your problem but to echo um to echo a point that John made and that I I know one of his fellow faculty members Dave Brown will experience in addition to losing all of all of the students you train to be experts on arrays very very many of these organizations that are putting arrays and they're smart speakers those arrays consist of transducers and we lose a number of our a number of people in our transducer that are educated as in transduction are then going on to work for Bose and and like commercial audio commercial audio institute so that's that's a place where we get people in a pipeline um they are educated in in a core area that that supports underwater acoustics but but from a from an employment perspective um that they're being captured by other industries yeah yeah uh uh echoing significantly more than half of our graduate students are us citizens and in ocean acoustics it's even higher because a lot of the funding right now that is from dod is us citizen only so a lot of those are are working if that's was their purpose so uh and in our undergraduate program it's 95% 99% us citizens so thank you David your hand still up was that from before or did you want to answer this question too before let me take it okay just to follow up on one other thing about that one of our real success stories and maybe something this panel can highlight or maybe even find ways to grow is that the dod smart program which is these scholarships that are you know sort of a simple tagline is it's uh it's uh it's like grad school rotc for civilian defense employees that these people have their grad school paid by the federal government and then they're for an equal number of years they work as a civilian employee at a dod sponsoring facility and they're guaranteed to have those jobs when they graduate uh it started out as sort of a a well kept secret and that's not true anymore and one of the downsides of that is i when i go talk to colleagues and collaborators at newick and other dod labs they have more need than they can get bills that they're sort of budget billets rather their budget limited in like they say well newick only gets to hire three people this year so sonar signal processing might get one and there might be five codes that have really excellent us citizen candidates they want to hire so if there are ways that either you know some of the smart billets can be designated for these critical needs or there's a similar program that is specifically coming through the dod for the navy or in these target areas for prioritizing them i think there's actually that's a place where we're capacity limited that there are more highly qualified u.s citizens who want to work at ocean acoustics in these supporting fields than there are uh spots available in the hiring hiring dod labs they also oh sorry good you know i just to uh to extend on on what john said the smart program is great the other one that um that i've had some experience with students working through is the indy seg fellowship as well that that's a that's a fantastic fellowship it brings students in they're working on a defense related application they're doing their phd um through that program they're getting really well integrated and studying uh studying generally an important problem um and then and then um it does set them up to be a very attractive candidates for our for our laboratories and and different civilian agencies thank you kita yeah i just wanted to mention that this maybe is more on the outreach side of things but i know oftentimes a barrier to discovery fields like acoustics is that incoming students don't understand what jobs exist for that content area and so they're less likely to pursue it and so if they don't know what kind of jobs exist in ocean acoustics they don't think there are jobs that exist in ocean acoustics now i don't want students to be kind of job focused right sometimes it is nice to go and learn and enjoy the enjoy that but a lot of people from you know these uh lower socioeconomic statuses they are job focused right so they go for majors that are jobs right so they go for education because they know they can be a teacher they go for psychologists because they know that they can they can be a psychologist right so they they tend to gravitate towards majors that have known jobs and i think for this panel those are going to be your students that are going into engineering um because they know they can be an engineer but they don't know what engineering acoustics is right so how do you get those students okay thank you um we are just about at time i've taken over two pages of notes as everybody has been talking so thank you very much i love to hear um different perspectives from different places and i think that the entire committee um feels that this has been a very worthwhile investment in time and information gathering um we have three minutes left is there anybody who would like to just take us either on the committee or on the guest panel take a 30 second final comment that's okay one of the things that i have noticed um after the panel has ended after both panels i ended up getting two or three emails from different people who were on the panel saying oh i forgot to say this or i really wanted to make this point clear that you should consider in the report so if you something comes to mind after we've said goodbye uh please don't hesitate to drop me or caroline or anyone on the committee a note we'll share it with the rest of the committee for it to be um considered as an information gathering um communication and i would like to say on behalf of myself the national academies and the entire committee thank you for spending this time with us and um sharing your thoughts on something that we hope is going to culminate in a very impactful report where we see ocean acoustics grow over the next 10 years so thank you very much caroline would you like to say any parting words um yes thank you gen um and thank you again to the panelists um really appreciate the the discussion today and the preparation for um answering our committee's questions it was very informative um and i really appreciate uh everyone's time um and please feel free to reach out if you have any comments questions after the um panel has closed and also um for our committee members if there's anything that you think of afterwards um please let me know and i can send questions the other way too if the panelists um don't mind answering additional questions if things come up from our committee and don't forget to fill out the survey that's my gist plug right now too fill out the survey and pass it along to anybody you think could contribute valuable information all right well again thank you very much for your time and um i'll see you guys either at the next day at day or dan you'll be here for the short course next week have a wonderful afternoon everybody and this concludes our information gathering session today thank you very much thanks thank you