 It's anybody both in the room as well as those of you who are online. Please put the questions in the side. Oh, and we're monitoring that as we're going with that. I feel like maybe you want to want to start with some comments. Happy to start. So, I think everybody knows who I am at this point, but Jim McManus division director motion sciences. I am happy that Rick is here. Rick might not be as happy as I am, but, but as to the set in the beginning, Rick was really, shall we say, on the ground floor of the, the first, or the previous Cale survey. And so I couldn't possibly provide you with the context that Rick, Rick would have in the comments. That's relevant to your question about what is the, what did the division do you want to the previous decadal survey and so I'm going to turn it over in just a second and we let Rick talk through that, but, but I want to sort of emphasize as a matter of, of matter, of course, that we, we are here to help answer your questions. So, if we're not answering a question, it either means we can't, we will tell you that and or we're, we may not understand that that's what, that's what you want. And so we're what I'm saying in a long winded way. Those who know me know I do that is we would like this to be about dialogue. So we're here to help you. We're here to help you help us. Thank you, Jim. And I guess before I should have maybe preface this whole session with the idea that this isn't really about like, I don't want this to come across as well. We produced a DSALS1 report and what did NSF do with that? Did you do everything we told you to do? That's not what this conversation is about. It really is about more, you know, what is it that we can do? How can we help you help us? And what kind of a report would we have to produce in order for it to be really truly actionable? So that's, that's really the information we're after. We also realize that the landscape when the first report was put together was very different compared to what it is now. And we've actually spent, one of our subcommittees has spent a significant amount of time thinking about the way in which the landscape is different. And so there, too, I think we're going to be listening right to what you have to say with that lens on that the landscape then was different, that the committee then was really asked very specific questions. And we're being asked different specific questions for good reasons. And the more we understand about how the landscape was then, the better it is, I think, that we can relate what we do to the landscape that we have right now. So let's keep that in mind also. Yeah, thank you. I also want to draw attention to the fact that Jim Yoder, who's co-chair of the current DSOS was a member of that first committee as well. And so he also has, you know, knowledge from that committee's perspective. So you have Jim on that committee. I was the recipient of the report. And we have Jim here and Shelby from NSF, but Jim calling for the current report. Picking up on Tuba's main point, it was a long time ago that I was there. And I received this report, which was a beautiful, I'm truly, in January of 2015, as I said earlier, I've been there full time about three weeks. I've been a casual for the previous six months or so back and forth, but I really knew very little. And it was one of those times when I remember I got the preview version one day ahead of time before the report was issued. And it came out of email. And I remember just thinking, when I click on this PDF, my life is going to change. I just have no idea how, you know, how would you get that review from somebody like, like, oh, God, I want to run first before I can put any. Yeah, exactly right. And it was a very, very different time. Budgets are always difficult. Then the times you're particularly acute infrastructure was the real name driver, as I understand in in issuing that report with the with a flat budget and infrastructure costs continuing to rise as a matter of inflation and human personnel costs and fuel and everything. The infrastructure cost rising meant there was an erosion in the science budget, the science programs, the four core programs, plus all the ancillary programs that are interdisciplinary, so on and so forth. Two comments, first of all, is the team in NSF was perhaps the best team of scientists I've ever, scientists and staff I've ever worked with. And so it was truly a pleasure to be able to work with them upon receipt of this report. Secondly, I considered that report as a true gift because it was very well written. It was very targeted. And, you know, when you come in as a big leader to some, whatever unit it is, you're often asked to put together a strategic plan. Well, I didn't have to do that. And all these other plans to be it was delivered to me literally three weeks upon my ride. And with the talented staff that we had in particular. Section heads and program managers and everybody don't know how many staff there are now, but there are 42 total staff at the time, including admin support. So it's a small group of focus group and we're able to roll our sleeves and work on it, you know, together. It was a long time ago between Jim and myself. There was another division director, Terry Quinn. And so he dealt with some of the items to my understanding that I was not able to feel it. The short answer I have is we took the report extremely seriously. We went through it with all the program managers recommendation by recommendation graph by graph. And analyzed it and dissected and figured out where we agreed where we agreed strongly where we agreed we agree and then where we where we disagreed. We kept NSF's leadership fully informed. I recall going up. Sometimes being asked sometimes being demanded up to the director's office and it was France court of the time. And she had a suit change hard copy and it was highlighted and I posted it everywhere and she would open it up and say, what do they mean by recommendation 4.1 to a. Jesus. So, you know, getting into I point that out somewhat anecdotally, but I'm assuming that NSF leadership will be paying attention to this congressional staff pay attention to these decadal surveys. I was called up to those to Congress for private meetings about it as well and so on. So it's a big deal. It's not just a report that lands and that goes on to the show. We were pretty successful. I think in achieving the main goal to a first order. We had detailed conversations about how to decrease the cost of infrastructure and transfer those monies dollar for dollar. They stayed within OCE. They did not get vacuumed up to Geo. They did not get vacuumed up to, you know, telescopes or something else in the foundation. All, you know, worthy investments, but we were also given the gift inside the building that those dog guaranteed to stay in OCE. And so every dollar we were able to economize and I do mean that not just in a bureaucratic. Gentle way, but we really focused on economizing what infrastructure was doing where some infrastructure was less of a priority as perceived by the community and dollar for dollar. They went into the core science programs by the end of my time there. And some of these decisions were quite controversial. But by the end of my time there, we had transferred roughly $25 million out of infrastructure side into the science programs, the core science programs and in particular. And in particular. Otec. Andy Baker. Yeah. How we did it was, fortunately, those 41 people, they were all. They were, they are all involved in infrastructure and they're all involved in science support. And so that real guarantee and the dollars were transferred internally and stay within OCE. A person would be saying, okay, well, I sure I'm going to miss that infrastructure, but on the other hand, I oftentimes the exact same person and we're going to certainly welcome the investment in the science program. And that was what we did for three and a half years. With the drilling program, the big three being the drilling program, OII and the academic research with the drilling program, in particular, because there's congressional language and long term contracts and so on. We did not have much flexibility. So we focused on economizing the money that was going to the US science support program and say, oh, the, it's so many activities of drilling. With the OII, we removed the two southern ocean moorings, one in the southern ocean, one in the Argentine basin. Those were each about $8 million. That was extremely controversial to do. People lost their jobs at various oceanographic institutions because there was no longer a need and we were acutely aware of that, but we had to do it and we did. And then with the academic research fleet, we did a lot of things with various operators. The main thing that we took up was the seismic research vessel, Marcus Langseth, which at the time was owned by NSF, and that was a that was deemed to be, you know, financially non sustainable on our part. So we had deep and long conversations with Lamont about how to make that more sustainable. We put a cap on their dollar values that we were awarding them and then initiated a long process that I think it was during Terry Quinn's time. Lamont ended up owning the vessel, you know, eventually so we got it off the assess points. That was very controversial about what we did. So that was the landscape. It was actually simple to understand the tasking and it took a lot of people in the building in OCE in GEO and at the director's level to make it all kind of work out, but it was pretty much infrastructure is eating our lunch scientifically. We've got to put some caps and controls on that and then move over those months, which we were able to do. I won't get into all the internal discussions we had about it, but we really encouraged and animated conversations in that way. So two things that one thing that I'm hearing is that you had to make some difficult decisions. And while you were doing that, you have a report that you can point to well scientific community wants us to make these decisions in some sense that that enables you to keep moving in that direction, even when you're meeting resistance. In that sense, that's why it was a gift. Right. And, but the second thing I'm hearing is that there was a lot of visibility of the first report all the way up and down the NSF architecture, you know, the ocean. And is that and that maybe this is a question for Jim. Is that by default, every day cattle survey gets that kind of attention or, you know, how do we make sure that we write a report that will receive, you know, will be thumbed and, you know, underlined by folks up and down the chain at NSF. I don't know the answer to your question of how to get get the survey in the right places. What, what Rick did in ways I just couldn't have done because I don't have the historical context is really set the table for where we were then where we are now is much closer to focus on our priorities and what do we need to the future. And so in some ways the, the previous decadal survey was a little bit looking backwards and a little bit taking stock of where we are now and addressing those challenges that are much more immediate. And where what I would say is to get the right audience to the which I think is your question is it needs to be a much more of a visionary document than the previous document was. So it in in that document, I'm just going to use an example in that document. It talked a little bit about technology and the needs for technology going forward. The overprint of what that means for the future is even more important today. What do we need, what kind of infrastructure capabilities do we need to be doing our job well in 2035. I made this comment, I made this comment more than once, I'm doing my job correctly. The division director in 2035 won't be wondering what on earth was he doing me and this it's right. It would be much better if they didn't think about who was around in 2025, because it is operating in a way that makes a lot of sense in 2035. So, and I neither need the, the adoration if you will have success, nor the criticism of failure. I don't want either. I want success to be its own goal, and that success is 10 years from now. What are we doing, and what we put in place today, and that is your question to that's how I'm taking your question. What, what does our community need to put in place today, so that the, the basic research broadly defined community as well situated decade from now. We still have challenges that the sort of, I don't think Rick would say I want to put words in Rick's mouth, but I don't think Rick would say we did a bunch of things and all is great. Right. And so we're still addressing some of those, those legacy issues because you can't simply even though we're in the federal government. It'll be obvious, we can't move quickly inside the federal government very well, but we also can't inside our field. So it's just, it's not a snap of the fingers is all I'm all I'm saying. So that's why I am very focused on what can this report help us with over the next 10 years so that we're in a place where the following decade survey is is continuing to look forward and and look forward with what we've left behind. It's sort of a lot of fancy words but, but if you've read it. By the way, I reread it for the third time I've been in my job for 18 months I reread it for the third time yesterday, just to make sure it's heavy on exactly what Rick is talking about. That's not where we are and please don't do that. And, and so really aspirational is what we need. The other thing that was mentioned and it's not a subtlety. It often gets, and I think everybody in this room is aware of it. But the decadal survey is one of a number of inputs that we take. And Rick mentioned the Hill. Lots of those folks know who I am. And I participated my colleague Shelby Walker is often in those meetings, often related to facilities and questions from the Hill about facilities so keep in mind that we're not the only voice here. We have lots of voices, the Executive Office of the President congressional folks. The upper reaches of the foundation, you know, NSF has a strategic plan. It has aspirational goals as well it's important that we that we are cognizant of those as we move forward. So, lots of feedback we get, I think there's about a half a dozen, we normally say that we get get feedback from and this is this is certainly an important one. I don't think I've answered any questions. You did great. So, in fact, let me let me ask you a clarifying question because you sort of into the book, I think. Rick talked about how, you know, they were essentially trying to reduce infrastructure costs and pump that back into the core research part of the house and you said, you know that you were guaranteed that that wouldn't be sucked into something else. Where are we at in terms of the landscape today about how all of that works in a very different place. Okay. I'll tell you what I can. There much the infrastructure side of the NSF house, if you will, is managed slightly differently than it was a few years ago, compared to the basic research side of the house. And so what that really means is the freedom to move back and forth. It's much, much harder. What happened 10 years ago might not be able to happen today. I don't want to speak in absolutes, but I will say that the where we the good news of where we are. And my colleague Shelby can sort of contradict me if I'm wrong, but we are dedicated as as an institution to taking care of our facilities quite frankly, and in ways that maybe we haven't been as attended to the rising costs of of executing on those both in terms of in terms of labor parts, you know, you all know, I don't need to tell anybody in this room that shipbuilding has not gone up linear, linearly the last couple of years, it has gone up way way faster than it was going 10 years ago. Simple access to materials you all know, coming out of the pandemic that supplies are not what they were 10 years ago. So all of these factors roll into, we've really got to have a lot more. Eyes on the facility side of what we do and Shelby's position, which is relatively new in the in the directorate is C helps us oversee at the directorate level, how facilities are being executed within the divisions and then there's a parallel at the up in the on the 19th floor. So, we're doing things quite differently than we did once before so that the real point is that movement back and forth is much, much harder. Susan, I see you have your hand up. And usually, you know, even if you are a committee member in the room, if you want to ask a question, let's use the hand on zoom kind of equalize access to questions with it. Oh, and I think you're coming in on. On. Yeah. So I had a question because 2035 to me it sounds like it's way out there in the future. I think now it's, you know, from a planning purpose, it's not, but thinking about how, you know, we get caught by surprise surprises very often. And I'm thinking there's something like the pandemic or what really happened. I think one of the things that happened last time was that escalation and the fuel costs. And so I'm wondering, is that something that this community should think about the, you know, from the surprises and it could be a new technology, right? It could be some fabulous new technology that really, you know, the ocean community adopts. And suddenly, our needs are a little bit different. I'll answer that from my perspective. I would say. No. And in a word. We can't. We inside. The federal government is very difficult for us to plan for the unforeseen. And so having asked high level aspirational goals and things, directions we need to be going. Need to be pretty resistant to. Another global pandemic. And day to day. The team inside of OCE will deal with those problems as they come up, but I would say that. That's not energy well spent. Yeah, well, one of the things that I, you know, makes me think about it is that helps us understand what level to think about those aspirational goals. You don't want them to be too specific. Correct. Absolutely. If I can add something to that, not about what's going on in the building now, because I don't know. But one thing I think it's very important for people to recognize is that NSF still needs to be doing their job of running the programs they have meeting the needs of the community. And the day to day, really important work. It's not like you're going to receive a report. And stop everything else they're doing and throw all their dedication into implementing a report because they've got the very real pressures of the day to day of everything that's going on at sea on land programs and so on. So there's a, there's a blending of the implementing the aspiration, implementing what they're currently responsible and enthusiastic about and moving in that direction. So that's another important component to keep going. So, but the question about the question about the specificity of our recommendations actually deltales really well. Jason with a question that you have in style. So, Jason, you want to ask a question. Yeah, thank you. In the last report. 10 primary questions. You say is that going to cover to me from that structure. At one level, I'm curious to see how well that played out. But that's second. The question is, you know, the statement of tasks and give us two or three by options. Otherwise, I get that with the manager. There's a tension between two or three priorities and a level of specificity versus everybody that goes on this committee. I was just saying, Hey, here's a great idea. Why don't you champion this? What is the right balance? Where should we have, can we have a discussion about that because I'm concerned. If we get too limited, we're going to miss them. I see the other day to specific. Yeah, it's a clear question. It's clear. It's probably clearer than my answer is going to be, but what I read through the decay, the previous decadal report as I was working my way through some of the science nuggets. Some of my reactions were, well, that's just a proposal. And so for context, I spent decades on soft money writing proposals. I was a program officer, a rotator. So it is easy for I find it easy to look at something and see, is that a priority or is that a proposal? Keep in mind. What Rick is saying is that we've got this infrastructure. Rick didn't use these words. I'll use these words. We're in the proposal receiving business, right? And so at the very core of what we do, we are constantly looking for innovative ideas. The fact that a particular question or a particular path or path of research written in the Cale survey is not going to impact a decision about whether or not a proposal was funded. And so, so there's a broad spectrum between what the this report would say from the perspective of their individual proposal ideas to very visionary where the field needs to be and be going. And what I would say is lean way this way. If, if you query a question and say, well, that's a, that's a half million dollar proposal. That doesn't belong in the Cale survey. And that's what I would say. Others may. So if I could follow up, you're saying. Yes, please. Yeah, yeah. That brings to mind another question for me at least. I went back and read the original Bush report that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation. That was an interesting read as well. Because NSF, after all, is the science, basic science agency for the US. There's a couple of questions on silo about how the work that NSF does relates to other agencies. But Mona, I think your question is really timely. About that definition, that piece of that, do you want to ask the question. Sure. So, basic research, who does NSF mean by basic research broadly speaking as we sell. And how does it differ from views inside research because in many civilizations, we see views inspired views and co-production. So, to what extent do you want us to focus on co-production, views inspired, the assumption in which other disciplines are moving. And so I think in the tasks, it's pretty clear that I would like this committee to address that question. So, your last questions to what extent do. Part of the charge here is, I need you to answer that question. Okay, so we have a basic research framework and it's how we operate is under that framework. If you want to see something of a difference in approach, so use inspired to me and I did not read the Bush document, by the way, just in full disclosure. But as we as a, as a, as an agency, we think about use inspired research, which on the spectrum of things is between apply and basic research. And, but it's driven by a use question, right. So it's basic research apply to that question. If you will, it's not, you know, I hope this is a little bit clear. It must not be perfectly clear in my mind, I have a clear answer. But, but it really, we are at a point in the ocean sciences community, where we're asking the question, how much or and what of use inspired work, where do where do we fit in and we belong as a community. I think we belong there. I'm happy to reveal my own feelings on this and I would also say, we do this work now. We're, I could rattle off a bunch of examples but at the risk of getting some of them wrong. I don't want to do that but but we already operated the space. What else can we be doing in the use inspired space, still very much consistent with what we want to do. But it's, it's a spectrum there's not, it's not a simple A or B choice. There's one of my colleagues likes to use NSF a and NSF B to describe where we are so we sit on that spectrum all the time. It's not just NSF B or NSF a where 1 is use inspired on his basic research. There's a spectrum. Let's see. I have a lot of questions on silo. I know we're not going to get to all of them. And I also see that we have folks joining who are going to be part of our next panel, which we were going to start at nine, but we're about 15 minutes running late. So I hope it's okay. I hope you all have the time to accommodate for that. Rose, Debbie, Doug, Bob, and yes, I'm getting some thumbs up. So thank you for that. Let's see. Let me go to a G and then Peter, since you all are. So, from what I said, I've seen a little bit of more, the things change the more they stay the same. And it doesn't seem to me that the challenges are that different in some fashion, but very specifically to this before, I do worry that I might be misunderstanding something and what I'm confused about something like your presentation. You were asking for something that's original. I have been thinking that we need to have it in some fashion grounded in reality. So that what we suggest actually useful as opposed to fantasy need to find some space between the two very specifically I guess to illustrate that in the previous report, almost every priority question had at end of it. I know how difficult that is. And so we don't make suggestions like that that, you know, I'm just not going to make that much progress. So I just wonder if you can clarify. That's a good question. As I mumbled, I know you know, but what I would say in the last year and a half of my time in O. C. E. There's, there is a much, much greater awareness for talking across the federal family where, you know, I could be getting part of this wrong but a lot of the crosstalk amongst the federal family was very historically was very much focused on program officer to program officer. That still occurs. But what I'd say is now we sort of all the way up to the 19th floor, those, that's how many floors we have so all the way up to the 19th floor, those conversations are happening and so as much as we can, we are constantly trying to figure out how we can solve challenging problems that individual agencies may have together and that that's happening, maybe not day to day but but it's happening pretty frequently I spend a lot of my time in interagency meetings. And as you know, our separate bureaucracies are often gentle herbs. I was just saying one thing to that just to the community is the the interagency working group environment that IWG is very, very robust and I believe it still remains robust. And what Jim is talking about is very, very true. There's a lot of conversations between the different agencies at mid and low level levels and also relatively high levels and speak to that point, you know, directly. So just a quick point is I've been thinking that you're talking about the balance between making suggestions on how you do something and what you do. Correct. And you do you want to say anything about your desire for vision on either end. I would please minimize the how suggestions. Unless folks really do have a way a way forward on particular I spent a lot of my time on how and so do my colleagues in the division how we can actually accomplish something and I'll give you an anecdote without any specificity so I don't get anybody in trouble, but there are at times conversations where someone may say, I'd appreciate your help, but it's probably more trouble than it's worth. And we've got this. So that that's okay. That's life. Right. No, I don't need your help. I've got this myself. And so those conversations are are just part of the dialogue. And so sometimes you might not see us working with no just pick an agency on something because it's better if we don't So, anyways, let, let us worry about the half. Okay, I'm going to go to Peter. All right, thank you, but thank you both for sharing your thoughts. I'll keep it short, but it's what you said about the kind of separation and management between infrastructure and basic. And with that, my attention as we think about developing this report, I want to make sure we don't proceed from sort of poor assumptions, right. Are we really talking to kind of two different management entities. In other words, if we're making recommendations, are you would you encourage us to not say, oh, you know, infrastructure, you know, support can move from here to basic research. We should really be saying, here's an infrastructure recognition. Here's a basic research recommendation. That's, that's what I'm hearing you say. Then I am a fact of it communicating that message. Very good. Thank you. Marcia, I think you'll have a question on Silo if you want to ask that. Yes. So, um, you said that we shouldn't anticipate things like rising fuel costs. And Susan asked that. However, there are some trends such as the cyber trends. So we have an exponential increase in data. We have the advent of AI now. I understand not anticipating things that we can't anticipate like a global pandemic, but can you make a couple of comments about realizing that we have trends going forward and anticipating the effects of those trends. That's sort of like the landscape now being different from 10 years ago. Yeah. So, um, not exactly sure how to answer that question, but I'm going to steal something from your language and use it as an example. So you mentioned cybersecurity. Well, just to be clear, cybersecurity is a part of it, but the whole cyber infrastructure, so data storage, data access, computing infrastructure and security, I would say is kind of all part of that next day. Yeah, so it's no secret because we put an ad out on the street for somebody, a program officer on cyber infrastructure, cybersecurity, who would work underneath our integrated programs, aka facilities infrastructure. So our recognition that this has grown as very much part of the portfolio of things we do under the under the offices of our data collection and in our facilities is getting us to respond to, okay, we need some more expertise in this space. I know the Unal's office thinks about this as well. And lots of our colleagues within the foundation all the way up again to the 19th floor is we hired a person recently in the foundation. So I don't remember this title, but it's very much in this space. And so, do you remember his title? See your advisor. So we are responding to what is sort of the growth. And maybe you applied the explosion of data, cyber infrastructure and cybersecurity challenges. And so we're doing what we can. It is reasonable to make recommendations in this particular space, knowing that we are moving in this direction as well. Thank you, Jim. So we have a few minutes left. And there is a question online from Mark Abbott that I think is an interesting one, because it relates to Jim, what you said about what versus how. The first DSAS report did have some items where they were sort of saying here's how you do it and how easy was it to respond to that or not. Mark, really it's a two part question I see and I don't know if you can unmute yourself and ask it yourself. I'll just watch the zoom here. There you are. Yeah, it's actually recommendation number seven in the report talks about creating a high level. If standing infrastructure committee that would look 10 years out and would look at 10 year plans and look at puts and takes on the whole infrastructure side. I can't see if that anywhere in the NSF documents. If that was ever created. And if it is or whatever it is, there are all sorts of issues. What are the issues right now. So for example, renewal and maybe it'll be in the next section renewal of the global class ships, but also biogeochemical Argo. There's a one shot. What are the. What are the larger issues that the NSF OCE division is looking at in terms of high level structure. And I think, even though it is sort of a high, a high recommendation, it really is. We really want the agency to always be looking. You know, at least 10 years out in terms of infrastructure, because that's sort of the timescale. So it's a bit of a, how do we engage the community in that planning process? I'll stop there. Thank you. Very quick answer. Hi, Mark. This is very, very, very quick answer to the 1st part with that recommendation. We decided not to put together that committee of the time. Because we wanted to get that house in order as it were 1st, get to a particular point of stasis of doing the very 1st round of realignment and then leaving it to the future leadership of NSF, not as a punt, but as a. Need to get things and then that committee, if NSF shows at the time, we do, you know, would move in that direction. So that was a conscious decision on our part at the time, but. Over to Jim, I guess, for the rest. Yeah, so Mark. That's probably the one recommendation I read. Again, yesterday thinking, I wonder what they mean by that. Well, and so I interpreted that a little bit that it was a community driven oversight community. And what I would say is internally, we have grown our institutional oversight on facilities that actually I'm going to ask Shelby if she'd be willing to comment on that at all. No, is an acceptable answer, by the way. I think oversight is probably not the term you want to use here. I think oversight is within the agency. So we're thinking about the community input into portfolio of assets that we're considering, you know, that that is, you know, that is advisory and nature that is something to be considered. You know that conversations have existed within NSF as to what level does that really live when we think major facilities. So things that are supported out of our major research equipment facilities construction. There's the sort of eternal debate of, well, how do we prioritize this and how do you then prioritize, say something coming from astronomy or something like that. It's, it's difficult to sort of figure out what the level would be within NSF as an agency. But certainly feasible within the Geoscience Directorate or within the division of the sciences. And I would say that we just need to be cognizant of, again, the level of the assets that we're considering within that portfolio. Is it ship? Is it something like OECC? Is it, you know, something that is one of the distribution or smaller equipment? So it's, again, advisory and major oversight. So, Tuba, can I ask a follow up on this? Do you have time? Thank you, Mark. Because we are out of time, but yeah, I feel like there's one more question that came in silo that is really important. So Kristen, I want to give you the floor to ask you a question really quick and that that'll be our last question and we'll move on. I have two questions. Yeah, the one, the second one about a strategy. Um, yeah, Jim. So you asked us to focus on the what not how. Yeah, I think I answered the original question on thinking in terms of a spectrum of leaning. So. Yeah, I think I answered the original question on thinking in terms of a spectrum of leaning. So it is okay to get strategy. No doubt from the committee, which is that, which is how. A little bit, but what I would say is you. My answer is heavily biased by my reading yesterday of the previous to chaos report, which was way too heavy on the how for what we need now. So, so is this is an appropriate way if we are recommending strategies. We don't want to get too prescribed. Correct. Well, as you were saying, like a, where it certainly found like a proposal, but we can give for examples or things like that that help, you know, we need a strategy to address law. Here are some possible ways forward. Is that an appropriate approach? Yeah, that's, that's an appropriate approach. The sort of further down the road on that would be, you need to talk to know about this specific thing. We probably already have. So, so I would stay out of overly prescribing how we might execute something. Thank you for that clarification. Excellent. And those of you who are online or in the room, if you have further questions, please do put them in slide. Oh, so we have a record of it. And I think Mark, just from his. Follow up question in there too. So we're aware where he's thinking was going. And with that, I want to thank Rick and Jim for talking to us this morning. And we want to transition to our next panel on the status and future of the academic research. And Jim is online and on. I'm going to tap him for moderating this conversation. Okay, can you hear me okay. You can. Okay, fine. I'm going to talk about the academic research fleet and by that we mean operationally those of the, those are the ships that are scheduled through you know, they do not include the NOAA research ships, or some of the ships that are operated by private foundations. So we're talking about the, the, the you know, scheduled ships. And just very briefly that the way the, the way these ships are managed has been a very effective partnership for many years and that that includes the Navy and NSF who have built or acquired most of the ships that are in the unals, they're in the unals and also unals itself, which is a community based organization that does the scheduling, and also the individual institutions that operate the ships, and also provide things like docs and space for the ship ops groups to participate in in a very effective partnership that some will continue to be effective in the future. So with that, I'd like to have our panelists begin their presentations. I'm going to stop watch these things so that I'll give you a warning when you've got hit nine minutes because we really want to save time for questions. But the, I'll go down the list unless the panelists have some other suggestion but Jim, so all right, okay, that's okay. It's fine with me Debbie go ahead. Okay, so I've got a few introductory remarks and then we'll go into the the presentations and then I'll wrap things up. So I was elected chair of the unals council about three years ago, even though I had spent what almost 30 years as a researcher going out on unals ships I served at the National Science Foundation. I thought I had a pretty good idea, as I'm watching, I thought I had a pretty good idea of of the fleet and yet it's been a really eye opening experience. So some things I'd like kind of the frame of reference that I'd love to have you consider some of the data you're about to see and is when I started in grad school in 1986, the United States was the unquestioned leader in ocean science. And in many, many fields now that is not the case, which I think should be alarming to everyone. One of the things you're going to see from Doug Russell is the academic research fleet has been cut in half over the last 50 years, which I think is really concerning and the fact that this decline in what is a foundational infrastructure for the kind of research that we do has continued over the last 20 years, while other countries, most importantly, China have made these massive investment investments in ocean research is very concerning. And when you consider the geopolitical landscape we're in right now, to allow this trajectory and to continue I think affects our national security and it affects our economic competitiveness. It's, we just have to stem what's happening right now. And I also think it goes farther than just the United States. I mean, there's a lot of knowledgeable people in the room there that know that humanity is facing a a existential crisis right now in terms of climate change. And the ocean is the largest driver of the global carbon cycle. We're testing an infrastructure that we need to not only understand how the ocean works, but is of a scale that we can begin to test solution based research is absolutely critical, not just to the US but to the quality of life that literally billions of people will have in the future. So while we're talking about the academic research fleet today. You know this is not an ivory tower academic question. This fleet is foundational to what we need to do to rise to the challenges we're facing right now as a country and literally as a species, and I think all of us need to keep that in mind in the field that we're in right now. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Doug Russell, who's executive secretary for unals. If you want to talk about the unals fleet answer some of the questions that you've given him that you've asked us to address, then rose to four is going to give you the NSF perspective. Rob spirit will give you the own our perspective. Kip Sherman, who is the chair of the fleet improvement committee is going to talk about the fleet we need in the future, and then I'll come back with a few takeaway messages. So with that, take it away Doug. Thanks for having us. What I'm going to cover today. I think a lot of you already know about much this but we want to make sure you have the information to win your report. And also, we know it'll be. It'll really be a catalyst for you asking more questions to us so I'm glad I always provide all the data you need to help you generate report but I'll give you the review where the fleet is today what it's doing. This is it's not just the ships. There's a lot more of this as you well know that make the ships able to go out and support science and for you to be successful out of there so we don't want to review all that. So expression reminds us you're answering this tough question of, what's the science tomorrow, what do we need to be able to do that science tomorrow and help us, you know, as we define where we're going to go next 10 years. So what's the fleet today right now 17 ships. We know they're global class down to the smaller global coastal ships, their own by national foundation. I'm a partner of the Navy. It might be that hopefully not causing problems. And of course, and universities own a lot of their own vessels operated by 13 different institutions currently, while waiting for the first the RCR visa come online will be back to 14 operating institutions, as we're currently set up. And we coordinate all the access to the vessels and equal equitable fashion to the community. And we make sure the ships operate. We our partners. And it's particularly the agency is make sure the ships operate to the higher standard research vessel safety standards. Our ships are the safest ships out there on the ocean, which is really incredible, which is important. We take students that would be scientists that would take non mariners out to sea to do hard work. And really the fleet, you know, the fleet, the global class ships, the land as the Thompson, the rebel, the Sikuli act and Langseth, which we already talked about, focuses on scientific research primarily but they do a lot of general ocean research these days to help us with the, all the demand we have and we'll talk more about that. The ocean intermediate class to kill one of the endeavor, which is where we're going to talk a little more about when she can be retired, given that with the schedule is with the RCR these, of course, the bios of the next floor. And of course, the, the, the astronaut class a selling ride and the Armstrong work horses for the fleet these days, the sharp, and then the RCR these which will will touch on down the road here. The future home of the Gilbert Mason which is really incredible where to do this. And our small vessels which are so important to getting future oceanographers out to see that it's a future scientist this is where we get their fundamental training, as well as doing important local coastal research so these are critical to our fleet as well. The pelican, you know this down the road a little bit sprawl Savannah won't submit the blue heron and Rachel Carson. So, Debbie touched on it briefly. Where is the fleet gone since, you know, started in 1972. We've cut in half we're down to 17 vessels right now. And with that, we've seen a decrease in births of sea for scientists were down 4% and births right now. And where we were not even long ago. But this will just give you the history when you're, as you're doing your deliberations where, where's the fleet been, where are we looking now in the next few years, in 2025, based on what we know the current, the current plans we know and this gives you this shows the trend, but it's interesting you see a couple of plateaus and you look at this. Along the way over the years of the fleet is done. They've been transitions has been flat toes and has been transitions. And right now we're kind of in a plateau. 18, you know, 17 18 ships. There's more than I mentioned, there's more than just the ships that make all this happen. See when research happened. Of course, the NDSF with Alvin century and Jason, which is just critical to the research and they keep invest investments in these keep these relevant. You know, Alvin's 50 plus years old and it's still, you know, it's still the sets the standard to the whole worldwide community and BC research and Jason century similarly. All these other pieces that get forgotten about but it actually are critical for the king successful science done. The technician, the technician pool, which allows us to keep, you know, the best technician to see with our scientists opposite Marcia was with an hour. This is a kind of learning lesson for us. We need to expertise and dredging pouring because that's something we don't do every day but it's critical to the scientists that were successful. We do go to see so it's been an investment in ourselves in the last few years. Let's develop centers of expertise. We've got to continue to do things like that. We see there's a problem. We've got it, you know, we need to have that capability down the road. Let's not forget that is part of this investment in infrastructure. Me so and pfp, pfp, those are all important to me and our more expertise. And there's also all the other pieces of software people side of it, but it's really critical like the multi beam advising me, we have keep investing in, you know, NSF and on our keep playing better and better multi beam systems. The need that needs for better mapping in the ocean box, we do better science. ODF, you know, is doing the collecting water all over the oceans, continue to monitor the trends and the changes that is critical. So these investments are still continue to be important will will in the future as well to do the science of tomorrow. R2R, which you all know well, and all these other pieces and you know the satellite network advisory. NSF and nowhere as best as so much in in the communications infrastructure last years, which allows more scientists to access in real time the ships and how to do the science to see. So we may have lost some bunks at sea, but a lot of more people actually have direct access, you know, to be able to engage the people on the ship at a time to see what's happening and to help modify change plans on on moments notice is really critical. You know, as community starts the federal agencies, you know these things, but it's just always good to have this in your record. Without the agencies, we wouldn't be able to support a science community that's where we're all focused, we're all here for. We've got 58 member institutions. All the most of them are very active in our community to help us find where we where we are where we want to go how we do it. This is all gets down to these the fleet we're talking about all the shipping facility operators and technical staff. That's all these are such important part of our community. There's a UNOS council that helps lead UNOS is the facilitator the coordinator the center of gravity for all this. And then that leads down to the office and we're kind of we handle the behind the scenes work to make all this happen. It allows me to enable the community to move forward, we engage in these important issues, and they help us move forward so they can provide advice to the agencies. And we can also deal with a lot of communication outside like the regulatory agencies on behalf of our community, which is a big piece of what we do as well. So, you know, we're nine communities now in, you know, is in the community. We've also expanded, you know, the last few years, you know, in recognition of where our, our, our society is now in there is now a standing committee which was initiated previously. And it's just like a subcommittee. It's just too important to elevate it to a higher level now and they impact a lot of what we do and shape how we do business. The safety committee we've added the recognizing we need more expertise in coordinating OBS is a more more critical to the geophysical community. So we've elevated elevated that created an early committee for them as well. You know, and, you know, so this is this is no surprise here, but it's just it's active it's busy. It's engaging. We've got and we've also added we've got some great big career scientists in a lot of these communities, these committees now, which are really taking these on really focus and really clear scientists. So we're not even thinking about where we go with facilities and the fleet and all the supporting facilities. Also, let's make sure we're taking part of the young scientists. We need them for the future for what you're looking at the next 10 years and beyond. And you know, the office, I won't give you all the details, but I will tell you, our task is responsible with staffing continue to grow because the complexities are getting bigger and bigger. And we are we have to support really the agencies, you know, NSF on our to be able to respond to a lot of the things that help enable the fleet to run dealing with like the Coast Guard requirements, for example, dealing with buying by America building America by America. There is so much stuff that has to have behind the scenes for your ship operators can operate these ships and support your science without being interrupted. You know, we've NSF is tasked us to hire a contract to support all the bureaucracy comes with a new, you know, good, well intended change, but the bureaucracy behind that is amazing. And our ship operators don't have extra people on top of that to answer all the questions and do all the inventories their ships and then go fight the battles for waivers, because we have every ship in the world these days has foreign components in them. And a lot of these systems on the ships, you cannot break apart and say this is by the American government inserted in that system possible to do right now. And so we have to answer a lot of questions so that we can keep operating NSF and keep ensuring the ships get maintained, you know, no one are, you know, it's just it's an amazing continuum. COVID-19 we've also became experts and writing guidance to the fleet about how we can do this safely. This is an example is why it's a complex world is getting more complex. The UNOS office continues to grow NSF and on our been amazingly supportive of us. But we, we are a little office keeps growing and, you know, it's part of the cost of running the fleet. Quite frankly. So how the fleet being used. I just show this real slide. This is what scheduling of the community looks like. And this is not any of all the ships. It is way complex. We look at a one year scheduled ships and most of the blue is underway doing science projects and purple and orange accommodations or, you know, transits and maintenance periods. Not so I don't expect you to look at this guy. It's funny. It is. There's a lot of pieces of this. It's, you can understand why it's difficult to cope with schedules every year for the community. Where is the fleet? Where's the fleet then it's been everywhere. And you know this, you're taking the ships to see our global is everywhere in the world, which is, and they're highly recognized and welcome around the world. So it's incredible. The amount of scientists still gets done. We will, these tables will be in there. I'm not going to dwell on it. I can tell you is we are back up and above where we were pre pandemic levels for that. How much, how many days are funded and see by the agencies. It's incredibly amount of work. And we're doing with less ships. But the ships are underway and we'll show you in a minute that they are well appalled for for every day of the year dedicated to being doing science. You know, and that's that's the important message. Our ships are fully utilized. There's a lot of other things that come with that and I'll show you in a minute, I'll explain it more, but I just want these tables are in there to show you that your fleet is well used. It's well supported by the agencies and NSF is the primary funder to this for as long as money in this. Doug, I want to interrupt you for a second. You've been going, you and Debbie have been going for about 1314 minutes. And if you want to save time for her at the end, we need to move on. So you should try to wrap up in the next minute or two. Okay, we'll do I can be done in a minute. And so this is the other one. This right here shows you how the ships are tied up with your underway doing science. They're getting ready to do science. They're undergoing inspections. They're doing major maintenance, which is a lot of it's required by the federal regulatory agencies. And, and then sometimes you have to deal with crewing issues and stuff like that. So I'll leave it in that. And this is more tables in here. We've taken a lot of people to see. These are the numbers for that well into that. I'm going to turn it over to Rose for her perspective. Hi, thank you very much, Doug. So I think as a group we decided that we were going to just do it all do our presentations together and re yield our time so I'm definitely not going to be taken the nine minutes. So there was the question is how might this look in the coming decade. So when we're looking at the science that we feel we're going to be doing in the coming decade. I feel like that's what we're asking the report to give us, but you know we have sustained observations that we foresee that we're going to continue to do. We recognize the change in biology, the paleo climate research that needs to be done, the geo hazard, we're highly invested in stem and outreach programs. So, we can make a very long list, but these are just a few items that are a few topics that we think we're going to continue doing in the next decade. And we hope that this report will inform that creativity that we're talking about. So next slide. We do ask for an update on the RC RVs and we, there was a meeting last week with the shipyard and so we have some new updated dates delivery of the first vessel the tiny will be one July 2025 vessel to one January 2026 and vessel three one June 2026 so they the after delivery there's about 262 days to outfit the ship to do sea trials to do a film realization of, you know, for the crew on how to run the ships. There's going to be warranty and fallout time there's the NSF inspection that satisfies that for acceptance into the unals. As a unit operator. So there's a lot that's going to be packed into that 262 days. And by the time we're all done in 2027 will have all three doing science. So some NSF successes I wanted to focus on some of the things that I think have been successful in the last decade, and you know whether we can improve on them in the next decade and if they need to talk about in the report, it's up to you but it's this idea of having barters so we can access foreign and other federal fleets. We already have a barter with NERC, and that gives us access to some of the European ships. And we think that that's important because reducing transits is helpful and getting more science done. We already have work in a certain region and we can, you know, add a cruise to where they're at and vice versa I think it's helpful for both of us. So we want to also increase, we want to continue that and and also add, for instance, Noah, we'd like to see if we can do barter with Noah, and a barter is something where you don't exchange money you just exchange ship time. You don't have a running tally of how much you owe each other and then you try to get onto their schedules. I think it's already been touched on by Jim, but there's definitely been increases in NSF infrastructure funding. So it's a different environment than we were when we did the last Decale survey. And I think that the foundation to their to our credit has realized that, you know, we don't want to be in a situation where the tail is wagon the dog so to speak but in order to have a very functional fleet we need to do the investments necessary to keep the ships maintained and there's a long list of items that were potentially deferred and and now we're catching up with that. One of the things that Doug mentioned in the increase in their staffing is a crewing coordinator. About two years ago we recognized that we were actually leaving cruises at the pier because we didn't have enough crew license crew to get underway. This became a critical issue we I think it was scripts that had a three month downtime because of lack of crew so anyway we ended up with a crewing coordinator, and I feel like it's been a big success. There are a few vacant positions now. And part of that was also recognizing some of the recommendations that came from a a crewing Tiger crew committee, and they provided a list of recommendations to the agencies that included increases in salary for crew members retention bonuses have ability. So we've been addressing all those things and luckily there's been money from NSF to be able to realize those goals. The deferred maintenance as I said had always been an issue in the past, when we had flat budgets which is actually a decline, we had to make hard choices. So we would always do the safety items first but there are other items that ended up being deferred and so those things we've been dealing with them last year to have ability upgrades. So you just need to go on foreign ships, and some of our partner agencies to see that we were kind of behind the times as far as have ability so we're trying to make our ships a little nicer to be on. And then scientific instrumentation is also seen an increase in funding. And then the pools, the wire pool, the winch pool, the band pools, the tech pools, those are all I think success stories and whether we can use that blueprint for other types of pools I think will be important. And I can show you that on the next slide. And then the other success I think we've had is the early career science training opportunities that's been going on for at least 12 years, maybe longer 14 years, 15 years. And we recognize that we need to make this a codified way of handling early career training opportunities but right now we're still doing it kind of ad hoc as opportunities present themselves. Okay, next slide. So challenges. We'll get into this discussion later because I think it's important, you know, we have the current mix of global and ocean class ships. And is it the right mix for the kind of science that we think we need to do in the next decade. We touched on cyber security. That's definitely something that we see now not on the horizon but now as an issue and so, as Jim mentioned, we have a new program director coming into OCE that will be all things cyber. The next thing I think I want to mention is the NDSF assets. So, everyone loves to use Century and Jason and Alvin and this can be difficult for scheduling. So, sometimes cruises have waited three or four years to get to see in order to get the ancillary assets that they need and the timing on the ship schedule so if there is a way to have duplications in some of those areas that would be that would help that that pressure we have with scheduling. So, this was a number that I got from Doug, but they did a little, you know, review on the Bunks for science community and there's been a 4% decline. And I think that's attributed to the fact that these ships are much more complex and you go into the bridge of these, these new ships and it's computer driven. So, with that we need to bring the people along that can support the bridge and the engine room so that takes away from Bunk space so how do we deal with that to you know and that's something like bringing in telepresence having more more satellite connectivity and and just figuring out ways to get the community on the ship remotely. You know, I hate to pick on killing one, but I'm just going to say that the ship when it was designed was designed for the type of science that we no longer hold as a priority. And so the things that we think our priority science for us and in the Pacific, the chemo killing one isn't the best ship for for doing that kind of science. And so I think on our will touch on that, but they have a decision and kind of an off ramp so to speak on whether to invest in a future midlife, or do we cut our losses and say the ship, even after midlife isn't going to support our priorities. And, you know, if we were to look at something like glider pools, this would be a force multipliers for bringing in PIs that may not have access to gliders but this makes it easier by having it taken care of through a pool. Um, greening the fleet. We have a requirement from the, the White House to get to net zero by 2050, which, you know, on one hand, we're bringing in. We want more globals. And we don't have the technology to get to that net zero. So that that's a big challenge for the fleet and how do can we do offsets to get to that those numbers that they're looking at. And then the harder question is the underutilization of the local and regional class vessels. So we've seen this big pressure on the global and ocean class ships, but not so much pressure on the local and regional class ships and you know why is that is, why is the science turned to these big science expeditions instead of looking mostly locally to do their science. So do we need to reevaluate how many local regional class ships we have in the area. So those are definitely hard questions and big challenges. I think that. Oh, yeah, I threw up. You want to go back just so you have some perspective on how the day rate is divided. So, you know, the way it's been 10 minutes. Okay, so if you don't want to, we can talk about that one later. Okay. Thanks. Thanks. Next slide please. Hi, I'm Rob Sparrick. I'm the program officer at the officer naval research responsible for a significant portion of the hardware related to the academic research fleet. O and R as an entity spends about 15% of the current operating budget. I try we'll try not to read these slides to you but the takeaway for the first bullet somebody use the term ground truth. Ground truth is going to be what Congress authorizes. So the Navy can make a plan. We do that with shipbuilding. The congressional budget office reviews it and analyzes it. And in the end, we get the fleet that Congress authorizes but you can't buy a ship without congressional authorization. We are about one of the questions you ask is what is the Navy plan for replacing the globals. Since that plan is still 12 years away. There is no formal plan, but even in the formal planning that the Navy does for shipbuilding. We do not include vessels like oceanographic research vessels. So all of our ship planning is based on what we call battle for ships. I will highlight though in the time frame between 2036 and 2042. The Navy expects three of the globals plus Kilimanjana, and incidentally, the no worship Ron Brown will reach their end of service life. So that's four ships, which are the huge portion of the academic fleet going away vessels that will have been around for four and a half decades. Also, in that same period of time competing for money will be midlife refits for the other two Navy owned ocean ocean class research vessels, plus the Sikulyak owned by the National Science Foundation. If you were to do some quick back of the envelope math, you're talking about a billion dollars in a very short period of time, something that historically does not happen very often. So this creates great opportunity because what you will get is a new fleet hypothetically that will last another four or five decades. The risk on the other hand is with shipbuilding. You've probably seen it in your questions related to RC RV, but any delay in a construction or midlife project means making hard choices such as investing money and keeping ships that have reached their end of service life and you're just trying to get them to get by or alternatively let gaps happen in the fleet capacity and that impact science. So my three kind of bullet takes away the Navy's plan is going to be the one that Congress approves with lots of churn and things in between. There's a period of time coming here and the time that you care about in the next decade, when there's a huge shift in the academic fleet. I can't overemphasize how big getting rid of four ships and replacing them with whatever the next thing is, because that's going to last four or five decades. On the other hand, because it's so many ships, and a lot of stuff going on, there's a lot of risk. So hopefully, we'll get it right. I'll end there. Thank you so much. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Now is some. Okay, Sherman's going on. Go ahead, Kate. Thanks Jim. I'm kept Sherman I'm a physical oceanographer from Oregon State University and I'm the chair of the fleet improvement committee. I'm going to sort of look at the near term and long term future of the academic research fleet. So we've touched on all these things but first, I'm going to present two slides one presents a somewhat shiny view of the future and the second one for shows some fairly stark facts. First off is autonomy in the future autonomy will be commonplace as the technology becomes more robust. First and foremost, though, autonomous platforms will never be a replacement for people going out on ships. Autonomous platforms are they add value to the research and so a nice example is exports from 2018 and 2019. That's what the schematic shows the field work for export used a combination of ships and autonomous platforms operating together. Right now, though, those operations primarily come from boutique operations at academic institutions. As the demand and scope of autonomous work grows. We may need to consider other modes of working for the autonomous fleet. Maybe things like a national facility. So, for example, the National Ocean, Agra National Oceanographic Center in the United Kingdom. They have the marine equipment pool, which has a lot of autonomous platforms. That's one thing we could consider a NERC report. Recent NERC report recommended doubling the support for autonomous platforms every 5 years. And so that's an interesting feature to consider if we're considering investing in that the next job for the fleet improvement committee is finding the right or the main job of the fleet improvement committee is finding the right composition of research vessels. And as Rose mentioned, the global class research vessels are currently oversubscribed. We have a backlog of cruises and it's not shrinking. And our coastal and local class vessels are under subscribed. And so the questions are right now are, you know, what's the right make up for the future? Do we need more global class research vessels? Do we need different sized vessels? Do the global class research vessels need to be potentially bigger? Some of this is due our current condition right now is somewhat due to the fact that we replace two global class research vessels, the nor and the Melville with ocean class research vessels. All right, which were a reduction in births and capability. The next thing is polar research. Polar research is becoming more and more important as the focus on climate change. There are plans for an Antarctic research vessel which are currently unfunded. This Antarctic research vessel would be a replacement for the Nathaniel be Palmer and the US Coast Guard is currently taking input from Unals on an Arctic surface capability. And they're specifically asking for science mission requirements from us, which is the sort of the first step in planning research vessels. And these would be polar capable ice breaking cutters. None of this will happen without the input of the community. And the last thing is the greening of the fleet. There's an executive order that requires net zero emissions from the overall federal operations by 2050, including a 65% reduction in emissions by 2030. So this is a pretty big ask for the academic research fleet currently. Next slide please. All right, here are the start facts. This is a table that takes us out into the future to 2035. And this is what the fleet will look like. The summary of this is in from 20 to 25 to 2035. We'll see the academic research fleet shrink from 18 to 10 vessels. And 13 to 8 operating institutions. The 3 globals. The the Atlantis, the rebel and the Tommy Thompson will end their design life and enter their extended life. Which is Rob mentioned will require investments. And the academic research fleet will see the retirement of all the intermediate coastal and local vessels. All right, that's the summary from the thick. Excellent. Okay, so I'm going to go over these really quick and some of them I won't mention at all so next slide, because they're they're just building off. You know, so some, some suggestions we'd love to be included in the plan and yet Doug you can go. You can put them all up back. Okay, you know we mentioned killing one I shouldn't be replaced if so with what we just heard about the ocean and global class capacity again and again like what's going to fill the vacuum with that. One point I want to make about the coastal and local class as a researcher that has worked in both blue water and the coastal zone. There's a bit of a scarcity mentality with a number of coastal researchers they don't ask for you know ships they worry that it's going to make their proposals too expensive. So is this a problem in that there's they're getting all the work that they need to get done with the ships that their institute or the boats that their local institution is running, or are we do we have blinders on some of these scientists and they're not asking for what they really need because I don't think they're going to get it. And I'm not convinced about that. I also wanted to point out that these vessels are very valuable for training. It's not that worth the cost but something to throw in next, you can put up the next budgets. One question about the autonomous tools that we've talked about it you know, do we need a national strategy around this, you know they are becoming as valuable as ships in many cases and so. But right now they're more discrete groups that are using them do we need to how do we make them are accessible to researchers across. I'm going to toss out a phrase that came to my mind when I got involved in you know, we've got great things out there in the fleet right we've got Alvin we've got sentry we've got. Oh shoot Jason, but I will say that I was like is that still all we've got there are great vessels but are there things coming down the pike at NSF being developed that I don't know about. Otherwise why not, and I don't know if I just pissed off Peter Gurgis or if he's like go girl I don't know I should have probably asked Peter about this. The the carbon at zero you've heard you know we're it's 2024 and we were supposed to do this by 2025 and I'm going to push back on Mark Abbott 10 years isn't long enough for a plan. When you're talking about ships we're way behind the eight ball. And you've heard about cybersecurity so go to the next. And I want to make the case we you know Rob mentioned that the Navy has a plan, I want to make a case that we need really a bold new vision for the academic research fleet and the funds to implement it. Right, and this is beyond the scope of a decadal survey but the decadal survey could recommend that this be done, because what we need is the science of the future intimately linked to the fleet and the infrastructure that we need in the future and right now we don't, we don't have that. And I think we need to desperately engage the next generation in developing this. And I'll tell you why I think the greatest threat to oceanography right now in terms of infrastructure is not the fact that we might be down to eight ships. It's that next slide please. We've become a community that is starting to dream small. Right, we're starting to again these blinders that we seem to have accumulated in the community I'm going to give you a brief. I just met from my first meeting with the fleet improvement committee, I was just sitting in trying to get up to speed on what they're talking about and they're talking about the next global, and it was one of the most depressing conversations I've sat through, because everything that seemed to be brought up about about some capability or some capacity that needed to be on the ship. And then there was instantly a response of we can't afford that we'll never get that approved that'll never get through. So my question is when did we start thinking this way on such a massive level. At the end of that meeting, I asked if some people could stick around and talk to me and just help again help me get up to speed. And then the quote that is burned into my brain stem from one person is Debbie. If you want a state of the art research vessel, go to China. Again, when did when did we become that country. So I think engaging the younger generations thinking really boldly about the fleet that we need is important not just for the fleet itself. It's how we again start thinking as a community that we're a country that can do anything. And the facts the last slide. And I'll just leave it up there. You know, the fact we just launched pace $964 million. NASA launched pace. billion are a country that can do anything. And we need to start being really bold in the request that we need for ocean science because it is important, critically important to this country and to humanity, and we're not bold enough. We talked too much about what we can't do and I think we need to knock that off. So with that. Yeah, thank you. That's a very challenging statement and I appreciate that Debbie. I had to quite two quick questions before we go on to the other list one. I'm not sure who will answer this I guess maybe Rose with the first one or maybe. Well, anyway, I'm not sure but what's up with seismic one rumor is is that Lancet will go out of service around 2026 and is there are thoughts about a replacement for seismic ship. And second of all, I also heard a rumor that rumor from somewhere and I don't remember where that there is a some sort of a plan to build a new Jason it would be somewhat less capable but still very capable, or the deep submergence facility. Anybody have thoughts on those two seismic and new Jason. I can I can talk about seismic Columbia has been working on a plan and doing a lot of background work for a training and another vessel and converting it to be a seismic vessel. To do a lot of the site and the capabilities of Lancet, even at the full suite of them, and also do a better job with general ocean graphic support as well. So that way it's better utilized, but they are even actively working on it. We don't know all the, we don't know all the insights in behind the doors what's happening, but that's sort of plan is actually to obtain a vessel converted and put into service as the Lancet has retired in 2026 timeframe maybe if they can. This is not a quick easy process but that's what they've been actually working on. That's agreed a number of times to the marine seismic research operations. Rose, I don't even talk about another Jason Jason light or something. Well I was going to ask Jim since he's in the room to talk about that but there has been talk about having some kind of second Jason, and I don't know where it's at in the planning or funding stage. Rose, do you want me to say anything about that. I'm sure Brian's on there perfect. Morning everybody. Nice to see you all. Regarding a mid scale and mid medium class ROV there's been a lot of interest in the community about relieving the bottleneck of Jason and also standing up a capability that could work from ships other than global ocean class. And that is to design and construct an ROV or more that would be compatible with the RC RVs, frankly, and other ships of that class. So, while there is no, you know, funding available to do that, the Deep Submerge and Science Committee did produce a position about that need. And it's been, you know, broadly acknowledged and accepted and I've, you know, I've even discussed it a bit with Noah about their interests. I'd like to add a comment to that. So, when Doug showed the complex slide on scheduling. One of the things that's not hidden that's hidden in that slide is the vehicles. So there's only one Alvin and many of the vehicles being soul sourced and drive the schedule. So, right now our schedule limitations are often more impacted by the availability of the vehicles than the ships themselves. Okay, I think we'll move to the questions that are on on the list here. The first one I see is from Layla that has a lot of support. Do you want to ask your question Layla. Yeah. So thanks first to the panelists for all of your perspectives. This has been really informative. We actually asked part of my question and the comments in the context of the local and the coastal vessels and the committee is interested in connecting the appetite for ship support with the menu of offerings and and understanding if that current menu or the future projected menu is not meeting the need where we'd like to know what's also on the hidden chefs menu. I think I'm hungry. And so, and that might also show us some some things in regional science drivers. And we wonder if NSF or you know, some data they can share on investments in ship time on non academic research fleet vessels, maybe through rapid funding, maybe through other mechanisms where a non ARF vessel has to be used to support an NSF science initiative. This is kept. You know, you know, I don't think we have that type of information. You know, it's possible NSF might just from the expenditures and where they go but that's a pretty deep dive in terms of finding that out. You know the whole way of trying to approach that might be reaching out to the oceanographic community via a survey or something like that. Make a quick comment. Sure. So not specific to the vessels but to the vehicles I can't recall a year in the recent past where I didn't rent a third party ROV at least once or more times per year. So I was just going to make two observations on that. I mean, obviously, the file core to does carry out a lot of NSF supported science. So that's going to a ship outside the ARF. As far as the smaller ships. That's something that could potentially be collected through the NSF award systems but it would take some time, but they, but we do ask that they meet the unit safety standards and so there's a whole process for using non ARF ships. So, hopefully through that engagement there would be some kind of idea of how often this happens. Okay, well let's see move on the other one I see next on the list is from Dipanjana Dipanjana. Yes. Go ahead and ask your question. Thank you. It is really great to know about the air please the services provided by the air please and also the challenges. I was just wondering that as the price of the vessels and the fuel to run a vessel is always a constraint. What are the options to use hydrogen or any other clean alternatives to run these ships in an energy efficient manner, but of course without compromising the research objectives or the safety. Thank you. Does Vick want to ask for that? Yeah. So, that's a great question. Alternative fuels and the like. That is definitely under consideration right now. Scripps institution of oceanography is spearheading an effort to design a coastal research vessel that is partially run on hydrogen so that is there is an attention being given to that it's a challenging. It's a it's a challenge to have a platform that's propelled by hydrogen and can still complete the research missions. I can add to that as well the part of the problem is this being a source that kind of the quantities we need, especially for our global ships that travel the world. So you can't get the alternative fuels. The infrastructure is not caught up to where the world is gone yet. So that's it is a challenge. And also you cannot convert these ships quickly to move into alternative fuels you have to basically design for the ground up because the time it is where you differently in all the other infrastructure controls and all that it's not easily possible for the ships we have. Yeah, I think just just a quick comment that there is a lot of research on on on acquiring large amounts of hydrogen. It's something for the future but it's something to think about and I'm really happy that Scripps is least going to try something on today's scale but in the future maybe it's it'll be more, it'll be putting more possible. I was asked about nuclear in the chat. The US is really good at nuclear ships. I was made to a Navy nuke. Yeah. That's true. I, I can tackle that question. I'm a nuclear trained naval officer. Crew size that comes with adding nuclear power is an additional expense. It's probably if it would be considered it would be considered in the Arctic, where the advantage of having nuclear propulsion is reasonable. There are other nuclear powered oceanographic research ships in other countries. The US just has not gone down that particular path. Okay, a jeet. I think I see you next on the question list. I just, and I'll go back to Peter after a jeet. Thanks. For me, I was just curious in terms of what how we are writing the report if examples can be provided of how the new RCRE is supporting the science of the next decade. Just examples of things like for my own personal thing, it's like, are they capable of launching. Just examples of things like that. I think Brian. All the ships in the fleet are capable of launching AVs and the RC RVs will be supporting the science in the next decade because those are the ships will have. Starting their, their service life right at the beginning of. The decade you're considering 2025. I was just into the type of growth. Many of the ships right now can support aerial operations. That's a, you know, we didn't touch on that, but. Autonomous aerial operations are a part of the academic research fleet. There's a committee at Unals called score. Which is solely well, which is focused on that in addition to. Human occupied aerial measurements. But at some point we can talk about what the RC are you bring in terms of their sea keeping efficiency and dynamic positioning data presence. I mean, those are all the things that the RC are these spring. I think that are going to be quite enabling for the research community. I'm happy to provide it with you on that. And we're specifically designed for from day one. Very science board design. And their regional class vessels, which put them in a particular size class, which, you know, that establishes sort of their capabilities, what sort of sees they can operate in how many. Scientists, they can carry, which is not the same as, for example, the global class research vessels, which have the broadest range of sea. Keep keeping capabilities and the largest science births. I don't mean to butt in, but you guys are taking on the thing I think about every day. So, a GT to your question. Nice to see you by the way. The RC RVs are will be certainly capable of launching autonomous and other systems aerial surface submarine. And we, as to have pointed out, are specifically designed to well support that activity. We're going to add, you know, advanced usbl capability day to every vessel, as well as station keeping that's that's far improved over over the ships they're replacing. Very similar capabilities to the global and ocean class systems with the limitations that that kept mentioned that, I mean, I think regional classes and misnomer at this point, they've been expanded to larger than our intermediate class, but you know, that's semantics will still be somewhat birthing limited a little bit duration and range limited it compared to an ocean class ship. Okay, let's Peter Peter Gurus. You had a question. Yeah, thank you all. First off, major things to folks on you know, having been in that in those shoes. I know how much work you all do to support science. So thank you. And, and thanks to the program officers. I mean, you do this is a heavy lift. Um, you know, why don't we acknowledge Rose comments about just being vessels to comply with NSF, you know, sort of safety policies and all the other practices. I mean, that is that is really important. I also, I just having worked with Schmidt Ocean Institute and other entities and trying to bring together NSF dollars and Schmidt resources. It works, but it's all very ad hoc and you know, when we look at where the US academic research fleet goes, it's pretty biased towards the North Atlantic and some work in the city. And if we want to do global research, either we need a bunch more or we need to be really smart about partnerships. And I would, I would love to hear more about examples of partnerships that maybe I'm unaware of that exist between NSF and other agencies in the, in the, in the southern hemisphere around the world that might allow us to have our US scientists to have access to the global ocean. Thank you. So, let me start off with just saying that, you know, Schmidt is always invited and comes to our Unals meetings and we kind of feel like they're kind of an ancillary part of the fleet, so to speak. We have, as I mentioned the barters that we have with NERC, and that's kind of the idea that we're looking at is how can we more efficiently use ships that are in different regions because we have these requirements for OOI. We have, you know, the OOI, the bats, the hot cruises, we have all these requirements that keep ships in certain basins. So, it, I think it is important to think more strategically about other opportunities. We're trying to do this barter right now with NOAA so that we can exchange ship time with them without having exchanged dollars. So, yes, I think that there is an opportunity to look up beyond the ARF for partnerships. Thank you. Okay, Allison, you had a question. A couple of them. Yeah, I do have a couple of questions, but I guess I'll start with the one that's by a spring. You showed some data of where all the vessels have been. And this ties into Keith's question a little bit, but do you have data not just on where the ship has been and operated, but where the scientists on board are coming from? And I guess what I'm getting at is, for example, the regional class vessel operated by URI mostly utilized by scientists that might live in New England. And what's the institutional diversity look like also? Not all our data is good because it depends on what the operators have printed from your when you collected the data for the participants during the cruises. So that we can gather it so I can't promise to be really accurate. Unfortunately, because we've had working on making more standardized and so that through the marine facilities planning application we use now and scheduling. We've incorporated a cruise planning process through that and that is now becoming more standardized and how people collect all that information. I can't really give you quite without doing some digging about where did all this and correlate to each ship. That's a big lift of data work. If that's what they need, we can work and figure out how to do that, especially the data we have. Do you have any like this anecdotal evidence or like you used idea if that is the case where the regional vessel kind of being more utilized by regional scientists? I would say, well, actually I would say there's pretty good diversity. I mean, I've given the example is this like there's been scientists that have used the link explorer that come all over the place. You know, and they take advantage of France to do something from the mainland back to your mood for me to do their work. When I managed the barns and then the Carson in Seattle, we had scientists more of the place come and use it in the ship. There's a lot of scientific questions sitting somewhere else in the country and you've got people come across the country to use this little ship to actually answer the questions. So I think there's actually quite a very good diversity. It's not just biased towards that local institution. Okay. Mark, Mark Abbott, do you have a question? Sure, just trying to hit all the unmute buttons. Yeah, it's actually comes out of a report from years ago back and when the consortium for ocean leadership actually existed, which is we need to really think about a portfolio approach of acquisition, you know, leasing to government to build on, et cetera. We need to think about mechanisms to manage the funding so it's a bit more predictable than it is right now. And more importantly, a governance strategy for the agencies that really formulates formalizes their roles and responsibilities because right now it's very ad hoc. I mean, I agree with Debbie on the blue sky approach, but we've got to come up with approaches that manage what are looking like very plausible scenarios. I mean, all the scenarios we proposed over the last or saw over the last 10 to 20 years, a compression of the fleet, et cetera, are really coming to pass. I'll put words in Rob Spurrick's mouth, but I don't see the Navy being able to play a very big role anymore in the next 10 years. They've got the great ship problem. We can't count on NSF to come up with the $1 to $2 billion worth of ship costs. So we've got to come up with some strategies that really enable the science we need to do. I don't think that means a necessary retreat, but it means a lot more creative and out of the box thinking of NSF, go out and come up with the requirements, Navy, you go build a big ship. That's been our model. And I think we've got to think really differently. So I'm curious what the community, what the group is thinking on those lines. Stop there. You have ideas, Mark, just to turn your question back around to you. Well, I think the decadal survey of ships is one part. I think we've got to start thinking about lease leasing ships. I think I've seen a lot of questions about relying on some more private operators. I think even things about, even on the globals, how can we increase their physical footprint? You know, right now, everybody wants to be on them, but you're still limited on how many things you can put in the water at once. So a lot of time, people are sitting around waiting for wire time. So are there strategies that kept sort of alluded to it of using autonomous platforms to physically increase the effectiveness of the ships we have. Maybe even some of the smaller ships. But I think right now we've got to come up with a governance structure that involves the agencies and the community that really constantly is looking at this portfolio of approaches. And thinking just differently than what we've done in the past. I have a comment on that. I would encourage you to take a look at the National Oceanographic Partnership Language. You'll find congressional intent. I think you will find that the partnership while long standing possibly could be improved and codified some of the things that you're asking. I would say yes, you caught one of my hidden messages when I suggested the CBO report is what views the Navy Shipbuilding Plan. The CBO would say the Navy Shipbuilding Plan, which doesn't include research vessels isn't affordable. So the Navy already has an unaffordable plan that doesn't include research vessels. Can I comment, Jim, on that? Sure, go ahead. I think one of the things we're seeing right now is the impact of a lack of coordinated advocacy for ocean research in general. The Consortium of Ocean Leadership, many of the people on the call were involved in that and I mean that was, what, seven, eight years of just trying to keep it afloat. And now it's gone. Everybody's kind of scrambling. And so we don't have anyone in Washington as a community leader right now that is really trying to make the case for large investments. So we could look to, you know, the coordinated communities like astronomy that is very effective at using decadal surveys and then advocacy with Congress to get what we need, what they need. And I think we could learn something from that. There is a gathering at Ocean Science next week on Wednesday at 1245 to talk about ocean advocacy. So join us if you're going to be there. I'm glad to do that on a decadal survey testimony call. Out of order. Let's see. We have here marks. Well, Allison, you had another question about. Let's see. Yeah, did you get to that one about building a new ship from scratch. And also, that's a more general thing. Are there other agencies like no. Certainly in a ship build that we could tag on to is anyone have a comment on that that to do something to replace the upcoming retirements. Yes, the existing Noah class B vessels which started contract about four months ago is for a to ship build with two options that cost about $150 million and could be exercised in the next 46. Or 72 months, if my math is right. Or be lost. Is that an option to replace kilo, for example. It's a potential option for acquiring additional vessels should Congress feel the need to replace kilo Moana. I tried to hedge my answer on that, but yes, it's an option. And, but just to clarify that Noah variant is the Armstrong class, basically, and then they, they took that design. Or not yet. The astronaut class. Which, which might be a suitable replacement for the one. But the, I think the key point of of Rob's, well, my interpretation of what Rob said is that there's an opportunity there. But nothing can happen without the dollars being appropriated to capitalize on that opportunity. And that requires the community's advocacy, like Debbie pointed out. I think that two of our major ships in the last couple of decades are named after astronauts shows how bad we are at advocating for ourselves. If you go back real quickly to my original question, I asked this because I don't know, but did you know slash NSF class to build a new ship from last, or is more than you could fire and old oil and gap vessel for example and then fit it into a research stuff, which seems like it could be more cost effective and not take it home. I can, I can touch on that. So it's, it's a complex question. I mean, because you can look at ships and you know was there's a ship and it's looks like it would be rearranged but then they start digging into it. And now what's real condition is it's like doing your house and do conversion, pull out the walls and find all those things they weren't taken care of behind. Oh, by the way, the code is changed. And now you just deal with all that. So at the end of the day, you know all the design work, all the conversion work, you may have spent this as much of that work or newer and may not get done much faster. Believe it or not. I know it doesn't seem like he does the ship, when it cut it up makes some changes and put it in there but we have very complex ships. It's one of the most complex ships in the world, because of all the scientific data systems and all the instrumentation plan. By the time you add all that into a ship, you really modify it tremendously. It works in certain situations and that's, that's what Columbia is trying to do. They have found some potential relatively new ships, not small throwaways by the way. So you're not dealing with the rebuilding your old New Orleans house. It's got to turn like the image behind it. They think they've got found some that could work, but it'll still be 150 million dollars to do that. And that would be focused for a few things, not like general oceanographic what we tend to do. What we want, like I always describe as net one chip you pick up and do anything that, you know, in your neighbor can borrow and use it for anything. That's the beauty of our ships because it can support, you know, do physical research, physical oceanography research, the integrated combinations of all these. That's why our ships are where they are. So it can be done because you have compromises. Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with the process approach. I just didn't know if there was like a rule that that can be done. No, there's no rule that you can't be done. I was done with like Seth, for example. I'll be out real quickly. Most of the lovely ships are foreign ships. And then a set that no one can not spend that kind of money to acquire a foreign ship. I mean, the reason why like, I'll give you the university of Washington, we don't want to buy things in England bought a ship bought it back, and it's in conversion work. Because that was specifically in portion of graph research about what kind of funds and not with public money. Certainly the National Science Foundation and the Navy are not going to commit money overseas. Congress is not going to allow them to do that. They do that very successfully. Yeah, it was a lot of money to convert. But yes, I think they made they bought the Lancet for less than they sold the. You and for you were sort of run out of time and this has been a really interesting session I appreciate the speakers the participants the questioners and it was a bladder buster so maybe we need a break. Thank you, Jim. And we're going to take a 15 minute break at this point and then that way we'll be back on schedule. And I'm trying to make sure that I know you all have accused me of cutting your break short so I'm trying to make sure we keep the lunch hour full hour, so that everyone has an opportunity to interact with them informally. So let's get back to 1045. Thank you. I was going to make it away. Okay. All right, everyone, we're going to get started on the next session. This is a session on public private partnerships and ocean science. This session is geared to developing information on successes, lessons learned and future opportunities for NSF to advance their mission and goals through public private partnerships. We have four speakers in this session three or online and one of them is in person, and we will get started off with Dr. Henry Jones. He's the director of research development and scientific enterprise at the University of Southern Mississippi. We will share some lessons learned on the development of a data assembly for 100 systems. Great. So I'm sure you've already been welcome to do this city and to Southern Miss so I'm going to do that yet again really glad that you're here. Thanks for letting me be a part like everyone in this room and align my fear has taken me in all sorts of different places, but one common theme is some different elements of public private partnerships from the very first company I started about 25 years ago. That was the collaboration between the government and academic partner and my small company on to most recently the project that I run here at Southern Miss. As Layla described when we were building a data assembly of improved systems. So, you know it's tough for anybody, especially in academia don't talk for 10 minutes. I was given four possible things to talk about. And what I'm going to try to do is put about two minutes into each. This is where they sort of give some summaries based on the experiences that I've had so far with different implementations of public private partnerships. So one thing is a model that I think about frequently for how to think about the relationships between government and academia and industry in particular small business. The gears of the machinery of government such as it is, it's just enormous with lots of inertia for good and for not so good. And lots of things can be generated, it can be lots of energy through participation by the government, but for industry and especially for small businesses, it can absolutely just decimate that small little gear represented by a small company of just a few people when you're trying to work with the government. So what I have observed is that academia can be a really excellent transmission between those two parts and that can manifest itself in many different ways. One example, the next one is this data assembly that I'm going to be principal investigator for. So the way that this came about is a good example. Southern Miss had a good relationship with NOAA and NCI is it's, you know, probably speaking the archive. And we were just in discussions with them because they have relationships with them and they were describing this really difficult new problem ahead for them which was a lot of video streaming in. Video reference, not a lot of standards and not really sure how to handle both processing it in real time, but then also making it available in the long term. So this was a, this is a very difficult problem. And what's also good is that USM had a relationship separately with Hyperion, which is a business that is a DOD contractor doing and working this problem. So what USM could do is connect NOAA to Hyperion and to entities that really would have not known to connect and would not have known how to connect. And so the initial step was for Southern Miss to be the connect door to just see if we could work that problem together. And then what it has turned into, thankfully, is executing a solution to this problem where, again, it would have been difficult for Hyperion who used to work with the Defense Department to know how to another small company to know how to navigate NOAA. And it would have been difficult for NOAA to know how to work with the government owned software that was available to them that Hyperion was aware of. And I think the same construct over and over where academia is really an excellent transmission point for connecting the big years of government and the small rapidly spinning gears of industry. So on the topic of how to maximize their use and research impact, I come from an entrepreneurial background. One thing that I believe is worth pointing out is that commercial entities start first with the customer. And this is not some alchemy that is difficult to figure out how to do. This is something that still can badly make sure it is done first because if you do not figure out where the customers are coming from with the market as you do that first, the commercial entity that starts to figure that out last, you won't be a commercial entity for long. And so what they have done is developed many tools on the screen here. I have the Getting Jobs Done Canvas, the Lean Startup Canvas, the Diet Proposition Canvas, a few concepts that are well known and understood in the commercial industry. I teach a class at Southern Miss for using us in the context of the Defense Department. And my perception is that we could see a lot better data use and research impact to the extent that we can include these tools up front in the conversations as opposed to at the end. The Get Up does have its iCore program. It's these exact tools and campuses and so forth that tends to come at the end when you are trying to find out how to commercialize a product. My experience has been that the best way if you want to make the largest impact is to try to include these tools up front. And that is that in part it's because there are often a lot of things that are required to make something thrive once it is created as opposed to it doesn't exist. That is the typical, if you're going to blind spot or the gap to close between the conversations that I've had someone in industry compared to somebody who's just funding the initial research from, especially from government and sometimes from is it's not just enough to make the things you've got to make the thing be able to thrive in the marketplace of some sort so that it will endure and not just be. And, you know, there's a list here of some of those things that are not taken into account that if they are, they are all things that can be accountable. And when they are, they can result in a system that can thrive, whether it's a product or a service. So, we've now we're through those four topics from the beginning. I want to bring up a really big challenge ahead. I think everybody's generally aware of this, but I have seen this firsthand. I saw this firsthand when I was working with the Defense Department to handle these streams of video data. I also, I found it and ran a quantitative hedge fund. So I saw what sort of appetites automated algorithms can have for data. AI algorithms, I say here, they are relentless data consumers. We generally speaking have had as a cap on our desire for throughput from data are individual ranks. There's only so much that one researcher can really try to assess through. If you properly construct an AI algorithm, it will demand as much data as it as resources will. Whatever the resource constraint is, it will maximize that resource constraint and when that constraint is eliminated, it will just maximize until it finds the next constraint. So, that's what I mean here when it slowly stresses the infrastructure lead points. If you are building out something, and it's got everything this regards to AI needs storage and compute and network capability to connect all of that. The algorithms will max out one of those three, and you'll be pressed to increase it and it will max out that resource or one of the other ones, and so forth. And that's the reality of when you have these sorts of algorithms implemented and, you know, especially in systems that can be accessed by a broad variety of people compared to just some internally, you know, when you're opening it up to the public. So, in our project that we are currently doing for knowing the archive, we recognize this sort of demand cannot be free. So, one way to accommodate these sorts of demands is to from the beginning, but in place the infrastructure to get some sort of financial compensation. But that's not always the most appropriate or, you know, sometimes for policy reasons or for the customers that you want support on have the finances to adequately compensate for that. The resources. So what you can do as an alternative is to require that they submit their results back into the system for other people to use. And I think this is a really important insight is that these relentlessly consuming algorithms are also the most productive things that you can imagine. And if we can get their results to be inserted back into the set of data that is subsequently available for other researchers, it is a very, very powerful feedback mechanism. And I've seen that firsthand and I'm excited about what we can do for NOAA when we implement this for them as well. And it's something that I can talk about at length because it is so exciting what you can do when you implement this sort of positive feedback that's automated. And then the final topic is I was asked what what have you seen that was really a big deal that really made a big impact. So, with regards to data, some of you may be aware of the spare policies for May 4 for good data stewardship. Findable accessible interoperable and reasonable fair fair standards and so forth. It's a really good concept. It has not percolated into operations all that much. I have seen in some of my past endeavors that what really makes things happen is creating a school. And as I know here there is a reason why everywhere you love their, their stars, some of the thumb, some of the lights and all this sort of thing. It is because simple metrics thoroughly drive producer and consumer behavior. Stars are a, you know, they seem to work. So, we're starting with stars in our system. When data is pulled in, data is ready to be shared. We have a very simple at this point rubric for giving a fair metric. We are not the fair experts. We don't want to be the fair experts. We are putting in place the ability to score based on parents and then to publicize that so that it can drive both the behavior of the producers of the data, make their data fair, and for the consumers of the data to highlight, emphasize and utilize that because it's been very clear to them that this is the most fair data, the first data of them all. That's, that's it for me. So we'll hold the questions to the end with all of the panelists. So our next two panelists are joining us online and both are presentations from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. And Karen Grissom, Deputy Division Chief of NCEI, Postal Medicine and Geophysics section and Tim Boyer, oceanographer at NCEI will be talking about strengthening partnerships through the Blue Economy Services and products. And I'm not sure which is going first. I think Karen. Yep, I got a thumbs up. Okay. Can everyone hear me? All right. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Hello. My name is Karen Grissom and I'm very new with NCEI. I just joined the organization three weeks ago. So Tim is the expert regarding the organization, but I'll try and help you learn what we do a little bit. So today I'm here to speak with you regarding the public-private partnerships, specifically the Blue Economy, with a focus on unmanned systems. And I would like to thank my contributors, Jennifer Bowers, Carrie Wall, and Sharon Masick, without their help, because I'm such a newbie to the organization. This presentation will not be brought to you. Next, please. Okay. So just a very high-level overview of what NCEI is and its value to the nation. A lot of you are aware of the data stewardship that NCEI provides. We provide the archives for ocean atmospheric data from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun. And we also provide a range of products from hourly to decadal timescales and cover local to geographic locations. The expertise that we have in-house, we have two science divisions and three support divisions, two support divisions, and the data stewardship division, of which is the archive, which most of you are familiar with. But we have a plethora of expertise from geophysicists, marine geologists, to space weather scientists, to climate scientists, people that focus in paleo, climatology, aerosols, coastal inundation, a lot of expertise within house. And moving on the far right of this graph, you'll see a pie chart that shows you our stakeholders by section. And one thing that you'll note is that the bulk of our stakeholders are external to the NOAA enterprise, which means that we have a lot of stakeholders in the ecosystem, agriculture, agriculture, transportation, insurance is a big one, education and emergency management. So we produce a lot of higher order products that benefit these stakeholders. Next, please. Karen, just a quick note, we're not able to advance your slides right now. I just wanted to let you know that the room can't see your slides at this moment. Oh, you can? Okay. Would you like me to share my screen? I actually think we have it. If you're looking online, you're okay. My apologies. Okay, so we're all good, Karen, go ahead. Okay, okay. Next, thank you. Okay, so a lot of you have heard the new blue economy. So the question is, is what is new and what is blue about it? The ocean economy we're all aware of is comprised of navigation, exploitation of those natural resources, tourism is another activity, fishing, et cetera. There's a lot of things that go into the existing ocean economy and what makes it new and blue is that what we're trying to do is we're trying to focus on economic growth within that sector, but also have components of social inclusion and make sure that it's sustainable and that it improves the livelihood of people around us. So as far as how this will benefit the public-private partnership is it's an intersection of technology, data, and information are coming together to catalyze this. And what are the benefits of that? How does that play out? We'll see that in the next slide. Okay, thank you. So the new blue economy was founded on capabilities of acquiring data and developing information that will enable the nation to spur responsible long-term economic growth while the idea is protecting ocean health, human health, and ensuring social equity. And here what you can see is we have three areas. It's three legs of the stool per se. It's propping up ocean health because we want to make sure that it is a sustainable development of the new blue economy. And the three areas are research or science, policy, that's all that's how we can inform decisions of management, resource management, and venture-based, there we go, venture-based innovation. So the venture-based innovation is where we are focusing today. And those are innovation workforce and application. In the innovation, we're focusing on areas like we want to increase our coastal observations for a variety of applications. We want to make sure that all this data is accessible and available to the public. As Henry mentioned in his previous talk, he brought up the fair principles of data management. We definitely want to follow that. Another thing is this can't happen in a vacuum. We need to make sure that we're adequately engaging with the stakeholders and the public out there so that we need to know that what we're doing is benefiting the economy. And we are spurring innovation and increasing that public-private partnership. Lastly, a lot of this is based on a foundation of research and experimentation. But none of this can happen without the workforce. So that's one of the big roles of the new blue economy is developing a workforce that is able to support this new blue economy. Which means that we will need data managers. We'll need computer scientists. We're going to need people who have expertise in cloud computing. We're going to need a whole slew of scientists. We're going to need pilots for unmanned systems. We're going to need manufacturing sector. It's almost endless the applications as far as how the workforce expansion can grow. And of course it is just going to depend upon how we manage the resources of the new blue economy. And lastly, all of this needs to come together. The science and the research come together and influence our policy on how we're managing it. Next. Okay. So the case studies I wanted to focus on is looking at unmanned systems. And here's the region of where we're kind of forming this nexus for unmanned systems. And you'll see that there's a lot of activity going on here in the Gulf of Mexico, the northern Gulf of Mexico around unmanned systems. We have an innovation district that's located in Gulfport. We have USM campuses. We have Stennis. And of course there is also laboratories. There is a number of unmanned systems and that are being developed here along the coast. Along with a lot of data processing and coastal data management capabilities. Next. So who are the players? These are some of the players that are active here in the Gulf. Inside the circles, those are the dashed line. Those are the current players that are active in that Gulf, the Gulfport Innovation Center and are spearheading a lot of these efforts in the northern Gulf of Mexico. And the logos that intersect with the dashed lines are part of a current cohort pilot project for Vincent to fund six venture capitalist companies in Blue Economy developed. And it has to do with technology develop of unmanned systems. And further out, we move more away from the local area. We move into companies that are already existing in this uncrewed arena and are established and are competing. Next. Okay, so what are we doing here? We're building a regional Blue Economy Nexus per se. In this area, it's not so much that it's an application, but it's trying to build the workforce. USM has a training program going on for unmanned systems. I believe it's the first of its kind in the nation. And we're building partnerships to develop the capability to increase the collection of observations for more environmental observations for longer times and in harsher conditions. Areas where it's too difficult to send a ship out or too costly to send a ship out. And of course, we're promoting data driven decisions to foster that innovation. Some of the benefits to stakeholders and when I say stakeholders, this is the public. This is, these are the technology companies. These are researchers, scientists, resource managers are the data to support decision making in public interest. For instance, we can provide data on sectors from pipelines to wind farms, fisheries, weather, and just any kind of plain exploration. For example, South Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, the charts for NOAA producers are very valuable to the commercial and recreational fisheries and aquaculture sector. And as you'll note in the middle image that red unmanned system, they're utilizing unmanned systems currently for doing that kind of mapping for charts. Another is the data is open to the public. NCEI takes this data in and also refines it and makes more advanced products. As I mentioned previously, when I was speaking to that stakeholder sector to make it available so that decisions can be made on this. One example is the world ocean database of which my colleague Tim will be speaking to in the next presentation. Another is to promote workforce development and technology. The whole idea is to bring jobs to the local and regional area through this regional nexus and unmanned systems. And out of all these benefits, it creates some opportunities that we can look to the future to expand this. And some of those are the technology development and transition going from research to operations. That seems like a pretty straightforward area, but it's actually quite complicated to take it from the research to operations. So there are some areas where we need to focus there. We also, as I mentioned, the workforce development, we have a need for pilots and drone operators. We also have a large need for data managers to people that have experience in managing large sets of data, writing computer code, and particularly with migration to the cloud and AI ML learning. We also have, there's an opportunity for rapidly advancing data science skills, and that is something that I'll speak to more on one of the insides next. So expanding this unmanned system test case, we could take it from a regional nexus where we're developing capabilities in this region to a national application. And one of the national applications for unmanned systems is using it for fisheries monitoring to make informed decisions and data driven decisions on things such as stock assessments. This application is scalable. It allows us to go from a local to regional to, excuse me, regional to national to global scale. We can also monitor habitats and water quality. Water quality that we're looking at monitoring with unmanned systems is a whole slew of things that are costly and expensive to do if we put out a buoy or have to go out there manually sample. We can cover a lot larger areas and that would be water quality, sea surface temperature, salinity, DO, these are dissolved oxygen concentrations, a whole slew of things that it makes it easier to do with an unmanned system than if we were to do manually sampling. Another thing is we can minimize our interaction with protective species. Turtles is a fun example through telemetry monitoring. So we're remotely monitoring them and we can telemetry that data, meaning it's transmitted to satellite and we wouldn't have to have a direct interaction with that species. We could do that through use of passive and active acoustics. And lastly, this all comes together and it's going to help us with to assess population size and determine prey abundance. The good example of that are the rice wells. So that's a good application for that. Over this will support different stock assessments such as HAKE in the West Coast, Atlanta Cod, here in the Gulf of Mexico, Snapper, Shrimp, Gruper, those are three examples of where we can apply this, this fleet of unmanned system technology to manage our fisheries. So what are some of the benefits of this? I would say some of the benefits of this are we do get this increased in this exponential increase in data collected signals in regional water. So it's going to allow us to have a better indication of what the ecosystem is and what kind of stocks it will support. As I mentioned, we could do the water quality mapping. So that's going to couple with use that for determining what kind of conditions will support. Another thing is the expansion of workforce. I think I mentioned that before on the regional. This is something that I cannot stress enough that this is a new area, a new emerging technology. It's been in the development stages for probably 10, 15 years, but that's relatively new as far as earth system monitoring. And so we really need to develop a workforce that has experience in piloting these unmanned systems, monitoring the data, processing the data, writing code for it. There's a never ending need there. Along, of course, we need oceanographers to look at the data and tell us what's going on, biologists, fisheries, fisheries specialists. There's a lot of need for workforce development there. So some of the facts about fisheries that I thought were kind of interesting and this shows you the potential for the scalability goes back to our first benefit of scalable from a regional, national to a global. We had a seven people depend upon ocean as a primary source of protein. So that's a significant market sector per se, if you're going to look at it from an economic standpoint, 2.5 trillion annually. This is the ocean contributions to the economy and 600 million. That's the worldwide number of livelihoods that depend upon at least partially on fisheries and aquaculture. So that's a huge market sector at any company that's looking to expand in this can just look at these numbers and realize that there is a market sector out there. Next, next slide please. So another application is more has more of a global impact. I mentioned the fisheries on a national impact because fisheries are managed on on a national and a regional level. There's something that are exclusive to our EZ. Excuse me, my light just went out on a global impact. We can use unmanned systems to to have a discernible impact on monitoring marine weather observations. And an example of this would be disseminating data in real time from unmanned systems to the global community for numerical weather prediction and natural hazard detection. We work with our global partners at the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the International Hydrographic Organization to collect this data and make this data available in real time or near real time so that it can provide a benefit to numerical weather prediction centers globally all around the world. Some some benefits of collecting this kind of observations for marine weather include process studies process studies are the unmanned systems are ideal for process studies to inform the needs for a longer term observations. A good example would be measuring air or sea surface temperature to understand how the tropical Pacific impacts global weather as well as climate and how hurricanes form in the Genesis region of the eastern tropical Pacific. These would be ideal for that where you might not be able to sustain a long term observing system out there but you could send out an unmanned system. Another example that is benefits to stakeholders are data buys so we don't have to actually go out and build the infrastructure within NOAA or within NCI to do this we could buy the data from a commercial sector and provide that. It allows for more flexibility and it's also a shorter spend up time and versus developing the developing that capacity in house and another benefit from using unmanned systems for marine weather observations are they provide a rapid response capability. You can be at the right place at the right time a good example of this would be driving one of these into the center of the storm, which has been done previously. AOML one of the NOAA labs sent one into a hurricane I think it was a year or two ago and was able to collect observations within the within a hurricane and previous to that the possibility of a the probability that a hurricane is going to go over one of your observing assets in the ocean is very minimal in institute assets so here we have the capability of directing them to the storm versus. I'm waiting to see if the storm goes over the asset. Another unknown fact about these is that they're also they promote environmental sustainability of observing systems and methods, they have a lower impacts than a lot of the current than the institute current observing methods. The National Weather Service National Data Buoy Center recently replaced a mooring in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary that was causing scouring to the benthic layer from its anchor with an unmanned system. And so there's no impact there it's a low impact in that area, and we still collect the data that is provided to the global marine weather infrastructure. So the opportunities what are their opportunities here for marine weather observations. We're living in a changing climate we know that there's a big market need for more observations of whether whether it's over the land or in the ocean. In order to do that we need to have technology innovation some of the limitations currently are the duration that these can go out the distance that they can go. How long they can be out in the water and of course the operating envelope some of them don't do so great in high currents or high wind conditions. So there's those type of things to consider and that's areas where public private partnership can intersect and stimulate technology in innovation. And once again is the inexperienced workforce there's very much a need this is the third time I've hit on this is the need for workforce development and capability in the unmanned systems area operators data managers people interpreting the data. So it's definitely an emerging workforce need. Some other opportunities are cost the cost of these can vary but some of them are actually quite cost effective and would in compared to a long term observing platform so that's something that as we develop them more ideally the cost would come down and then it would be rolled back into more. Private public partnerships we'd be able to put more money into the private sector as the cost comes down that that goes back to the data buys. Next slide please. I'm just going to say the last thing is data landscape. So the data landscape is changing and we need data managers because we're going to get a lot of data coming out of this. And the data from this is like I said from the regional to the global level. This is my last slide. Thank you. Thank you. Okay we'll move on to our picker is Tim Boyer. Thank you. I'm Tim Boyer. Karen's colleague at NCEI and I'll be expanding on some of the themes for the blue economy. I gave it a little different title to focus on those themes collaboration all along the instrument information chain as an oceanographer acutely aware that there are not enough measurements in the ocean that we don't have enough measurements. We don't have enough data to understand the ocean, not historically not presently. And when we do have data as we do have a lot more data than we had previously. It's a struggle to go from data to to actual information research or monitoring or or usable policy information or policy ready information I should say. So I'm going to that that that's this is a global task. It's not. And it's also a a task that can only be accomplished with public private partnerships. Next slide please. So, to drive that home this the UN decade of the ocean we are in the UN decade of the ocean for sustainable development. And I did finally get a communication from someone from the UN decade coordination office talking about public private partnerships but I didn't have time to put it in in this slide but Luis Demersen emailed me today to say that of the 300 actions in the UN decade of the ocean, more than half have some type of public partnership private partnership already, and there's actually a specific office set up to facilitate public private partnerships. So the UN decade of the ocean is a good way to facilitate partnerships and it's set up to sustain the these public private partnerships for for the seven decade outcomes which include productive productive ocean. Next please. Our own particular one of our actions in the UN decade is what I'm involved in which is the world ocean database, which is kind of a an aggregation and data to information point for for oceanographic data we have the oceanographic observing which which feeds the data into the NCI archive and that's that's where all that data is preserved and then from from there the world ocean database aggregates all the data from all the different observing systems. And I should specify that I'm speaking of the subsurface ocean, most specifically although the surface, this applies to the surface as well. The world ocean database integrates these different sources from global temperature and salinity profile program, our goal more to raise ships gliders. Anything animals with with instruments instruments mounted on animals, anything that we can get and synthesizes that enhances it common format metadata and assess the quality of the data, and then make it available to the community and also make information to the world ocean Atlas, which are benefits to the nation and globally. And so with this we're trying to meet the goal of the UN decade, which, which are contingent on the ocean monitoring on equitable data access and on tools for transforming that data into accessible information. Next please. So this this is this is historical database and so the data go actually all the way back to 1772, but for most of the time we these data have come from ships from instruments on different ships from mainly from research vessels, merchant ships and, and so on. And you can see a big bump up a little bit after 2000. That is this is somewhat of a golden age of ocean observations you have the Argo floats. In purple there you have the gliders that both Karen and Henry mentioned on unmanned systems. You have pinnipeds, you have more buoys. So we are in the golden age, it's still not enough data but it is at the same time a fire hose of data coming in. Next please. And so where the public private partnerships fit in there. So, so a lot of those data, the ship data do come from merchant ships. Anyone who works on the ocean merchant ship companies and so on have a high interest in understanding the ocean Karen mentioned that a lot of the marine global meteorology information and a lot of that from ship based comes from merchant ships, but also for the from the ocean, even subsurface ocean, a lot of data comes from merchant ships. And because the merchant ship fleet and the owners have a an interest in the ocean that's that goes beyond self interest even in weather forecasting and ocean currents and so on, just to an understanding the ocean. And this is an example the only under it's a merchant ship that was actually retrofit, they allowed researchers to drill a hole in the ship, and to put some special oceanographic instruments for 45 years. The only under has been part of this public private private partnership to to measure the ocean you can see in the lower left there. That's those are expendable bathy thermograph lines across the Gulf stream from the only under 45 years worth a gold mine of information on the bottom right there we also have kind of the other end, we have actual private institutes that have been set up that maintain their own research vessel, and they do contribute the data that's that they measure to to the the general public access. In this case, the Falcor and Falcor to all the Falcor I'm not sure the Falcor to is part of the National Science Foundation's rolling deck to repository so those data are part of the public record. Next, please. And other. This is another example. This is a data exchange agreement with private companies that this is from 2012. And on the left you see this is a memorandum of understanding between Noah and shell and and other oil companies that are we're exploring on the on the shelf on on the Alaskan slope where it's very difficult and costly to get research ships up there, they're taking information. So this information was shared with Noah and then publicly shared through the World Ocean database and through the archive. So there's a public benefit to this and there's also a benefit to the oil companies in that we take their data, and we compile with all the other source data and then provide it in a quality control form back so they, they get a whole picture not just their data but a whole picture of the area of their interest and publicly, there is a much augmented understanding of those areas. And so I'm going to talk a lot about the Argo program because this is the the main subsurface ocean observing system right now and you see it on the top right merchant ships any ships are fantastic but they're going along shipping lines, and even research ships don't take a lot of data in in the winter in either hemisphere. Argo floats are autonomous profiling floats that have been developed and have been operating for about 25 years now. And it is, they have only been operating and only been able to keep costs within within possible bounds by collaborations private public collaborations. And you see here, the instruments, the solo to on the far left that was developed as scripts Institute of Oceanography that was one of the, well, it is one of the main floats that's out there. But really, to be cost effective, we need a commercial manufacturer. And so there's been a partnership with MRV systems to manufacture these floats and floats that were also developed at Woods Hole. And you can see that the sensors on top the CTD sensors have also been developed with public private private partnerships in close collaboration with seabird. And with RBR, I'm sorry, I don't know what RBR stands for I couldn't even find it on their website, I used to know, but it's become one of those acronyms, that is, is the word now. So, this is this is another example of public private partnership. Next, please. And this is ongoing right now a new float is is being produced in collaboration with Steve Reiser and the University of Washington and and seabird the excuse me and MRV systems. And so this is the next generation of floats, and it can can handle biogeochemical sensors, which is the that originally Argo was temperature and salinity but now there's biogeochemical floats and these instrumentations are extremely expensive and and difficult to to to maintain. And so this partnership with MRV is is getting the next, the next generation of the BGC Argo floats out there and hopefully keeping costs down and keeping up quality of the commercial manufacturer. Next, and this is through I really should mention this is through the National Ocean Partnership Program, which has developed most of the facilitated most of the development of the Argo instrumentation, or much of it I should say next please. And so this is biogeochemical the sensors. So nitrate sensors here and this is Ken Johnson of Marine Marine Bay Aquarium Research Institute Steve Reiser of University of Washington, in conjunction with with with commercial in this this case again seabird, and they've developed this biogeochemical sensor for nitrate, which is extremely important for understanding the ocean system. They're also carbon sensors out there, which will help us understand the the carbon cycle and other sensors and so this was developed. You see on the right this is the seabird specs page now these are out there and then they're starting to to be used. Next please. Thank you Richard, rank or research. And this this is another type of collaboration and this is with the Argo is extremely difficult to maintain a much much easier than going out on the ship and getting these measurements, but seating the Argo floats and maintaining them developing the instrumentation and deep Argo. Most Argo floats go to about 2000 meters deep Argo is is full depth of the ocean and we need that to understand the changes in the earth's energy imbalance and the heat and the current changes in the deep ocean. And the Paul Allen Foundation saw this as as an important, a really important scientific question, and has actually funded the deployment of these these Argo deep Argo floats off of the off off of the Brazil basin. And so this is extremely important because it is difficult to get even for a program like Argo to get the funding to to develop the Argo array, the deep Argo array. Of course, the maintenance of the Argo array will still be the responsible the Argo program. Next please. And so moving on. So this is a lot of getting the instrumentation developed and and taking the measurements. So now we need to get those measurements out to to the public. And this is where the, this is the NOAA, this is the NOAA open data dissemination. And this is a public private partnership with with the three through with three cloud providers with with Amazon Web Services with Microsoft Azure, and with Google Big Query. The easiest way now to get data out is is through the cloud, but there are costs associated with that. But so the not is working with the cloud providers so that they, they allow for those data sets that they see as environmentally important and also for which they then can incorporate into their search engines into their artificial intelligence and so on, allowed for the free input and output of these these data. Next please. Tim, I'm just going to give you the time check as well. Yeah, sorry about that. I'll, I'll, I'll try to zip through these fast. So this is actually, we are able to the world ocean databases now available through Amazon Web Services in the cloud free free and open access through the not. So this is a great public partnership for for getting the data accessible and equity equitably accessible to everyone. Next please. And so finally okay the data is out there, but we at least my group doesn't have the the resources to to to we do make the world ocean Atlas which is one step in getting from all of those data into a coherent information and that can be used by models and so on. But the next step really communicating that information to to the public to the users. We don't have a great facility for that. And so there's a public private partnership. It's not actually ours. It's use geological service with Esri a private company and they've developed ecological marine units which take in the world ocean Atlas information which uses the world ocean database information from from the ocean observing system and they take it a step further, both in into a tailored product for customers that that they are aware of that that need this something called ecological marine units which will help them make and assess ecological areas in the ocean. So this is a public private partnership for that last step, really going from data to information that that consumers can use. That's, that's what I have next. Oh, I do have a summary but I'll just leave it up there. Thank you. Thank you. And then we have one last speaker in the session, Dr. Amisha Campbell. She's the assistant vice president of the research and economic development at Jackson State University. She'll be talking to us without slides on partnerships with and assess technology innovation and partnership. Thank you so much and thank you for having me here and I see my buddy. Dr. Gordon here. Hi, Dr. Gordon. Good to see you. One of the things that as I listened to the presenters before me and the innovation and the technologies that they're discussing is how do we ensure that these technologies are protected and also that how do we deploy them within the new blue economy to impact economic development. And one of the things that we have been working, Jackson State has been working with USM on for a number of years is how do we work on and helping these emerging technologies that would impact the new blue economy. So we started with the Build Back Better program, working with them through our NSF iCore program that was mentioned earlier, teaching the lean startup methodology to some of the teams there at USM, working with the early stage technologies and through all those efforts we have been able to have many successes. Some of those successes will be, of course, collectively in our collaboration as the Mississippi Research Consortium, working with our state legislators and our institution of higher learning to find seed funds that can support these emerging technologies. So from the private-public partnership with the Mississippi Smart Business Act of giving credit to companies that work with universities on research, they can get a rebate back. But we also looked at the other side of it. How do we support those early technologies that are coming out of our universities to impact our ecosystem? And so we now have what we call the SMART Accelerate, and that gives up to $150,000 in funding to support some of these early stage technologies that are coming from our institutions that we consider state-owned IP, which is state-owned intellectual property. So as we work through some of those nuances at first of not having the funding, and now we have some opportunities where we do have some funding to do some of these work and to impact what's happening. Working with them as well and the Blue Navigator program and looking at how we support in those companies that are getting those investment to come to the coast and work in the new blue economy. And doing the training, the entrepreneurial training that's needed, making sure that they have what they need to pitch in front of investors. We're getting them ready now to come to Jackson State University for the SBIR Road Tour. They'll be able to talk to program officers on the SBIR and STTR side to see how they can develop their proposals to get some of those follow-on funding to support those technologies. Because the whole idea is we want these technologies to be based in the state of Mississippi. We also want those companies to relocate in the state of Mississippi. And so whatever we can do with those resources, the training as well as helping to find the follow-on funding is some of those things that we've done. And I'm proud to say that in a short space of time that we've been able to win not only the Phase 1 of the Build Back Better program that was funded to EDA, but we were able to win the new program by the National Science Foundation, which is the NSF Engines Type 1. It's a $1 million Phase 1 for us to see the feasibility of us running an engine in the state of Mississippi, covering from down the coast all the way up to the some northern parts of Mississippi. And with that program, so far we're looking at our different stakeholders. We're looking at what we need in the new blue economy in terms of the technologies that are needed. And this whole topic is around food and water security. And of course, you know, all of that, we will be looking at aquaculture. We will be looking at healthcare. We would also look at export. So we're talking to companies like Dole and others in how they can support the work that is happening here in the state of Mississippi and among our two institutions. We also with USM leading has now won one of the newest program by the National Science Foundation, which is the Accelerating Research Technology Program or NSF Art. And that's a $6 million program that was funded to University of Southern Mississippi. So I give them very good kudos for the hard work they're doing to ensure that we have the resources that are necessary to make sure that the companies that are relocating to the Gulf Coast, as well as the technologies that are developed are successful. And that they really get towards impacting society because everything we do is about societal impact. And then comes behind that is those investments that will come into the state and help develop our economic systems here in the state of Mississippi. So I wanted to bring those pieces out because a lot of times when we are talking about these new technologies that are developed, sometimes we fail to think about what can we develop in the state, what can we develop to solve some of the problems that we are having, whether it be in the ocean systems or whether it be in other areas that may impact the new blue economy. And so we are looking at some of the lessons we learned during that is that understanding that there are different types of technologies that are going to come through that may impact ocean science and how do we address those different areas. As no one mentioned AI before, I was listening to a podcast and the conversation around government is not regulating AI, right? They haven't had conversations about AI. Now is it too soon to have those conversations? We know the impact of AI when it comes to anything we are doing in terms of technology, when it comes to movement of people, when it comes to the ocean, when it comes to other areas. And how do we use that? I know the conversations going on about who owns the intellectual property when AI is involved, that's completely different. But how do we use these new tools and technologies to impact and enhance the work that is taking place in the new blue economy? And how do we support those early stage technologies and to support the workforce that's going to be needed to do some of the things that we're trying to do? Because everything we think about, even though we have AI, there has to be a human component behind that to drive those data, to put those data incorrectly and train that AI tool in order to make sure that what comes out of it, it's accurate. The AI will not operate without that human element providing that input that's needed. We've seen a lot of new technologies coming out. I will give kudos to my partner in Chrome, the USM, and the Office of Innovation Management, who really has his hands on the polls about what's taking place. Everything from the on-cruise systems to all the way up to the species in the ocean, looking at those technologies, looking at the faculty that are developing those technologies and making sure that they're provided with the resources that are needed. And not only are we looking at funding from our federal partners like NOAA, National Science Foundation, NASA, and others, but we're looking to our companies that are investing in the economy and seeing how we can partner with them to develop new technologies, how we can get workforce development opportunities for our students and sometimes our faculty as well. But I think with all that is happening, those conversations about making sure that we have the right workforce, make sure the talent is there in the different spaces that we need would be critical. And that's why those funding that we are receiving from the federal government to do the training, the entrepreneurial training and the commercialization training, that we are staffing up our offices to provide that support. Because the technologies that are happening, we have to make sure the technologies are working the way they need to do. We make sure the protection is there and then how do we deploy those technologies to have that positive impact. And so now we have, I would say for the first time in a long time, and must thank the Chips and Science Act and must plug here our Senator Wicker for champion that Chips and Science Act on behalf of the state of Mississippi and the ex-school states to make sure that we have that funding. And not only that we have that funding that we are able as state institutions to compete for those funding as well. So again, as a recap, some of the lessons learned is understanding that we need the human capital to help us do some of this work, understanding the different type of technologies and how do we work with those technologies. Some of the technologies have a social component to them that we now have to pivot and be able to help train social entrepreneurs to do some of this work. We also making sure that we have the resources to scale up because before we can serve certain capacity but now we have scaled up with the resources that we have and the training of our new staff that's on board and we're happy about that. And then of course, as we are recruiting companies into the Gulf Coast, making sure that they have what's needed to stay in the Gulf Coast and to stay in Mississippi setting up their business headquarters. So I think collectively with the team that's surrounding the efforts that are taking place in the Gulf Coast that we have a solid partnership. We have company support and we also have support from our federal partners. So definitely have to give kudos to all those different public-private partnerships that are taking place. And that's necessary for us to really have a meaningful impact in the new blue economy because we, Brian and I talk a lot about when people talk about the blue economy, they often forget about the tech side of it. And that we have to make sure we have those tools and resources that will be able to accelerate process. And I'll step back and say, you know, for someone who more on the tech-based side, a lot of people do not know that six years of my career was in the shipping industry, right? So that's what my love is. And so having to do this partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi, it gives me that opportunity to go back to my first love of being on the dock and seeing the ships and looking at the tools and resources that they use in that process. And if you're old as me or older, you remember the tele-fax machine that you had to type to the ships and say, stop, next, you know, little words as possible so you don't spend too much money. That's how we learn. But now there are new tools and resources that can be used to really manage the operations and the export process within the shipping industry. So with that, I'll stop there and just say thanks again for this opportunity. This is a space that I really love working with and I'm glad to have, you know, the tools and resources as well as the partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi and the Office of Innovation Management to really help these companies and these technologies that are coming in the Gulf Coast region. Thank you so much. Thank you. So we have time for some questions. There's quite a few questions in the chat. I'm going to call a tuba's model in order to elevate the committee questions first and maybe hear some voices we haven't heard yet. So there's a question from Chris. If you'd like to go ahead and have. When I wrote this, it was initially for Henry, but really any of the speakers might have comments. I saw how academia can be a critical connector in public private partnership, but I wonder if these were happening in your experiences more because of some initial individual connections that are already there. You know, someone they, they, you know, all of those things that are sort of happy chance for our specific strategy implemented to identify and bring multi-sector groups together and launch these partnerships. So here we have the third Wednesday night of each month we have the Gulf Blue Navigator networking event and it brings people from government and from academia and from industry all together because I do think initially it is just who do you know and having those conversations. That is part one. And then part two is having the infrastructure and the practices in place and some experience and connecting all those from a contracting and grant and collaboration perspective. What do you need them both. Thank you. And I'll make sure it's him. Do you want to comment there. I agree the networking is is key and I'm getting involved. Yes. Absolutely. And if you've been working in also if you've worked in the area in the arena, it helps too because you build a lot of you build a lot of connections that way. I wonder to professionals that play any role in the development. Or with that look on your face and thinking. Doesn't see it seems like those tend to be siloed a month that might just thinking is about like the marine technology society. So that's a good that's a good example. I'd say there are some exceptions like the marine technology technologies that technology is a good example of maybe the exception to the role. It does seem like for the most part they just those things can maintain silos. So the next question, certainly for me. And I think this is one that any other panel is going to address and I'm wondering if you all have to continue this conversation about networking. Do your thoughts on developing teamwork, teaming frameworks and proposal submission models for us to consider maybe as a recommendation to NSF to help us focus on use inspiration and ultimately increase the use of fundamental funded science. I will start off and answering that we currently have a program that is funded by the National Science Foundation is for translational research and we teach in team science so we bring in faculty right now from the different institutions in the state. And they go through a series of workshops together working together figuring out how to collaborate and working on major proposals together as a team to impact that interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary standpoint, but also looking at a grand topic. So right now the team is working on food security and the next cohort will be working on resilience. Oh. Other thoughts here. Could, could you repeat I'm having a difficult time hearing from the room. The question was that was on developing team teaming frameworks and proposals for submissions to NSF to focus on use inspiration and ultimate success of fundamental ocean research. I, it is difficult. I have tried to, to join or initiate proposals through through the knob, or as well as through the UN decade and I don't have an answer, a good answer for you, but because I, I have not been able to to finish. I don't have the. I don't know how best to team, and it's been very difficult, at least from the government side to find ways to team with with NSF and with with with private organizations. I know the knob is very successful and a very good way to do that. But I, I guess I would turn, turn the question around, and, and, and ask. I need help on that as well. So, I don't have a good answer. We have a couple of questions from Pete and Allison kind of on them the same nexus. Do you want to ask yours. What about Allison? Thanks. The question was when considering the advantage of the public private partnership, what are some of the biggest challenges to establishing and maintaining these partnerships and then as a follow on, I had asked, what are your biggest recommendations for successful partnerships to be maintained. So, biggest challenges in or strongest recommendation for insurance is that So, I think that the previous question also hits on one of the biggest challenges, which is getting the teams created. Often the biggest problem is there's a deadline and just getting the meeting set and the agreements and the paperwork and so forth. There's a lot of energy initially and then you just sort of put the pieces together and decide I don't think we can get this done by the deadline at all. And what frequently happens is you have some set of entities who have done something in the past and so the paperwork is already put in place and so those are the easy partners to continue to work with, which is fine in one sense but it makes it difficult for new entrants in the ecosystem because they just don't have any of that in place and makes it hard if not impossible to be a team member in a timely fashion. And so I would recommend just like what I understand about what Amisha described a second ago, grow actively putting the teamwork in place before you actually know what the opportunities are going to be. It's just necessary to actually meet the opportunities when they arrive. And academia as my first slide showed is very frequently the best way to do that because it is just about impossible from experience to create teams without something already existing between a small company and the government. But you can have agreements in place between small companies and universities. And which take a little while that they can be put in place proactively so that when the government opportunity comes along the university and its infrastructure is able to respond quickly and bring those. Those industry partners of small businesses in particular. And when there's just nobody could have otherwise. Yeah, I'll speak to that a little more I want from my experience the biggest hurdle has been there's been between public partner part private partnerships has been the time frame within the government side. And actually by the time things are released and we're able to take any kind of action it's a relatively short turnaround and trying to and then coupled with that we have to jump through a number of legal hurdles to enter into any kind of new partnership. So the best thing to do, if you're planning on entering any kind of partnership is you do need to plan in advance and look out to the opportunity may not be available at this time but what can you do if this opportunity becomes available. So that means working to build the teams in advance, and those teams will be comprised of the academic sectors, cooperative institutes, the commercial sectors, and maybe even other governmental sectors, and look at what you can do if this opportunity becomes available versus waiting for the opportunity to become available and then taking action. You definitely have to be proactive. I don't know if you want to leave on schedule. Okay. Okay. Though Tim has his hand up, maybe just give the last word to Tim. Absolutely. This isn't so much the last word but a real difficulty in public private partnerships that I've encountered, especially on the data side is the difference between the need that we have for free public complete public access to data. Yes, there you go. And on the private side more of a proprietary attitude towards it. There you go. Mark, you are unmuted so we can hear your mother. No, that's the. That's the, that's the nub, because you're talking about a very different seascape of private academic government partnerships used to be the private sector was a, you know, they provided the gear. Or maybe they were an outsource recipient to now they're trying to make business on what used to be a government or maybe a government academic partnership. And that's, that's really different than where we've been. And so you have very different values and governance structures in place where companies want to cost schedule and performance and delivering value to investors or shareholders. Academic wanting promotion and tenure government trying to keep Congress happy or their constituents happy, etc. And, you know, just as I put in the, in the chat. How do we make private proprietary data transparent, particularly in terms of quality control and quality assurance. And also, we're for the ocean we're looking at infinite timescales. We're looking for decades and a lot of these little companies. If they go out of business because of market forces, we're left holding the bag and critical time series all of a sudden become not available. Okay, thank you to our panelists appreciate your time. All right, thank you sir. So we, yep. And so for those of you who are online, we will be at one o'clock. This topic of this next panel, I think this committee has been so much my thinking and talking about the topics of inclusivity. And so it really, really important conversation and I'm thrilled that we're having such a robust panel on this topic. And so, Mona, I will hand it over to you. Thank you so much about should I tell me should I unmute myself when I talk or should I just talk just talk just now. Okay, great. Okay, well, thanks. Thanks to all of our, we have a basic panel today everyone. So the thanks to all our panelists for for agreeing and for their willingness to participate in this in this discussion with us and engage with us. We had a couple of cancellations due to a variety of reasons but still we have a pretty solid group of experts here with us. So Christine Chen is from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for Garza from University of Washington, Brandon Jones from the National Science Foundation and Arana from UCLA. And so we, how this is going to work. I am going to drop a link in the chat window to some definitions for diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, accessibility, because these are the terms that we will be using throughout the conversation today. By the way, we have two hours so we can dive deep into this conversation. So, we'll, we'll share some of those definitions. Each of us is going to share a couple of remarks. And then we'll have a couple of discussion questions with the panelists. So I would suggest that you, once again, use Slido to add your questions will take the questions after a specific discussion with with the panel that we had today. So with that, let me first invite Christine. Christine, are you with us. Hello, yes, can folks hear me all right. Yes, we can hear you. Okay terrific. Let me start sharing my slides. Okay, are folks seeing something on the screen. Yes, we are. Okay, fantastic. Hello everyone. Thank you very much to the committee as well as the program organizers for having me here today. For my remarks I'd like to briefly summarize the main results of a paper that me and several others pictured here co authored in 2022. In this paper we examined publicly available data on funding rates by PI race and ethnicity at the National Science Foundation from 1999 to 2019. And we found evidence of persistent racial funding disparities. And after, after this after just providing some high level highlights about this paper, I then like to offer some thoughts about how these funding trends impact science and society. So I look forward to discussing this more with the committee and the other panelists afterwards. So, diving right into the funding trends. Okay, so I think most of us know this NSF received many tens of thousands of proposals each year. And unfortunately the NSF cannot fund them all. And so, like most other funding agencies, the NSF undergoes a merit review process to try to figure out which of these proposals to fund. And over the past two decades, overall funding rates have fluctuated between 22 and 34% due to changing budgets as well as overall proposal submission numbers. Now, despite these year to year fluctuations, when we look at funding rates based on PI race and ethnicity, we see patterns that are sometimes remarkably stable. Here we've normalized fluctuations in overall funding rate to see what differences remain. And we see that proposals by white PIs have been consistently funded above overall rates over this period. In contrast, most other groups appear to be funded below overall rates, most if not all of the time. Black and Asian PIs are consistently funded at lower rates. And you'll notice that some groups experience greater year to year variability than others, specifically for American Indian and Alaska natives in purple and native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders here in orange. Now, that difference has to do with the number of proposals that each group submits. So I'd like to show what these funding disparities represent in that context, in the context of total proposal numbers. To do that, let's just look at one year the year 2019 as an example. I'm going to show you a graphic where each box represents 10 proposals. And that means a five by five square is 250 proposals and then four of those squares together as a block represents 1000 proposals. So in 2019, white PIs submitted 20,000 or so proposals. And this is what that number looks like in terms of boxes. And here's the number of proposals submitted by other groups. Now the overall funding rate in 2019 was 27.4%. If each group were funded at the exact same rate, we'd expect these many awards outlined in black to be granted to each group. So if everyone were funded at this rate, 27.4% in that previous plot that I was showing with all those lines, they would all all those lines would just fall along the 0% relative funding rate line. However, this is what the actual breakdown of awards was for that year. White PIs were funded at a rate of 31.3%, a rate that is higher than all the other groups except for American Indian and Alaska native PIs. And because of the differences in the total number of proposals that are submitted by each group, each percent difference in funding rate has a different impact in terms of absolute award numbers. So for white and Asian PIs who submit the most proposals the funding rate differences represent hundreds of awards and surplus and the deficit. Yes, so this is a snapshot of overall of trends in 2019. I don't have time to go into detail on the other results we found. But I'll just say here that for some years we were able to examine more detailed disaggregated data on trends by proposal type so research proposals versus non research proposals, as well as by scientific discipline or NSF directorate. And when we looked at those more detailed data for those years we found that regardless of proposal type or scientific field, these trends generally remained white PIs are funded above all overall rates, and that rates higher than most other groups regardless of proposal type or scientific field. So, yes, so coming back to this schematic here, if we consider the annual number of awards and surplus and a deficit to each group. For all of the years, not just 2019, you start to see the extent of the cumulative impacts of these funding disparities. This is really a story about cumulative advantages and disadvantages. A back of the envelope calculation using these totals, and the average award size given suggests that this could represent several billions of dollars in unbalanced funding. Given how important funding is to the success of a researcher's career and productivity. It's more than likely that these funding trends have played a huge role in why the racial demographics of stem faculty have not meaningfully improved over the past few decades. These are compounding trends that, again, play an instrumental role in the stagnation of diversifying stem. And I also want to emphasize that these trends, oops, sorry, also impact our body of scientific knowledge. Here it's worth noting that similar racial funding disparities have been reported elsewhere at the NIH, NASA and the UK various philanthropic funders. These trends are widespread. And similar to the NSF at the NIH, they've been happening since at least the year 2000, with no changes to the magnitude of funding gaps for 20 years. At the NIH, they found that topics more commonly proposed by Black PIs like community oriented disease prevention, minority health, and ironically racial health disparities were funded at lower rates compared to other topics. And not only that, they were also underfunded with much smaller grant sizes compared to white PIs. So basically, we know less than what we should know about these particular topics because the funding structures at the NIH were set up to be prioritized such topics. During the pandemic, I read about how racial differences and mortality among COVID hospitalizations were occurring. Say it bluntly, Black and brown people were dying at higher rates compared to white people when affected by COVID. And I can't help but wonder how things might have been different had the NIH managed to close this Black PIs right funding gap over the last 20 years. So I asked the committee to consider these same questions in the context of ocean sciences, in the context of climate change. What don't we know about the ocean because of these funding disparities, racial funding disparities, and what does that mean for which communities benefit or do not benefit from our ocean science research. To end my remarks, I wish to emphasize the following. In the absence of inequalities, our body of scientific knowledge would more closely reflect the spectrum of topics relevant to all of society. And so these racial funding disparities therefore jeopardize the integrity of knowledge as a public good for all. And if we're going to have any chance at eliminating these inequalities to make sure that science doesn't perpetuate or exacerbate existing social inequalities, then we have to go to the root of the problem. And that means we need to reorganize what causes inequality in the first place, which is unequal access to social prestige, insider knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, material resources, money and funding. Okay, so thanks very much. Looking forward to discussing this further. Much gratitude, Christine. Next up, we have Dr. Garza. Take it away, please. Can I share my screen? Yes. One second. You see that? Yes. Great. So thanks for having me here today. So today I'm going to talk to you just about my sort of take our perspective and how I approach working with diversity in the ocean sciences. And so I think some folks are familiar with this paper came out about five years ago. It's Bernard and Cooper doc paper talks about no progress and diversity. And 40 years and really it's a summary of about 40 years of diversity based geoscience programs for minority students in the US and funded by NSF. And this is one of the key figures that you want to take a look at here. And that if you look at the center part here, race and ethnicity, the black line are sort of those who are getting KHD, but who are classified as white. These lines down here are those getting PhDs but come out of groups that are considered minority groups in the US. You actually have to zoom in over here and people see to actually get a better sense of what those trends are like. And you can see for geoscience PhDs, you know, Native American on Hispanic black non Hispanic, right, they're attaining PhDs as much lower rates than other groups that blue liner Hispanic or Latino groups in the US that are attaining PhDs. You can see that that rates still not high. And I've got that red circle there for a reason. There were five Hispanic Latinos who got PhDs in the geoscience. The reason I highlight that I was one of those five so it's helping to put a face to the data in this case here like who is actually getting their PhDs back around that time. So when we talk about, you know, the ocean scientists, we also have to deal with some of the implicit biases that result in the lack of diversity. You know, some of these center around, you know, basic engagement inclusion of who we're bringing in to the ocean sciences resource allocation, power allocating resources, right individuals from different types of groups. And also our academic identity and the currencies, you know, that we work in one of the things that I'm starting to get a bit out of it's just solely focusing on student programs. That's one of the more common things they see whenever I ask when how they're going to deal with their GI issue. It's always they're going to they're going to develop another student program. You see, we have a lot of those. As my colleague Brandon Jones is here today with how you also have to deal with the environment right that you're putting students into as well because we don't improve that we're not going to stay. And so I'll talk a little bit about that in my comments today. We talk about your engagement inclusion. This is usually the first step right for somebody coming into the ocean sciences. You know, often there can be a really unclear understanding by those outside the ocean science. You know, what we actually do, you know, if I were going in a room full of ocean scientists, they're going to describe ocean science is based on their very specific research area that they look at subsurface microbes in particular parts of this paper. You know, I'm a renecologist. I might talk whether I look at Fred or Fred interactions. You might have other colleagues and talk about doing modeling of fishery. So you can get a really unclear impression. But if you look at, for example, the biomedical sciences, they have very clear messaging about what they do. You know, it's messaging that resonates with the student populations that they're trying to get to. And so the other thing that we struggle with is this ineffective messaging and engagement that we have with student front or represented groups, particular that early undergraduate stage. Even some of the imagery that we use is an image that I've been using for a number of years on the left there. It's kind of your classic graduate school brochure, a bunch of guys, you know, hauling heavy gear on an A frame there. You know, I went in Google construction jobs and that's actually the first picture that pops up right there. If you're a student coming from, say a blue collar background where, you know, you have a hit your construction work in your family. These don't look any different right from one another. You're also sending different types of messages right to an individual is looking at this before even get to talk them wanted to have a manual labor. If you're physically disabled, you're out of luck. You have to be a guy. Right. There's all types of messages that you're sending just through the imagery that we use. And because they can often have this lack of community and belonging. If you don't fit into these very specific models, right, that we put out to the world about what it looks, what it means to look like a notion scientists. Right, but even when we get students in the door, they often also struggle with finding their footing in there. It says a paper by Hofstra it all in 2020 it's called the diversity innovation paradox. It's actually talking about to a large extent how once you get graduate students minority backgrounds into graduate programs, they actually when you do a retrospective analysis of their DCs over 40 years. They're actually innovating at much, much higher rates, but they rewarded less often with that rewarding they weren't getting faculty jobs. It was happening when you go back and you analyze that is they were doing work that wasn't the norm for the time so often because they were doing work that different it tended to be grounded in the fact that, oh, because they don't know how we do work in our particular discipline here so they're not actually getting rewarded here. So it's a diverse innovation paradox and that that innovation, it isn't getting recognized until much, much later on that in this case. Yeah, and then resource allocation is another one, you know, where we struggle here. And it's implicit bias pops up, you know, who we collaborate with. Right, we have to talk about the old boys network, you know, I remember any college either tend to be a small series subset of schools that only work with each other right in that realm and so it can be very exclusive. There's a student who receives funding, you know, this just came up in the previous top certain institutions have a tendency to get more funding than others. Even internal barriers that we face, you know, I was at a minority serving institution for the last 15 years of my career in there, and it can actually really tough when you even get the funding in there to actually get the internal resources to support the types of work that you want to do with the funding that she might bring in from an external source. Another way, you know, that this crops up as well as you probably heard this term parachute science, you know, this is a paper by Siphanoutis at all in 2021. And they're actually using the coral reef research to me as an example of where the kind of resource allocation issue right pops up here, where the majority of coral research when you look at publications that's being conducted by Western institutions, an example of the two of the top 10 countries in the world and producing papers on coral research are Germany and Canada, a country that actually they themselves don't have coral reefs right in their territorial waters there. I mean one thing that happens is, is they noted here that local researchers and their knowledge that are often excluded, even though you've got researchers coming in with lots of funding and resources that local knowledge base and the people who have that knowledge are being included and so it creates a resource and accessibility right in equity and what happens is that then feeds into your future hires and the discipline. And so really a big part of what we have to start thinking about is how we reframe our science identity like how we want to actually sort of frame ourselves as scientists. Now I have this quote up here because actually from a colleague of mine. And I had asked him about taking over an education program that I was getting ready to move on for and the feedback I got was I'm not an educator I'm a researcher and I was like well you're absolutely members tends to be part of your job right is also being an educator. Right but this is a photo of a colleague of mine Josh Cohen from Rutgers and he's a really good example of someone who's kind of reframed his identity. A lot of people know him as somebody who's got an active, you know, glider program down in Antarctica is really cutting edge work. You have telemetry work with penguins down there, but he also takes a lot of that and uses it to try to understand like how he can engage audiences in polar sciences. Right this is a program that we ran for a number of years where we were actually taking polar data right from Antarctica and then working with elementary school teachers to help them write craft lesson plans where they could actually use the science of the polar regions. Right to engage, you know, student populations and student groups that wouldn't normally have access to that and so it's really great example of how doing this type of outreach work it actually doesn't sort of cut down on your science right they can actually be seamlessly merged with one another and that's really where we need to start going in the ocean sciences. And so finally, you know, why do we want to change our research model and how we're doing research in the ocean sciences, but one, it improves the diversity of those that we're engaging right and stem as a whole right we're bringing in new perspective. Right new ideas right the solution so the story probably been dealing with for the last few decades might be in a community that you haven't historically engaged with or it might be at a university that you haven't historically. Right engage with and when we do that results in new ways in conducting research and the types of knowledge basis that we can sort of form in the ocean sciences. So thanks and I think I'll be coming back a little later. This thank you so much Corey. Next up we have Brendan. Thank you Mona, I want to get started here. All right, is that visible. Yes. All right, excellent. Thank you so much for the invitation and obviously I'm at NSF. So I'm going to be primarily in listening mode today, but I did want to come with some information as it relates to what we're doing in the directorate for Geosciences around this broadening participation issue. And so what I'll be presenting is not ocean specific, but it is applicable to, you know, all disciplines and stem obviously with the earth system sciences being in the forefront and what we're talking about today. So I'm in a division within the directorate called the rise division and you see that description there. It stands for research innovation synergies and education. And it's the interdisciplinary home. I'll have that a little bit more on a slide coming up for the types of work that are needed around education. Workforce development, but also big issues like climate, global related activities as it relates to earth system science and things of that nature. So I sit with other team members in what is referred to as the education and broadening participation incubator. And so that's what I'll be presenting on today. So the mission of that incubator is all about talent development and broadening participation for the earth system sciences or geosciences. And we have four kind of sub themes or sub areas that we focus on that you see there at the bottom sharing knowledge, applying consistent methods, promoting promising practices and developing innovative ideas. And I would probably say this aligns with what Corey kind of finished his his talk with that we seek to build a community of practice across the earth system sciences to engage in this kind of work and also help develop necessary changes at different levels that will help us take full advantage of all the human capacity that's out there that is needed for the issues that we're facing today. The goals, again, just breaking these down. We seek to and everything that we do in that incubator, whether it be a program or internal activities across the agency is to emphasize broadening participation elements and everything. And oftentimes in the community people are saying, well, this is a or they see broadening participation activities as something extra that they have to do. And as soon as it is categorized that way, it becomes a burden when really there are probably a whole lot of things that people are already doing that just can be elevated. We will say we marketed or rebranded as broadening participation activities, but also there is work that needs to be done to make sure these these elements are raised to the level that they should be interdisciplinary home for broadening participation work. Oftentimes, scientists need to partner with social scientists or educational specialists or those experts that are not in their disciplinary arena. And given that NSF is a federal agency, we are unfortunately still siloed a lot of times by our budget structure as well as some other kind of structural issues. But this particular incubator and rise as a division is a interdisciplinary home for the community. Okay. We will have areas and programs and initiatives that allow the community to submit ideas of proposals and engage with us to move things forward. So we are excited about it being an interdisciplinary home. Also, the information dissemination in place for innovation gets to that latter point I made about building a community of practice. We see rise and specifically for what we're talking about today. We see our education and broadening participation incubator as a virtual maker space where the ideas can come in and the resources are available in an equitable way and everyone has a voice. Everyone has a value. And we just come into brainstorm and then move things forward. So, programmatically, when it comes to our ecosystem, I'll use that word, we have several flagship programs and then we have other smaller initiatives that connect to the ecosystem to build this full more holistic approach to supporting students. And some of what I will say basically repeats what Corey was saying about the necessity for building an inclusive or welcoming culture. So we have 3 main thrust in our ecosystem career development champions and then culture and career development is more about the traditional preparing of undergrads graduates or those that are early careers and upskilling them and moving them into the workforce. Champions is about the professional development needed for many individuals like yourselves who are already established experts in their fields in different entities, different parts of the research enterprise. But what is it maybe that we did not receive in our academic training or even our professional training that has us misaligned with the needs of the early career folks that are coming in now in 2024 and moving on. And then the culture piece is like what Corey was mentioning. What is it about how we're socializing and where we're socializing our early career people into academia, federal, private, nonprofit, what have you in the research enterprise and that is not welcoming or things that can be changed to allow them to bring all of who they are so that they can be fully engaged in the work that is necessary. And with that we have 3 flagship programs that touch on each one of these main thrust for career development. We have the geopaths program that is temporarily paused. But we are and stay tuned because we want to engage with the community to develop the next phase of geopaths. It's almost 10 years old. So we're kind of at this decadal review point in the program. For developing champions, even at the institution level, as well as the faculty level or expert level, we have the golden program and that is still stands for geoscience opportunities for leadership and diversity. That's still viable. And for the last 2 years, we had the cultural transformation in geoscience community program. Which focused on the culture of the geoscience is that's currently suspended because we are working on a new initiative, which I can't really talk about in detail that takes CTGC or this culture program to the next level. So last few slides. I wanted to pull out a prime example from 1 of our golden or actually a golden suite of awards. We made a couple of years ago. These were eager awards. And so if you're unfamiliar, those are kind of the exploratory awards. A mechanism that we use at NSF and we make the suite of awards. You see the column on the all the way on the right. These are the institutions that those awards went to. But across the top, you see the themes that each of the projects focused on is some projects focused on multiple themes, but I wanted to highlight those 2 kind of in the middle in that goal highlight. Most of the projects we're looking at mentorship, which is what we wanted to see in an alliance with the program goals of golden professional development at that expert or mentor advisor professor level. But the institutional policy projects we are keeping a close eye on. These are projects that are looking at institutional policies related to tenure and promotion related to workload and the disproportionate weight that in academia that workload falls on women and faculty of color. And what tenure and promotion values beyond publications and grant dollars, all the other work that is necessary. And as Corey mentioned, the individual said, well, I'm not a, you know, I'm a researcher. I'm not an educator or whatever that statement was. So looking at our value systems and that's 1 thing that I would like to emphasize for the committee to think about what what is it about our value systems and the ratings and rewards that can be adjusted. So finishing up the last 2 things. As I mentioned in our ecosystem, we have the programmatic ecosystem. We have these main projects, but we also have a suite of projects to fill in the gaps so that we are doing our best not to leave leaky places in the ecosystem where people can fall out. And so we have several supplement programs for veterans for people with disabilities in the geosciences for post backs who have finished their bachelors, but maybe haven't really decided to move on to grad school yet. We don't want them to slip out. So we have a mechanism to catch them at that post back phase. And we also have an experience for teachers and we see that as part of building those champions that can help seal up the cracks and build out the community. So the last slide. I just wanted to leave this as consideration for all of us. If you don't know Gus, Beth, he's an environmental lawyer. I think he was 1 of the founders of the national research defense council. I think I have to go back and look, but anyway, this quote resonates with me and I try to use it as much as I can. And basically Gus is saying he used to think early in his career that it was all about the natural and physical focus on the natural physical system and the research science that is traditional. But what he's realizing now that it's really about the individuals. It's about our perspectives as humans. And it's about what we bring to the research enterprise that will help other humans be optimized so that we can take advantage of the full human capacity to address these issues as I mentioned before. So I'll stop there and look forward to the conversation. Many thanks, Brandon. And next we have a lot of welcome. We can see your presentation or you have to do with yourself. Great. Can you hear me now. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks. All right. We go. Yeah, so thanks for your time today. My name is Rodna Tripati. My pronouns are she they I'm a professor at UCLA where my expertise is in paleo oceanography, paleo climate and geochemistry. I have also worked with others here to found the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, which focuses on reparative climate action and environmental justice. One part of the center CDLS oceans is focused on equity and ocean sciences and ocean justice. Part of my motivation for forming this is because I wouldn't actually be here in academia if it wasn't for opportunities for access. My family is from the Fiji Islands with ancestry from India, due to the colonial histories of both places. My mom's parents were sharecroppers, they grew sugarcane. She was the first generation in her village to be literate. And in the US there were a number of issues my family faced as immigrants. We've had to be resilient and often our hopes for the next generation have been would have carried us. Now I learned about stories like those of my family of my own so often from our students today. But what I see that is different is that in my case I had these remarkable opportunities for access. I participated in programs at Cal State LA, a minority serving institution, and UC Santa Cruz, which is now also an MSI. At these places I had advisors, mentors role models, learning communities with supportive peers. These included things like a women of color research cluster that Professor Angela Davis set up at UC Santa Cruz when I was a grad student working with Jim Zachos who is here. You know that meant that I was able to become one of three Asian Pacific Islander women to get a PhD in the US in my field in 2002. You know those statistics that we were seeing earlier. And the various formative experiences that I've had have been part of the inspiration for the center. So what I'm going to do today is describe how through a focus on evidence based interventions and inclusive equitable ocean science we can bend towards justice. We can advance stewardship in ways that are that are meaningful. And so we do this through support of an ecosystem of fellows. One of our fellows, DeMarcus Robinson from FAMU, where he's an undergrad, is now a PhD student at UCLA in Ocean Biogeochemistry. He just published with other co-authors the first US ocean justice strategy. Ocean justice derives from environmental justice and the vision for from the report is actually described here. Equitable access, meaningful engagement, recognizing the value of indigenous engagement, expanding and improving ocean education to improve our workforce and also to build knowledge. So there are a whole series of recommendations and outcomes that come from this. So the work that is being done right now that you all are discussing I think is really at a meaningful time. So the work that we do with the center draws on the scholarship of National Academy of Education faculty member Sylvia Hurtado and others on effective practices for inclusive science based on a meta analysis of effective programs in the biomedical sciences. And that's what this figure shows here. So drawing on all these elements, the work that the center does is really largely focused, although not exclusively focused on indigenous partners. The center is actually based in part in our American Indian Studies Center as well as our Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, the Institute of Environment and Sustainability and other units. Part of the reason why we do this is because UCLA is a land grant institution so that has its own meaning to native peoples. We are settlers here, we're located on the lands of the Gabrielino Tongva people. We're still present today and their stewardship of the lands and waters of Los Angeles are really been critical for our own presence in this in this area. Now, indigenous communities, communities of color and low income communities in many regions, including coastal ones are considered frontline communities. And so our work with CDLS oceans focuses on these communities. We do this through our diversification of ocean sciences, but also through the research that we do, which is community engaged. We emphasize the social context of what we do because of the interconnected nature of the different systems at play and the way they intersect when it comes to the oceans and environment. From vulnerabilities to rising sea level storm surges to the community expertise that holds often vital information for environmental resilience and health. So the ethos for the work we do is to be deeply respectful, reparative and to engage in reciprocity as we build relationships. So our model for cultivating leadership with a center is a network leadership model. We cut across departments, colleges and universities with the fellows we support. Our ecosystem of fellowships program supports community fellows, we support faculty fellows and most importantly we support the next generation early career fellows from high school through postdoctoral people from two year and four year institutions. Our work brings together different interventions from community building, mentoring, team based research, community engagement, technical and higher skills training through co curricular workshops. Now we've supported at this stage more than 250 fellows across green steam fields at the center about 20% of them are in oceans related areas. Our levels of diversity are quite high that's what's shown this this figure on the lower right from a survey a couple of years ago. Now this type of work is really important to be grown and sustained at multiple institutions because we're doing this work in a field where there's a growing diversity gap. This figure from Steve boss at the University of Arkansas compares demographic trends in the country to diversity trends in the workforce. This matters from thinking about, you know, who are effective ambassadors to communities when it comes to ocean stewardship to who gets a seat at decision making tables. And what's interesting and sad to see is that in many fields, including ours, even though the diversity of the country is increased dramatically, the diversity of the workforce hasn't kept up. In fact, it's actually equivalent to levels of diversity in the US during the Jim Crow era some 70 years ago. Now, what I think is also important to note is that to with the center's model, in addition to very directly working on addressing those demographic demographic issues, we intentionally work to support mentorship from people of different generations, activists, community leaders, people in higher education, people working in different sectors. We center on the resilience of those who are systematically marginalized. So we uplift resource and support people who might otherwise be expending enormous effort to persist in ocean science training or to work on ocean advocacy issues. We support them with an equity lens and we build community around them. At the same time, we motivate and equip and support those who are passionate about the issues who see that there is a convergence of interest so that they can also share in doing the reparative work that's needed. So the center is for everyone. We don't exclude anybody from applying. And there's, and there's many aspects of our work I jokingly say we're like an octopus, the community and tribally led research projects we do or one heart of our work. This includes a service learning partnership with the Amamutzin Land Trust that I'll describe more in the next slide, but also partnerships with the Northern Chumash Tribal Council for their proposed Chumash Heritage and National Marine Sanctuary to work with the Bay Foundation and Heal the Bay who have now with us. We've supported public participation of hundreds of community members in sampling efforts in marine protected areas and non MPAs areas where there's seagrass and kelp restoration. We've supported over 30 undergraduate and graduate students. Just in the last three years. And they've been participating in service learning and research. We've also been sharing revised curricula to support inclusive classrooms. And this has impacted over 700 students and we provide field based oceanographic experiences and this has now occurred for about 100 students. In our work with the Amamutzin Land Trust we collaborate to support research with tribal stewards around tribal priorities around land and coastal marine stewardship. This includes sharing different knowledge systems to support community power, community health, climate adaptation and resilience from training in cultural resource management, geochemistry, environmental genomics, drone mapping and to assessing the impacts of stewardship and the access of climate models and ocean models. There's all sorts of work that's being done. The work is also being brought by tribal members into a youth leadership program where people in higher education are sharing language and culture. Relating to stewardship from kind of Western Marine STEM and also from traditional knowledge systems. So with that I want to acknowledge that with the work we're doing in Centering Equity and Ocean Science, we've been inspired by the pathbreaking work led at HBCUs by Dr. Bob Bullard, Dr. Beverly Wright, but also others like Ashanti Johnson with the MS-PhD program and we continue to be inspired by work that's being done at minority serving institutions and non-MSIs around the country as we learn of it. There's also really exciting vision from the next generation of marine scientists including Dr. Tiara Moore from Black and Marine Science. I mean, you know, there's this sense that actually there's a lot more work that's there below the surface of what we recognize than what we might otherwise recognize. So that's what gives us hope. We also believe that our ceiling is for the next generation, their floor, but it is critically important to sustain and grow the type of work that people here are discussing. So I look forward to the discussion on how we can do that. Thanks. Thank you so much, Aradna. So panelists, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and I encourage everybody to ask questions using Slido. So our statement of task reads that we ought to identify novel opportunities to regarding ocean related views inspired social solutions oriented research and innovation. And we ought to think about opportunities and strategies to promote innovative multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approaches. So my question to the panel is what kind of improvements are required in the research infrastructure to foster equity and justice in ocean sciences? Are there any frameworks for use in science, non-disciplinary research that the committee should consider? And if there are, could you provide some examples of any kind of robust community university partnerships that the committee should consider? So I threw a lot in there, but basically the gist is are there, what kind of improvements are necessary in the research infrastructure to facilitate the kind of innovation in ocean sciences that we seek to foster? Maybe I'll bring something up. I think there's a really important model that actually comes from Dr. Beverly Wright, who I'd mentioned. She talks about the community place where university and community expertise is kind of at the same level, right? And so there's an opportunity for university researchers to think about how can we support the work that's being prioritized by communities and work to really execute that vision, but also do that in a way where community members are elevated, you know, with respect to the work they're being resourced. Often there are young people, people of all generations who are, you know, in higher education or who are interested in work opportunities and can be supported for in doing this type of work. So I think that that model, seeing that kind of developed and implemented in ocean sciences at a broader range of institutions would be really key. And, you know, I think that there are ideas we've been thinking about based on what we've heard from our community partners about, for example, having mobile field labs that, you know, they have that are on traditional lens so that people can sample for environmental DNA in the coastal environment and do sample processing, you know, and also have the ability to look at data to see how conservation and mitigation measures are making a difference. That's just one example, you know, but it's, then that means that the research infrastructure is not just sitting in the university but there's some of it that's also sitting in the community. Thank you, Rodna. Others. I'd like to hang a lantern on Rodna's suggestion here, which was really excellent. I guess I'll share that at a recent conference where I talked about the NSF funding, racial funding disparities, a scientist who's also a tribal member approached me, and to discuss specifically the trends for American Indian and Alaska Native PIs. And she wondered about how, well, she shared with me that she noticed that when she visited various proposal calls put forth by NSF and other funding agencies, that none of the topics that were being, the proposals were being asked for seemed to be relevant to her community back at home. There was a mismatch between the science that the funders fund and the science that indigenous scholars like herself wanted to pursue. And so I wonder, in a very similar way to what Rodna's proposing, I wonder if there are ways for funders to better fund the topics that these scholars are interested in pursuing that actually bring back benefits to their communities. So there has to be a way to fit that into funding infrastructure in some way to do that better than it's currently happening right now. Thank you so much, Christine. Any other thoughts, Corey or Rodney? Sure, I can go. You know, the funding was an important one. I was actually a postdoc at an NSF Crest site at Cal State LA for two years. And, you know, that was, you know, running at the same time as the STCs are spinning up, but at a much, much lower funding rate. You know, they were expected to have this research impact, but it was maybe a quarter of the funding rather than STC was getting. So I remember, you know, back then, you know, we couldn't buy the infrastructure, right? So we couldn't do the capacity building that she needed to do. We often had to, you know, go to our provost and our deans, you know, to get that additional money. Whereas, you know, someone, you know, housed in an STC, you know, wouldn't have to do that in that case. Right. And that creates an additional burden because oftentimes, you know, the type of work being done out of minority serving institutions. You know, it's one of those things we tend to overlook is they're often already doing in community work for there and really what they need. It's the funding infrastructure, the personnel infrastructure right to carry it off, right? It was unusual to have a postdoc at a Cal State campus. It just wasn't a common thing back then. But, you know, it actually helped us. You know, we actually, the small groups are three or four of us back then actually helped to do that. And so I think that's something to think about it as well that if this is something that, you know, NSF as a whole wants to elevate that you can't expect an MSI to do it on a shoestring budget, right? With shoestring facilities and shoestring personnel. Yeah, we can do it. It's just, it makes the work a lot harder to do it. And frankly, it's unnecessary to have to do that, right? When we can show this work. The press work, I mean, that was a really great program and a number of us are faculty and we're working at NOAA and we're going to Cal Fish and Wildlife, right? And so on. So we show you can do it. You can go to communities don't traditionally work with. They can do really impactful work. But I can imagine if that particular center and others like it were funded at the rate of the NSTC, I can only imagine what that impact, you know, would have been. Very good. Just quickly, just this this line and thank you for starting the reply. This line of response is resonates heavily with a lot of what we've been talking about. And our incubator at NSF and so to that last point, Corey was talking about the institutional capacity, not, not the researchers or the faculty or preparing the students, but the folks in the sponsor research office, or the lack of them, or all of those that are, are. Part of that support system to assist faculty and students with their awards or submitting proposals or applications and things of that nature. There's a huge disparity across our academic institutions in that regard. NSF has a program called granted. It's really new, but that's its focus. It's it's not on the science, but it's on all of those support systems, particularly at emerging research institutions and how to bolster them so that because it's not about the intellectual prowess. There's there's intellectual excellence at every institution, right? It's evenly distributed across the human through the population. But as Corey mentioned, some institutions don't just don't have the capacity and I believe the pandemic unveiled a lot of that. And so how do we capitalize on that? And it's something maybe for the committee to help NSF even move a bit more forward on. Last thing I'll say on the other point that Arana and Christine brought up is the constraints that NSF has a lot of flexibility in the federal government, but it's still a federal agency. And so lots of times we at NSF have to be in alignment with the rest of the government and that constrains us. However, organizations like professional societies or like HMI or something like that that operate in the boundaries. We can partner with them to help move forward in some areas that we might be constrained on if we were just to move forward solely. So just just a how to Arana's and Christine's what on that part. Do you want to add something? Yeah, I think that the one other thing that I would add to this discussion is that is the importance of actually having sustainable support for research infrastructure. So particularly the human and cultural elements of doing this work. I know that there's a lot of interest in kind of exploratory funding, seed funding. Cory talked about Crest as a model. That's a really, really important model, right? Science and technology centers based at MSIs that have long term support. The importance of having those types of centers, particularly at MSIs and particularly programs that are focusing on broadening participation in the ocean sciences. That's key. Noah has also examples of this, although they had like only a certain number of slots, you know, and so with that, you know, it is key to grow that type of work. The other side of it is that looking for funding that lasts for even longer than this. There are expectations typically around higher education institutions incorporating these into their budgets. But, you know, given what's been happening with the politicization of higher education funding and and so forth. And, you know, the shifts on this from the public to student sector. You know, that's that's not something that's likely going to going to happen, given all the asks. So there might be interesting areas for thinking when thinking about kind of public private partnerships for federal agencies to provide seed funding, but then maybe engaging in their relationships with private philanthropy and getting endowments for long term funding, you know, things like that. I just came from a conference on higher education and climate. And some of the folks that I'm mentioning leaders at MSIs, particularly HBCUs endowment, you know, to make sure that the works sustained for the next generations is really, really key. Otherwise, you have a shift in leadership and work gets defunded and then that's that. Thank you all so much. So my next question, and by the way, these questions are inspired by a subcommittee of this committee and that includes Carlos, Kersi, Kristen, Peter, Shannon and Sheenee. So thank you so much for your contributions. But my next question to the panel is is related to workforce development. So we identify there are reports that have identified a plethora of skills that are required for young people to be successful in the day and age today, ranging from cultural competency to communication skills. All of this is in addition to the core competencies that we require students in the ocean or atmospheric sciences or other sciences. So are there newer kind of frameworks, workforce development models that we should be looking at to accommodate the skill sets that are needed to address these, these, the problems that we have that we face as a society. And, and inspire people to to work in on problems that that they feel energized to solve. So are there any examples of workforce development models, more frameworks that we should be looking at. I was in a cooperative science there from NOAA for about seven years, you know, and that is a work, that's literally a workforce development program. You know, one of the things that they do is they emphasize training students, you know, in skill sets, you know, that NOAA is going to be needing, you know, in the next century or so. There can also, you know, coming back to the last conversation, there can also be a mismatch in the infrastructure that the institution has at the capacity to support that training. Just to kind of give you an example, you know, when I was rotating out of my previous position to hear the new science and technology focus areas coming out of NOAA for training or, you know, autonomous systems, AI, big data, genomic, a lot of institutions being supported through that. So centers, they didn't have quite the, they didn't have the infrastructure to, you know, support that degree, because even though you might have the money or the funding coming in on the grant, right, to purchase the equipment, you wouldn't have the long term infrastructures. For example, where I was at, you wouldn't purchase a sequencer because there would be no way to support a sequencing facility, we just wouldn't have the capacity to do it. You know, that said, though, it does highlight, I think for students, you know, early career professionals early on the type of skills that you need because they're going to be the non-traditional skill. One of the things I ran into is an educated 15 years. It was the stereotype coming in that you're going to be off on a sailboat, you know, swimming with marine mammals, you know, going to the tropics. And, you know, and there was this hard reality that, you know, later on in the students' careers is they're being told to get ready to graduate. Well, you really need a background in programming and, you know, communication because that's where the skill sets are at. And so sometimes the way that we think about engaging people early on doesn't really match up with what they need going out because there tends to be this fear that if you present the discipline as too scientific, too technically oriented, there's a lot of hard skills you need there that it's going to discourage people from going into it. And I think, you know, one of the things we need are better models. And there are some of those models that are coming out of those NOAA centers. But how do you start to support those models with the actual infrastructure, right, those institutions that start to ease in that next generation into the ocean science workforce? Yeah, I think, I think to compliment also what Cori has said, I wanted to highlight that, you know, there are frameworks out there that talk about the importance of kind of problem-based learning in preparing people. You know, it's really strongly, you know, encourage the use of that. That is really a way to then, I think, motivate some of the, you know, harder technical skills, you know, or the relatability of fields that people might not otherwise feel that relates to them. I've seen that be a really kind of strong motivator and the amount of growth that I've seen in students has been remarkable. There's a lot of, you know, STEM educational literature on this. I also put into the chat a link to a paper that was collaborative with colleagues at Conservation International and Arizona State University, where we actually asked employers in the conservation field what sets of competencies do they need, right? What are they finding that they need and where are their gaps for people coming in, but also people to become and go into a leadership role so that people have, you know, a kind of trajectory of the workplace. And, you know, of course, they're the foremost primary things are the scientific proficiency, the theory-based knowledge, technical and analytical skills, that's a priority, but also, in addition to that, problem-solving skills, practical experience, project management, writing abilities, communication skills, and so forth. And so this is just a short letter that we wrote and of highlighting that. And that then allows us to kind of think about what the next generation of curriculum should look like, right, to prepare people. Yeah, just building on that point that Aradna said here in GEO, we funded probably eight over the last eight years some work at the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT. So obviously that's not ocean, but there are a lot of lessons learned because the workshops, there were a series of workshops focused on undergraduates in GEO and graduates. And the format of the workshops was to bring the private sector in with the geoscientists, so to Aradna's point, and ask with the data showing that the majority of students coming out of STEM with STEM degrees are not tracking into academia. And so what does the private sector require as far as skill building for individuals that they're interested in? And there was clear misalignment with what the private sector needed and what students were being prepared to do. And so what do we do with that? So it certainly needs some help as well as designing programs that can meet all of those needs and to build those holistic skills exactly as Aradna was listing there and Cori was mentioning also. So I wanted to offer that. I'm going to try to find those reports and the websites and put them in the chat. Thank you so much. Cori or Christine, anything else? Yeah, go ahead, Cori. Yeah, I was just going to add to, you know, Brandon's that the non-academic pathway, I think it's an important one. I recall yours about four or five years ago. You know, we made a visit to Headquarters and, you know, the other folks who are also on the board in leadership, they're actually surprised here from, no, I think it was at the time of like 40% of their workforce was contractors. They were contractors, you know, in the workforce. And that was something, you know, they weren't quite expecting to hear just because they had historic focus, you know, in a site like that. So it's focusing on going and being, you know, a faculty researcher at a, you know, at a big R1 and so hearing that with a bit of an eye-opener. So I think, you know, finding a way to highlight these different pathways into the workforce, right, as you're developing people through the student post-op, you know, early career professional pipeline. I think that's really important. You have to really, you do need to start to develop that. Yeah, I think that there's, I think, relating to something that's been brought up in the chat by Katie Inder-Bitzen about workforce development, that there's also a need for more post-doc early career researchers. Yeah, I think that's really key and something that's also specific to needs from ocean-oriented folks. You know, one of the things that the Center has been looking at is where there are, we've mapped out co-curricular opportunities on our campus and other campuses that are our partners for both technical skills and higher skills. So basically where are their workshops on financial management, you know, mental health, conflict resolution, coding and R. But when we also see that there are gaps for particular educational career stages or gaps, you know, with respect to content, then what we do is we work to bring in facilitators for, you know, that particular area. And so, you know, with that, we've also started looking in different places. And I've seen this specifically benefit our oceans fellows. Like we work often with American Indian Studies and refer our undergraduate and particularly graduate students and post-docs to sit in on courses and working with Indigenous communities so that they can learn about the protocols, right, in a way where they're getting a very structured course, something that is at a high level, has case studies, has theoretical frameworks and talks about this with respect to many different contexts. And I also want to emphasize that, you know, wellness, mental health, financial management, things like machine learning, AI, you know, the things that we know are really kind of key for doing well as a researcher in any sector that is in oceans kind of going forward. Those are also things to kind of be looking at offerings for. I'm going to bring the committee in. Peter, I'm going to come to you. Can I first go to Shannon? Shannon, would you like to ask a question? You have two, you can ask one. I'll start with you first. Yeah, I'm really curious about this diversity and innovation. And so why is that persisting? What's going on in institutions, culturally, what is the institution or incentive structures that are there in place that are not rewarding innovation? Which is like, I think it's like, it seems like that's what we want out of that. So, I'm curious about what's sayable about that. Who wants to go? Could you repeat the question I had a little trouble hearing that. Yeah, the volume is a little low. Now, sure, I can speak loudly. So the question is, what are some of the cultural and institutional factors that are allowing the diversity innovation paradox to persist? Can you identify some incentive levers on this? Yeah, so I think that there's, you know, there's literature on kind of why diverse perspectives are utilized and not rewarded in the, you know, to begin with there's some interesting literature from social psychology on this. And so I don't know what you think. I think that being aware that this pattern exists is probably one of the first things to do to address this. So I think it is really key to teach about this pattern in classes, encourage people to think about citation bias, for example, and why that might come about. And to think about what they're doing in, you know, a paper that they might be writing to actually address this issue really could get people to think about kind of the historic roots of the Academy. And why that means, you know, there is this kind of historic cultural legacy that's that's present there, because I think we all agree that we want to see that's key to science is actually having the very best perspectives out there and that's not necessarily always the perspectives that rise the rise to the top right so if we want to see fairness and see a garden of ideas where you know evidence is what results and things taking root, we can really actively work on that if we know that there's bias there for cultural reasons and that we all have it right. And so that that's kind of a starting point so what we do in our education again it's around the training that we do and if we spend all of our time saying this doesn't exist. We're not being very scientific about it. Right. Um, yeah. I will just add to. I'll just add that the diversity and innovation paradox that was written about by Hofstra at all. That is really one component of an entire system where our evaluative evaluative practices and stem just continuously you cyclically reinforce unequal outcomes at every stage of woman and people of colors careers. It's it can start early on as an early career. As a scientist, there's data showing that for the NSF graduate research fellowships those prestigious grf P's that there are that many more of those awards are awarded to white students compared to non compared to students who are people of color. These kinds of disparities emerge and recommendation letters. They emerge in where people of color get placed like what types of institutions that get placed. They get placed into it's in publications as that diversity and innovation paradox paper. And teaching evaluations service expectations I could go on and on. And, and so, and of course, funding disparities of course which I discussed earlier so that the diversity innovation paradox that shows differences and citation rates based on topic and researcher identity. It's one part of an entire ecosystem that causes cyclically reinforced unequal outcomes. So, I don't know if that helps with identifying like causal incentive links. It's just to say that everything is reinforcing each other unfortunately and we have to apply multiple multi pronged approaches to solving these issues it's not going to be just, you know, if we fix peer review, everything is going to magically fix themselves right there's no silver bullets to this problem. It would be better for us to take a mosaic approach to these issues of culture change. Add on to that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there's some of it where it's a little harder to get at the, you know, some of the popped up during the height of pandemic closure, but you know, you can see where folks identities get really tied up into the type of work. They've done for a long time and so, you know, bringing something different in some ways threaten, you know, that identity and I recall one call early in the pandemic where we were asking how folks were doing and somebody mentioned how they weren't able to go do their research and somewhere in overseas. Right, and I was kind of thinking myself like if that's the biggest challenge you're facing right now, you know, you're, you're, you're doing pretty okay. And what I really started to realize when I talk to their colleagues is they're kind of identity was tied up and they're that person who goes to that place to do for all research every summer or, you know, they come to moderate if you help for his research or they go to Panama or wherever it is over there and so sometimes, you know, changing the way we do science changes. It can sometimes be unconsciously viewed as a, you know, the threat against that identity that to some extent, you know, there's a more direct, you know, it can be the funding, you know, that you get that you're always used to getting funding for doing things the same way. You know, I, people know, I run it, I run a drone program at Monterey and I've run it here in Washington now and it costs a lot of change. Remember, we getting because in the Marine Ecology Community, I mean, it's a very, they've been using the same data collection approaches since the 60s. But it really hasn't changed, you know, how we go out and we monitor, you know, coastal systems and, you know, recall, we first started going out talking about using the drones and I don't know how serious folks were, but they were talking about like, I was going to cost people their job. And I was like, that's a really odd comment to me because we really, you know, we're coming in with a new way of getting data, examining these systems open a question with a comment. It was going to change sort of the labor structure, right? It is there, you know, the funding that you get. In fact, you know, it, when I left, I do recall, you know, a couple of the states, you know, funding entity, they started to require that you had autonomous systems when you do coastal monitoring and it caused a little bit of a kerfuffle. And the stakes was very different from how things were going, but I think it was the challenge there, people were so used to getting funded for doing things the same way for about 50 to 60 years that this change was it was really sort of stressful for them. So, yeah, I said, it's not one thing or another, but it's this confluence, but a lot of things, some that are harder to get at some that are more direct like who's going to get the rewards right for the way you do your research. Yeah, and I'll just chime in. I wanted to hear from the academic folks there because I was taking a lot of notes. I got to take a lot of this back to our team for discussion. I just dropped a commentary in the chat from Mike Hulme that I just read a few days ago and he emphasizes values and this is what Corey was talking about. We have and, you know, everyone has some sense of their identity tied into their work others and some more than others. And then that automatically drives what's valuable to us. And if you happen to be sitting in a position of authority, a gate or something like that, and you have a certain value system, then it's going to be really tough for you to see and not good or bad, but just to see other value systems from other people or other communities, etc. So, you know, how do we, how do we deal with that? Right? That's a big question and something that is in the commentary is that. And this gets back to Gus Speth's quote that I had in my presentation. We're asking scientists who were all trained to hone in on a solution. And we're asking ourselves, our community to hone in on a solution to a question that is open-ended. And we're not trained to do that. When are we going to figure out that we need the experts that are trained to do that to help us do it? And so when natural and physical scientists figure out that social scientists are of equal value. But there's centuries worth of history of nose-down looking from the natural and physical scientists towards those who are social science experts or educational researchers, etc. But what we're talking about is a human problem. It's not a, it's not a science problem. It's not a research problem. It's a human issue. And we need those that have human expertise to help us deal with that. So, I just want to offer that. But I'll know that you have something to add. I don't think I can follow that. Yeah, yeah, Brandon, you said it, so. Okay, thank you, Brad. Did you want to ask the question? Sure. Yeah, I guess the question is whether there are good examples and thinking of just to probe your kind of thinking on this, I mean bias in funding assistance and under discussion, different times for a long time. So, age bias or entry bias is something. There are ways then to differentially treat first time applicants or renewing applicants. Anyway, the question is other, in other funding agencies, other good examples and thinking in a different space around indigenous participation for other countries that certainly deal with indigenous issues differently. I mean, from Canada, indigenous reconciliation is everywhere. And in the data side of things, the Assembly of First Nations created a protocol called OCAF. There's an expectation that if you engage with indigenous partners, you take OCAF training and bring that experience and knowledge to your engagement. And so they, they've actually created that the indigenous communities. So I'm just looking for other examples like that that might be best or better practices so that we could point to something to change what everyone agrees is an imperfect world. Thank you. Are there any additional examples, panelists that you would like to share? If not, let me know. Okay, Ajit. I just want to say that the masses have been playing with double blind. I have no idea how successful they are, or how it has improved or helped with any of these things, but it is an example of trying to get up. So, there are good examples to learn from this. Okay, I think you're seeing this. Go ahead. Yes, thank you. It's a really excellent question. I'm going to share, I'm going to answer your question, hopefully a little bit indirectly, just to share what I've gathered from what the NIH tried to do to resolve their black-white funding gap. They actually first reported racial disparities back in 2011 in a report that was commissioned by the NIH. And despite having done that, you know, more than 10 years ago, even as late as 2019, they still hadn't closed the black-white funding gap at the NIH, despite many efforts. And in fact, it was at the exact same magnitude where white PIs had a 1.7 to 1.8 funding rate advantage over black PIs, still in recent years compared, and that was the same magnitude as it was back in the early 2000s. So, when I learned that, I wanted to know, well, what did the NIH try to do, because it's clear that what they were trying to do didn't work. And I'm hoping that those lessons get transmitted to the NSF so that they don't repeat, you know, try to do the same things that they already tried that clearly didn't have an impact. And from my reading of what the NIH tried to do, they really hyper-focused on the peer review process, trying to find any way to reduce the disparities and review scores. Between proposals by white PIs versus black PIs, they overhauled their merit review system, you know, expanded the number of criteria that they used from whatever it was before to nine different criteria, changed the rating scale from to so that people assigned numbers from a scale of zero to nine. They did all of these things to try to narrow that the impact of bias within the review system, right. And none of those changes affected the black white funding gap. They did do a short trial, trying to double blind proposals. And what that had the impact of was that it kept the scores for black PIs the same while reducing the scores for white PIs, which I think is interesting because it implies that if there is bias in the system, which there is, we might want to reframe our thinking and think more about positive biases being given to proposals by white PIs. But that was on a very small scale and it's not clear at all whether or not that could be, you would get the same impact if you deployed that on a wide scale basis. And in terms of the deployment of double blind at NASA, that has also had disparate impacts on research institutions that don't have these like mega research offices that can support all the additional labor that goes into needing to double blind your proposals. It's a lot of work to, you know, fulfill all of the requirements to make sure that your proposals don't reveal identity information. That is all to say that the hyper focus on just trying to reduce bias within the peer review process. I think social scientists would probably agree with me when I say this but that ended up being a distraction from real solutions that involve looking at the actual distribution of material resources. I guess we can continue to look into ways to improve the peer review process, but it should not come at the expense of actually again addressing the things that produce inequality in the first place, which are differences in social prestige, material resources and insider knowledge so I encourage folks to not think about, you know, the peer review process as a one universal fix to all of our problems it's very clear at the NIH that that just did not work. So we need to find other solutions that again, talk about redistributing social prestige material resources and insider knowledge. Thank you. I wanted to just kind of highlight some strong examples of models that I think the ocean sciences can draw from. You know, I think Christine did a really nice job of talking about what can be done on the funding side. So I'll start to talk about examples of models in higher education that can be drawn from. I think the program that Ambrose year old at that set up at Woods Hole oceanographic institution is a really strong example of a program. There's the indigenous resilience center at the University of Arizona set up by Professor Carlotta chief. I think that's another really invaluable program. There and so things like this, but thinking about the ocean sciences. You know, examples, I think there are, you know, another example of an MS MSI that's made enormous headway and equity and access issues is Howard University, you know, in partnership with Noah. They produced 60% of all African American atmospheric science PhDs in the past decade. And top 10 programs produced fewer than 10. So people so that's just like that. It. That is really remarkable. I think that looking at the work that the deep south consortium for environmental justice HPC consortium, also the bullet center for environmental and climate justice is doing the EPA has recently funded them as through their tic-tac program so that they're a technical advisory center. And so they're basically then redistributing funding to community based organizations. And so they're, they're, you know, yeah, they're kind of serving in that leadership role and then supporting community based organizations with this. CUNY is and the New York environmental justice alliance also is in a similar to partnerships and so, you know, you don't quite see anything like these yet. But there, there are I think opportunities in, in ocean sciences, even in the agricultural sciences, you know, the USGS. And USDA have been supporting different types of centers, the USGS climate adaptation science centers, their partnership driven. And yeah, so I think that there's lots of examples around the community engaged side and also on the workforce development side. Jim, go ahead please. Yes. NSF has had our programs research experience for undergraduate programs for a long time. And my experience with them is that they tend to have much higher ethnic diversity in them than the graduate programs at the same universities are in place, or diversity on the faculty and some but I've never seen a an analysis of the RAU programs that would say whether they were very effective at attracting minority students into the ocean sciences. And, and then there's also different models that the UCARS source program where they bring students back multiple years is very different. I don't know which one's more effective in terms of recruiting minorities, but is there any comments on how effective they are and trying to build up the graduate student population initially and then eventually into the field of ocean science either as faculty or private industry or whatever. Yeah, I can comment on the one I read before I moved here for about 10 years. Yeah, we were a little bit differently started because we had a couple of different, we had a very different model and that was distributed across all the Monterey Bay. So we had about six institutions. involves one of the successes and recruiting students was one we leveraged our. Our network through SACNAS to engage a lot of HSI tribal colleges, big Islander serving institution like we said, well, I think we still do we have a little pulse of students that apply from Guam every year as well as HBCUs. But part of what work is that we had a because we have so many institution type so many faculty there are the big diversity of disciplines for students to choose from so we're actually really successful with getting. Computer science students from community colleges because they'd often work with the ocean engineering folks at a barry or the naval postgraduate school. In fact, a number of them are either in ocean engineering grad programs or they're working, you know, as you know, researchers. At this point, the tracking of them was a bit more challenging. So, if this was innovative at the time, I think it's innovative more we were using and we're using Facebook back and it was. Now, it's considered novel because actually how we recruited students, we were actually using that as their recruitment tool. They've moved off of that and you know, started going to things like Instagram and, you know, Twitter and how it's act. In the platform, we always had a grad student assistant would tell us what the hottest, you know, social media trend was and we go to that and so our students are on that. We keep engagement on the face with Facebook platform. It's the families because they will actually send us updates through there. You know, when we would sort of do highlights on alumni, they would say, oh, by the way, you know, they're doing this now right that it's actually you wind up having to use a lot of different. Platform, you know, email, we have an alumni group. You know, we actually ran a fall program for REU because that was one of the things we had noted. It's students would leave an REU then disengage. They're going to go back to their home institution. So we kept this online platform that we would engage with them through the fall to help them prep to go to their first conference. You know, we would do stuff in the spring to help them get ready for grad school, you know, and there are a number of them in grad school. I know one just finished up at Woods Hole, but not too long ago. I think one, our first PhD got their PhD about 2 years ago that were the EPA. So we keep track of them. And so, but we wind up having to use a lot of different platforms that actually required a lot of staffing and that was the other key part. Our program was unusual that we had a full-time education leave and administrative assistant and a full-time graduate student and most REUs don't have that. I think that's the other thing to consider here. It's not just one person. There was like a full staff that was doing this part of their full-time job. Yeah, just as a quick follow-up, any thoughts on the different models? Because I've always been impressed with SOARS at UCAR because they bring the students back year after year and they seem to have so much confidence when you visit them and so on compared to perhaps a program that OCE demands, which is that they only come for one summer. Yeah, I want to, I think your point about SOARS is a really strong one. Not only the kind of continuity of relationship, but also the specific mentoring model that they use where they have multiple mentors, writing mentor, you know, for example, professional development mentors, mentors in many different areas. So I think that the care that's been taken to develop that has meant that it is, it's known to, and they also, the tracking data, it's a really effective program. I think PAP, which I'll put a link to, and here is also known to be an incredibly effective program also with respect to the tracking, and that is one that, you know, is in the Ocean Sciences. Corey's programs I think are ones to draw on as well for best practices. Our center, we support people coming back also for multiple years, and we've seen, though our numbers are quite small, we certainly have seen that that has been really effective, so I'm glad that Jim, you brought that up. But I did put into the chat earlier a link to a special issue that Corey and others, Lisa White and others have edited, where there are different kind of case studies that are presented. And I think actually you'll, you know, some of the case studies that are being presented are actually from people who are running REU type programs. Of course their effectiveness is going to vary a lot depending on the structure and also there's a lot of creativity and variation in structure, structure, so some of the papers and especially she'll actually have some really nice examples. Is that the one in oceanography? Is that the one? Yeah, okay. Terrific. So I'm going to move on to Shini. Shini, did you want to ask a question? I feel like there's been a lot of chat conversation about this, so it's okay. Perfect. Leila, did you want to ask your question? Yes, I kind of keep asking or finding a way to ask the same question. We've talked about the peer review process and I really appreciate the thoughts that you all have that, you know, peer review is not going to fix it. But I think that some of the committee is looking for some thoughts on how we can shift the social science currency from the gold standard of NSF funding to the outcomes of science, especially when that gold standard is built into the peer review. Comments? Maybe we've exhausted the topic. No, I mean, I think that's something that NSF would want to hear from the committee because we are currently, I hate to keep using the word constrained, but we are by our merit review. But that doesn't mean that at the program director level. How panels are constructed and administered and managed, et cetera. There's a lot of flexibility there. So to hear from the committee about, hey, at that grant, at that level of granularity. What can be done in that review part of the whole system. That can loosen a lot of the traditional ways that we, and Christine was hinting at this, that we review, that we apply our merit review and still, as you mentioned, keep it as the gold standard. And I don't think there's any danger of adjusting what needs to be adjusted and losing any credibility. I mean, I don't see any problem with that. But this gets back to some of the attitudes that some of my esteemed panelists have mentioned that some people do think that, that if you start to tamper with the traditions that somehow the rigor is going to be diluted. And that's, you know, that that's just a prevailing attitude out there that also needs to be dealt with. So can I follow up question to the door for the second question. Is there are there examples that could be pulled out of deficit minded language that is showing up in reviews. Is that is that one way to, and I know it's tricky business because peer reviews are confidential. But can we elevate some examples or maybe point the committee to some literature where we can help shape our recommendation. I have a quick comment on that which is that the, you know, NSF has each division has these committee committee of visitors that come in every two or three years or four years to look at the. And their job is to look at the review process and they write a report and. So there is some information I don't think they're particularly thorough but the based on what I've read but it there are there are a large number of these reports floating around book for ocean science. The most recent one is 2023 that that do bring in a group of experts and they look at the review process and make comments and including on everything from whether you really career scientists are discriminated against or whether there's what it looks like in terms of diversity about another ways for those who are funded versus those who are not. Christine, did you have something to add. Yes, thank you. I sincerely appreciate this question from the committee and I wish I had you know the magical answer of what recommendations you all should offer. The only thing that comes to my mind about one way to frame this is. So the NSF is federally mandated to, you know, fund basic research right, but it is also the only stem funding agency with the federal mandate to train the next generation of scientists and engineers in the United States. And when we talk about NSF funding, the best science for the, you know, for the good of, you know, the nation and whatnot. I think we should also consider that we need NSF also needs to fulfill that other piece of its federal mandate right to train the next generation of scientists. And that could be further emphasized in this merit review process where when we are choosing the best science to fund, recognizing that given the current demographics of stem and who are the reviewers, the best science that current scientists might think is best may not actually reflect what is truly, you know, best for for the public good, such that everyone, regardless of background and identity is benefiting from our work. So we could further emphasize that important aspect of the NSF's job, right, and maybe make that more clear in the merit review process that that is also part of what we should be considering as the best science that needs to be funded at this time. So food for thought. Thank you Christine. Thank you all for your really thoughtful comments. My point of view, and my experience over the last several months in particular is under assault. And I don't think that's going to get better. This question I'm hoping is really for those primarily who work with NSF will work at. But as we consider, you know, our recommendations. What are the ways in which we can support you and making the case for the continued efforts to diversify our ocean sciences community. And I'm really hoping you might have some specific examples of pitfalls that you've seen from your point of view. Language or ideas that that tend to be less effective than others. And this is too much to ask that I understand, but I think it's an important point because we are really our partners. Thank you. Brendan fighting to get us started. Excellent question and an unfortunate one. An example of a pitfall. That are going to impact institutions, researchers, students and science overall is that public institutions in states with anti policies. Theoretically will not be able to submit proposals to particular grants. From funding agencies, because their state policy says no, and the federal we are hands off. We're not going to change our priorities in the programs. Under this current administration and that's another elephant in the room because November is. So what you know where this is impacting state institutions and it could. Theoretically those researchers there, those, those students, et cetera, and. And not just for the scientific enterprise, but for the, the building of the infrastructure of emerging research institutions in those states that are public. Because of the overhead that comes along with a grant. You know, they so. Is this going to end up causing a greater divide in the academic haves and have nots. Because the score states happen to be the states where these policies, and you know, you look at the maps, right? So that's, it's a, it's a huge issue. And what I think. One thing I think is needed is. More interaction with this is this is a weird statement more interaction with our business sector colleagues. And marketing and branding. And academics do it all the time, but anytime you and I don't want to bra brush. I apologize for saying that the academics that I often. Engage with. They don't even like to use those terms. But they do it all the time on their websites and when they're when they're at meetings, recruiting students and all that kind of stuff. What do we do as far as D I because I agree with you 100% it's under attack and it's. It's been looped in with all kinds of other kind of. Weird ideologies and things of that nature, but how do we rebrand retool and refocus ourselves that this work of broader impacts or brought in participation continues. A political sense. So, you know, it's not a political thing. How do we find the value. For anyone and what it is that broadening participation brings to the whole enterprise and to the planet. That is outside of ideologies and to help in a self. Figure that out. Maybe that's. I don't know how do we bolster our social behavior and economics director it. Right that director it as opposed to not as opposed to, but in addition to also keeping the discovery science in the core research directorates. Where it is or even higher, what you know, but we certainly would love guidance and ideas on that. Thank you, Brendan. I'm actually going to use this. I don't need to speak on the job, but I come from a university that's directly impacted by this. So I'm at the University of Texas at Austin. And I think it's important for people to understand what those laws, regardless of what you think about them. And I completely understand what they actually said. So there, at least in Texas, and I can't speak for any other state, but I know that this is one of the ones that people point to. The law does not prohibit you from getting a grant to to look at diversity initiatives. Nothing that we've talked about here is expressly forbidden in that long, Texas at least. So I think what's really important when you think about these things is not to be hindered by by what you think the law says to make sure you know what the law says so that there's this tendency I think for people to be be scared of the law. And think that they can't do things that they really can do and that I know for for sure the University of Texas would support and does support diversity research. Regardless of the Texas law, which states two things by the way it states that there can be no consideration of diversity and hiring and it says that the university cannot have mandatory diversity training. Or diversity department, but it really states nothing about diversity research. At the university so I just want to make that clear that people should understand what the laws and not not prohibit yourself because when this understanding. I'm not sure about a really good point that I think people should understand. I think that the conditions and when the step my understanding is way better than I do the conditions of the grant might supersede that and that sense for example for students. But there are diversity initiatives that, you know, by the University is supporting for students that are only for certain segments of students and that's perfectly acceptable under the Texas law. They don't touch students to I just want to chime in here. We have similar considerations in the state of Mississippi, but when you I will echo everything that Marcia said when you look at the law carefully and really understand that there are the places to work in and most of these applied to staff, not even the faculty and not students. Because my understanding of the Florida law is that it applies in recent state funds, not producing federal funds. I think that there's all of us are a little bit different. Yeah. All right, so I'm going to bring us back to whether you have a follow up comment or it's another question. I have kind of a follow up comment that maybe. I want to point us in a certain direction. So some of the things that I'm hearing, you know, we're all followed with the data that Christine showed us right and we talked about the evaluation process and Christine, thank you for all the insights you brought about what NIH tried. That's actually information that I had not heard before. So I would I would love to hear where I can get my hands on that and we'll begin a little bit more. But I think one of the things that I'm hearing in this conversation about panel reviews and how the system sort of recreating itself is this idea that we have to find a way to align our stated values with our evaluation system. Right. And how do we do that? And clearly, Christine, you talked about how an age has been trying that unsuccessfully. I guess the one analogy I will draw on is the analogy of hiring practices. I think for the last 20 years in academia, we've really dug into our hiring practices. And there's been a number of things that people have tried, some of which did not work. But there are interventions that do work and that essentially make sure that the process is such that the evaluation criteria are aligned more closely to our stated values. And certainly in my institution, I've seen a huge shift through the use of these best practices in who we bring in. I mean, without a doubt, I know that we carried out searches over the last few years that clearly would have produced a different outcome 10 years ago than they did today. And I'm very proud of that. So, and I know that this is the case at other institutions as well. So what does it look like to do that in the proposal review realm or in the, not just in the review, but just the whole process, right? And so I guess I want to, I still want to challenge us to keep thinking about ways in which the whole structure can be altered to align our stated values with the evaluation system we're using actually. And Kristi had some ideas, right? What about elevating this notion of training the next generation? That could be one way of changing the rubric so that different proposals will rise to the surface. Just like I think we have refined the rubric for hiring that are now resulting in, at my institution, huge changes in the number of students from diverse backgrounds from graduate school and also changes in the faculty. So, I guess I would love to hear some thoughts that there was still time, though I also yield to Mona, since I know you might want to roll about things with the point. Let's see if folks have any comments related to what you guys just said. Yeah, wanting to think about you, you talked about the composition of your faculty. You can start to also think about the composition of the review panels themselves. You know, because even if you train, I mean, you can train a younger generation, but if they're being trained by that generation that's resistant to change, it might be hard to get through to them. You know, and I think the comments come out about some of the science that comes out of certain groups that it has more societal relevance and basic science application. So are you bringing in folks from institutions on those panels that actually come from those type of research backgrounds? Like, you know, I talked about, you know, the National Network of Minority Serving Institutions and we have this tendency to think of them as a place where that's where I go to get, you know, Hispanic students or tribal students or African-American students. We don't think about the place where, oh, that's where I go to actually learn how to do community science the right way. Right. Oh, that's where that person's doing, you know, the type of research that way because they're limited by their budget. So they've had to do something different. That's different. So are you bringing those types of people right onto your panel that can inform the research? Yeah, I don't know. I've been asked to be on panel that are seeing where things like the big question about the infrastructure and facilities can become a thing. Well, they're too small. They're not going to do that. Right. Can somebody advocate for that? Well, if you give them the money to buy the facilities, then they can do the research. They can literally have the academic background to engage in it. You know, some of the social aspects, it's not unusual for folks who come from basic science background, like, I don't understand why we would fund this. If there's someone on that panel that can advocate, the reason that this work is going to be transformative because it impacts this community and that community that might actually be leading on the forefront of climate change issues. Right. You need those types of folks in there. In other words, you need a different type of reviewer that you probably have to think about. You know, having a panel, because you can do a lot of training. You know, I'm faculty member. We did a lot of faculty training, you know, my HR direction, like, they're going to say this, but the moment those applications got to the panel, like, they threw out that training and they looked for people who resonated with their pet issues. Right. And so you want to put in very non diverse, you know, candidate polls afterwards. Training can help, but you know, people have, you have this tendency to go back to the things that they're familiar with and comfortable with. And so I think in some sense you have to bring in these disruptor types. Right onto these review panels, we're going to take a look at these, these types of applications and proposals in ways that maybe not historically, in ways that these certain proposals haven't historically been reviewed. I also want to highlight the importance of looking at outcomes at NSF and noting, and of the importance of program officers themselves, ensuring that we have program officers that are broad representation that they're looking at the data is what's coming out of their programs, you know, what's coming out of their programs and that there are opportunities for, you know, accountability and discussion really within federal agencies because at the end of the day, the their, you know, people just like, like all of us right and so if NSF has a strong commitment to this, which it states it does it's built into the mission of this than ensuring that actually the processes within the agency at every level are reflecting that is key. And I think that the framings around workforce development, you know, ensuring it's representative of the US and so forth. Those are things that transcend all, you know, all parties right so we're almost at the top of the hour. I can't believe that we've spent two hours in this very rich, rich discussions. So thanks to all the panelists. So the my last question to all the panelists is going to be this morning, the NSF leaders are here and they, they challenged the committee to think about visionary strategic ways in which we can move forward ocean science research, but something strategic visionary that is grounded in reality. So I would like to invite the panelists to challenge the committee to think of one bold change, one bold step that we need to take in that direction. Well, I mean, I've been saying it for years, there has to be an SDC equivalent program that tells it MSI to develop basic ocean science workforce out there. I don't think to this day anything like that exists at NSF. Yeah, I second that I think that looking at the models that are effective that are mission driven from NASA from NIH. And even some of the work that NOAA has supported but is just not big enough in scale, you know, and so NSF to make an investment on the scale of STCs, but focused on workforce development, broadening participation. And that that's key right and that's key to sustainability. It's key to coastlines and people it cuts across so many kind of programs that and initiatives that they've that they've launched. It's hard to pick one, but one thing you could consider is to advocate for funders not only just not only NSF, I don't know if your committee also covers, you know, other funding agencies like, I don't know, USDA or DOE, but advocate for all funders, you know, government agencies and philanthropic organizations to improve their data collection and transparency on their funding outcomes by various characteristics. I think we do lack the most basic data to support and evaluate how we're doing, especially for faculty diversity initiatives. And actually NSF has been probably one of the best, if not the best funding agency in sharing their funding outcomes data. You know, for, for other agencies, it's far worse where they didn't even start collecting said data until like 2017 or something like that. But making sure that that continues and gets better, especially as we move into future uncertain years, I think will be really important to ensure accountability. This was strategic we have somebody from Oh, go ahead. Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to make sure I you know I did have a second one, and which is unfunding this kind of comm university model and ocean sciences, which I think is directly in alignment with the ocean justice strategy that was just released by the White House. Right. And so this, this is the time, I think for something like that. Brandon, you know, I, what I was about to say, it's only strategic that you're to you're at the end, you represent the agency to which we're making these recommendations. So what do you suggest? What, what should we consider? Yeah, it's hard to follow my three colleagues. I'm thinking that a push for cross sector collaboration. So this gets to Rod and his point about the community. Hubs around our coast, where there are not just academic institutions, but federal agencies, etc. I always think of the, the car model in Colorado, because there's federal agencies there and and facilities and things at the end universities. Right. So, where can we design these hubs, scale up these hubs that exist or people aren't thinking about so that it is the, not just ocean, but everything related to that in that, in that region, maybe regional models or things of that nature. But again, to Corey's point, big investment would be needed there. And the last thing I'll say is, and that's on the infrastructure piece for student prep faculty researchers. But then there's the ethics piece. What are we going to do about ethics as it relates to culture. And our professional societies, in particular, AGU is out in front as defining harassment in any form as scientific misconduct. But there aren't many institutions that are doing that is certainly not federally. So that's that's another part for the culture piece and retention of the workforce that we need. With that, we will close the panel. Thank you all so much for your very, very thoughtful perspectives and thank you for to all the participants for for a very thoughtful exchange as well. Thanks again. Yeah, that was really, really excellent everybody I so appreciate your time and wisdom and input into this process. This is the topic that I think is not featured prominently in the last six years survey and the media is really interested in making sure that we work with them as well. Thank you for moderating. Very much so.