 And it started just a brief note. We are recording this presentation are, some of our committee members are not able to view live. So we are going to be sharing it with them post meeting. And I will turn it over to our committee chair, Jennifer McSusold. Hello, good afternoon or good morning or evening, I guess, depending on where you are tuning in from before we get started, I just want to thank everybody for their time to share their thoughts on this topic. My name is Jen McSusold. I'm at the University of New Hampshire, where I'm the director of the Center for Acoustics Research and Education. I have been asked to serve as the chair on this National Academy's panel titled Committee on Ocean Acoustics Education and Expertise. This particular activity today is a workforce information gathering panel. And so this will be split. And I think Caroline will talk a little bit more about this, but it will be split into two different panels, one for government and one for non-government entities. So jumping right in, because we want to give everybody more time to talk than to listen. So if we go to the next slide, the goal for today's meeting really is to collect information and perspectives from all of you as both individuals and as representative of your organizations to inform our report that we will write on this topic. Here we're going to hear from speakers in the Ocean Acoustics workforce, both governmental and non-governmental. Things that we will be asking questions and topics centered around experience, obtaining and training their own workforce and thoughts on future direction of their workforce in relation to the topic of Ocean Acoustics. We can move to the next slide, please. I don't do this alone. So I want to very much introduce, they're not going to introduce themselves but acknowledge the different committee member on the panel. There's Andrea Anguelos from Penn State University, Art Baggerer from MIT, Yusel Hodling from Idaho's Education, Rujan Lee from the University of Washington, Carolyn Ruekel from the US Geological Survey, Bale Scoprof from the University of Rhode Island and Preston Wilson from the University of Texas, Austin. I'd also like to point out, Carolyn Bell, who is our point of contact through the National Academies and the National Academy staff that is working with the committee to generate this report. I think everybody but Art Baggerer from the committee is on today, correct? So this statement of task, I'm not going to read this all to you. You should have each gotten a briefing booklet but I do want to highlight four things. So this statement of task requests a report written by the committee covering four specific topics. The first is the state of education in ocean acoustics. The second is examination of workforce demand around the topic of ocean acoustics. And I'm also going to add into that and supporting disciplines, ocean acoustics does not exist in a vacuum. There are many different supporting disciplines that contribute to ocean acoustics such as technology, signal processing and so forth. So that is all going to be considered for the larger umbrella of supporting ocean acoustics. The third statement of task is to really understand the skill sets or competencies needed to meet the current ocean acoustics and supporting disciplines demand and the future demand. It's these numbers two and three that I think this panel will be able to provide us expert opinion and information on. The fourth statement of task item is to look how the needs that are not being met can be elevated in order to raise the profile of careers in ocean acoustics across all stakeholders and sectors. Anybody have any questions on the statement of task before I move forward? Cause this is an important one. Okay, let's go to the next slide. And so this is how our report is going not to be structured but will incorporate information on academic institutions that offer courses at ocean acoustics and supporting disciplines. That is not this information gathering panel but will be the topic of an additional one. Public and private sector professional level organizations that require expertise in ocean acoustics as part of their operations. You guys can speak to this firsthand. Ocean acoustics workforce needs in key sectors industry. I think we're gonna talk a lot about that today. Training programs currently available in key regions. That may or may not come up today depending on how the different organizations that we have participating in this panel answer questions and examples of current ocean acoustic programs which will be the topic of a survey that is going out to the acoustic community and another information gathering panel. Okay, let's go to the next slide please. Oh, that's your slide. All right, thank you, Jen. So just a few meeting logistics for everybody. I think everyone is keeping on this as Zoom is kind of the new norm for a lot of meetings. Please meet yourself when you're not speaking. Use the raised hand feature to ask a question or the chat in Zoom. We will be, as we get to the Q&A panels, committee members questions will be prioritized and Jen will be moderating the questions with Academy staff assisting. And then please turn your cameras on when you're speaking. And we, as I had mentioned at the beginning but for those that just joined we are recording the session for committee members who are unable to attend. Next slide, Eric. And just a brief agenda. We're gonna start with the federal agency panel and then we'll have a period for question and answers and then we'll go into the industry and research panel and time for questions for those speakers. And so with that, Eric, if you wanna end the slide and we will welcome Jill Lewandowski from Bohem to begin our panel. You are muted. As Jill unmutes each person, are we gonna do, we're just gonna do the governmental panel introductions first or do we wanna do all panel introductions? I was going to just go through person by person. Okay. So go ahead. Go ahead, the floor is yours. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, great. So hi, Jill Lewandowski. So I currently work for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and I wear kind of two hats. I oversee our environmental assessment work from a national perspective and I also direct our Center for Marine Acoustics. And I wanted to sort of start in this presentation by talking a little bit about, I'm not sure why this is not, there it goes, it's probably gonna, I wanted to sort of just start real briefly with Bohem's mission so you can get an understanding of where we're coming from when it comes to acoustics. So we have a purpose of managing development of energy and minerals offshore, which in this case is oil and gas. It's any kind of renewable energy, marine minerals, which is often sand mining for beach and coastal wetlands renursment. And we also have a carbon sequestration program coming on board, but we're meant to do it in an environmentally and economically responsible way. So I work obviously in that environmentally aspect trying to apply that across a variety of things. But it's a big mission because right now we have about two, over about 2 1 1⁄2 billion acres that we manage in the Otterkonneners shelf. And of course we just did get extension to look at renewables in some of the U.S. territories as well. To give you a sense, noise-producing activities happen across all of those program areas. I noted activities and every sort of phase of each of those activities, anywhere from air guns and other geophysical sources to pile driving to dredging, explosive. So we have a lot of activities that we manage. And we're sort of in a unique role where we regulate it. But we're also regulated to some extent, for example, under the Nader Species Act, which is a federal to federal statute where we work closely with NOAA and Fish and Wildlife. And they may regulate us and ask us to provide and apply some provisions to activities that we authorize as well. And to give you another sense of just the space for working on is it's not just a science issue, right? It's also a policy issue. This is a little flavor of some of the big statutes that we deal with. So any activity we have that's producing noise is going to have to be considered, you know, under the ESA, the Marine Mammal Protection Act. If it's a near or in a sanctuary, it's the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, essential fish habitat. So there are a lot of places where we have to sort of consider noise within our kind of regulatory structure and review. So back in December of 2020, we created or formalized what we're calling a dissenter for marine acoustics. And it's not to say it's a new issue for us because the earliest study that Bohm did on acoustics was in the late 1970s, up in the Arctic. And there were studies throughout the 80s and 90s, but I think acoustics as sort of a controversial issue elevated to, across our programs, mainly oil and gas started really happening in the early 2000s. And for the longest period of time, we didn't have anybody that had acoustic expertise. I came to it and learned it on the job. The person that joined me shortly, a number of years later also had learned it on the job versus some formal training. But now we're starting to see programs that are really training individuals to come to the workforce with those skills and knowledge in place. But to focus on what our purpose is is we are working on modeling. So we're trying to do a soup to nuts model looking at sound source propagation, impact assessment, applying relative risk framework. So we're also working with our science environmental studies program within BOM as well as other partners to fill data gaps and identify new ones as well. Policy is a heavy component, messaging, trying to improve our stakeholders' understanding of actual risks. I think we all know there's a lot of misconceptions out there about noise and what it means as far as impacts go. And of course, we're very, very, very much partnership focused. So our center rank acoustics right now, I serve as a center director. We have four team members on our bio acoustics team and we have three more on our physical acoustics and modeling team. Over on the right there, I just wanted to sort of capture relative to this discussion. I noted myself and one other person, we sort of learned the acoustics on the job. My background is environmental science and policy but I did not step into acoustics until I joined the government in the early 2000s. But there are many six are in early mid-career. We have one that came to us during her doctorate program right at the end. We had two that came right during or following a postdoc, three that came to us from consulting, mainly organizations that do modeling or actually do field measurements on acoustics. The education varies but I gave a little bit of a flare as far as the eight individuals that we have in the center what their advanced degrees were in. And it goes across the board from straight up on acoustics to applied mathematics to conservation medicine and zoology to policy and science, ocean engineering. So I think just seeing where people came to us with the kinds of degrees they have is an indication of the sorts of needs we have from an education perspective. And then my final slide is just to share some observations. One of them is something I've touched on already. I think in the past people learned on the job but I think now we're seeing more and more graduate programs that are actually training folks up in various aspects of the physical, biology and the policy side of the issue. I do see that a bit more in the graduate level not so much in the undergraduate. So I do sort of wonder if there's space there to grow and perhaps engage and treat people to start earlier and maybe get more people into the field. It does require lots of buckets of expertise. I think it's difficult for anybody to come into us with just one of these buckets. I think I know when I hire, I'm looking for people that are able to operate in more than one. So they're a little more interdisciplinary in some aspects. And that's large because we don't have the resources to fill each bucket with expertise. And so a competitive applicant is gonna be somebody who is not just a physical scientist or a biologist but they can also operate, they've learned through education or they've shown through on the job work that they can operate in more than one of these buckets. It's a small, the growing applicant pool. I look back, like if I could use like aquatic noise conferences as a judge, a gauge, I guess, when I look at the one in Cork, Ireland that was probably 12 years ago. And it was such a small group there into what we see now where it's gone from maybe 75, 80 people to 3, 400 and lots of students showing up. So that's great. I think that's indicating that more and more people are getting into the field, but it's still a limited number of applicants. When we post a job, we probably get less than 10 that have been the bioacoustics and even smaller than that on the physical acoustics and modeling. And that might just be a desire not to go to the federal government. It's hit or miss. Sometimes we've put out an advertisement and we've had a great number, a great, even though it's a small pool, it's a really, there's some great people in it. And other times we've put it out and there's nobody we even wanna consider. So it's a little bit hit or miss. And I would say, I know we've taken people from other organizations and I suspect that'll happen to us also at some point in time. So we are competing for the same people. I think that the one area that's field critically lacks is that whole messaging piece, like how do we outreach, educate, communicate, have experts in those areas or training in those areas that can allow a physical acquisition to be able to communicate and educate at the appropriate level or people who just can understand the science and the technical piece of it and do a good job at that. And it's, as we know, it's not just one level, right? So we need to talk to people we regulate. We need to talk to the general public and families that come to public meetings. We probably need to get into the education system, K through 12 as well, and really start giving folks a better understanding of ocean acoustics and maybe get them interested in an earlier age. I just wanted to jump in and ask if you could wrap it up so we could have time for committee questions. Yep, great. So the last two, I'll just pop up here. You know, it's difficult the federal government to get the FDE, to get the budget for the FDEs. It took probably about eight plus years of rallying until we finally were able to get that and boom. And then the last point I would make is it's very limited diversity in the field. And if there's a way that this committee can kind of think about how can we reach more diverse candidates and get to communities that are generally underrepresented in this field would be, I think, a really great direction to head. And that's it. So I will unshare. Awesome, thank you, Jill. We're going to move to Mike Jack for his introduction of yourself and your organization. Would you like to share or will you do the slides? It'd be coming up. Awesome, okay. So my name is Mike Jack. I'm with the Noah Northeast History Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And just to give a quick background, I'm a biologist by training who got into using underwater acoustics in graduate school. And but over the years I've interacted with many acousticians, physicists, engineers, and there's a learning curve there from a biological background to dealing with people who are engineering type backgrounds. And my expertise is in active acoustics in the water column. So that's what my background is. And I try to give, you can go to the next slide. I try to give a background of Noah, but I just, I made this slide many, many years ago and you can tell that because it says voltage on it and something else. But this is just to show and remind myself that the acoustics is multidisciplinary as we find out. There's electronics, there's engineering, there's acoustical physics, there's the biology and ecology, if you're looking at water column, but you can substitute that fish for seabed, reefs, wrecks, navigational charts, all different kinds of things. It's something in that underwater environment that we're trying to learn. And that all goes up into visualizations and computer science. And now what we're seeing a lot is with the data analytics. We've collected a large number of data over the years and decades and so now what do we do with those data? And within Noah, as Jill said, we're providing information for the public good. Next slide, please. So that's really our goal. So there's a broad spectrum of applications of underwater acoustics in science and that is reflected in the uses within Noah. So I'll probably give you a short shrift to most a lot of programs in Noah. And but also it's an applied approach within, I don't know, within the government, but certainly within Noah, we focus primarily on applied applications or applied approach versus basic research. Kind of the basic workforce structure. There's tech level support that do a lot of the technical level kinds of things, calibrations, post processing data, organizing ancillary data, as Jill said, there's a lot of other data that goes into this. We have software specialists. They develop software processing data, databases, data analysis, but I can say they don't often do is they're not into the true signal processing of the echo sounders. And it's much the same way with the hardware engineers. Most of the hardware engineers are developing hardware for related activities, calibrations or other types of things, but we've kind of left the development of the echo sounders and transducers to the industry, which you'll probably hear about quite a bit in the next panel. And that's, there's benefits and there's also limitations to that, to having made that, or having come to that if we made the actual decision or not, but that's what it tends to be. And then we have research personnel developing new analytical methods, interacting with assessment and ecosystem sciences and trying to direct how that information reaches the public and to the managers. Next slide, please. So I just, just a short list of things that came to my head when I was looking at acoustic activities in NOAA. I'm in the fisheries, NOAA fisheries or National Fisheries Service, NIMS. The living marine sources, that's where we use active acoustics primarily. That's where we're generating estimates of abundance and biomass for stock assessment and ecosystem-based management. So most of our data or not all of our data goes into stock assessment or ecosystem works or mapping distributions of fish and plankton. And important, we're creating, we're doing aerial surveys. So surveys over often broad areas at regular rentables. So it's not continuous data collection. Within the organization of NIMS, there's protected species. And that's primarily where we get into the past of acoustic monitoring. And that's where you're monitoring the spatial temporal distributions of the animals that are making sounds, mainly mammals, but there are fish. And one difference from the living marine resources is that they're continuously collecting data at selected sites though. So you have point data, but over time, time series of data. And acoustic telemetry. And that's primarily used a lot for protected species like salmon, sturgeon, some of the larger fish where they're trying to get migratory patterns of the species and mammals also. Again, they're looking at the spatial temporal distributions of fish and mammals at selected sites. Next slide, please. We also have the National Ocean Service. And that's really where the bathymetric mapping for navigations and charting comes from. So they have a whole, that's a whole separate branch from our division section of NOAA. And that's really, that's what their bread and butter is bathymetric mapping. And they have a whole field for that. But there's also a biological component, habitat mapping, where there's been thing of plastic mapping. There's also a lot of work with reefs and wrecks and other epigenetic features that are put into the ocean. That's a lot of where that work is done within NOS. And then there's a small contingent of people in, it's called Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which is OAR. And they deal primarily with ocean exploration. So they're out in deep water, typically, like in mesopelagic regions or deep coral reefs and other things, a lot of remote vehicles. And then we also have the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, OMAAO. And OMAAO doesn't necessarily do the acoustics, but they're responsible for the platforms where we have all our acoustic instrumentation. Most of those are crude vessels now, but they're getting into remote and autonomous vehicles. And we also have the survey texts that often conduct or assist with calibration of the acoustic instrumentation of the platforms. And they also deal with the at-sea data management. So that's really where the data are collected, is on these platforms. And I will say that the expertise in that division is low. They really could stand to have more expertise in that division. And then lastly, we have the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, which is NASDIS. And this is important because that's where all the NOAAA acoustic data are archived. Happens the facility in Boulder, Colorado, but they are responsible for archiving the data, but not only that, but making the data discoverable and available to everyone in the world. And it really is, those data are used by people from around the world. Next slide, please. Just to go over the topics, I think that Jennifer mixed. Oh, I'll skip number one. I can echo what Jill said a lot of this, but the demand is really the technical level support. We need, that's one of the levels. So we have a fair number of PhDs and masters, but we do have technical level support. And one of the issues with technical level support is that they often end up in dead-end careers, especially with the at-seed data collection. It's really, really, really hard to retain people and recruit people for those. And that's what a lot of NOAAA does. We collect a lot of data at sea and it's very difficult to keep those people. As I said before, the big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, that's really kind of the growing area for on the research side of things. As we're collecting more and more data, not from just the crude vessels, but from autonomous platforms, and we've really given short shrift to data management and IT needs. That is a critical infrastructure need that is very necessary. That's gonna have to get some attention before we move forward. Okay, next slide. Mike, if you could wrap up please so we can give some time for questions. And I'll just go back to kind of echo what Jill said. There's just the training and can you continue education as key, especially for that technical level, that the technical level people, because we really need that level of people and we need to be able to retain and keep them. That's all happening. Thank you, Mike. That was great that you tied it right back to the statement of work item. So thank you very much. The last person on our federal government panel is Brian Houston, and you can introduce yourself and your organization. Thank you. Hi, folks. Caroline, I sent you a package, both a PDF and a PowerPoint. Then the last few minutes, can you grab that or should I drive it from my slides from my machine? You're muted. Thank you. Yeah, if you wouldn't mind pulling them up if you haven't handy, otherwise the email did just pop in. I was gonna say Brian, why don't you just introduce yourself and then Caroline, you can get the slides going while he introduces himself Here we go. I've got them up now. Brian. Okay, so my name is Brian Houston. I'm with the Naval Research Lab and Naval Research Lab is located sort of splattered across the country, the main campuses in Washington, DC. Stennis Space Center, there's a large complement of us down there. We are also on the West Coast in Monterey. So if you'll go to the next slide, NRL is a basic and exploratory focused, research focused organization. Originally started about a hundred years ago by Alexandre Cranbell, urging the federal government that it needed an S&T laboratory for its Navy because of all the new technology that was being generated. So most of our folks are practicing scientists. We publish in the open as well as we have closed publications for things that are more classified, about a thousand PhDs, a lot of patents and publications. If you don't remember anything about the Naval Research Lab, just remember that it's the place where the global positioning system was invented. We go to the next slide. Okay, so there are about 16 divisions in the Hethel Laboratory. The Acoustics Division is highlighted in red. It is under the Ocean Atmospheric Science and Technology Directorate currently headed up by Doug Todorov. Next slide. So inside the Acoustics Division, we have five main research areas, what I call strategic research areas. Ocean Acoustics, Ocean Atmospheric Acoustics, the dominant one of course is Ocean Acoustics, is the first one. It's also the dominant research area. Physical and structural acoustics, undersea signal processing, autonomous and distributed systems, and then advanced materials for undersea warfare. Ocean acoustics embeds everything else. It's intertwined in all these other core strategic research areas. We do mostly basic and applied research, but we also go all the way to the fleet. So much of a lot of our research, researchers do work at the very basic and exploratory level, but many of them are out on Navy grayships as well, in naval aircraft and so on and so forth. Next slide. So Ocean Acoustics is a core research area. A lot of the work that we do today is dealing with very complicated environments where sound propagation is obviously very important aspect of the way the fleet operates. There's an enormous investment by the operational Navy to get that right. And more and more recently we've discovered, or the Navy has discovered that it's the environment stupid. You really have to get this piece right because a lot of the sonars that we have, for example, both passive and active, are not functioning at the optimum level, if you will, in terms of the precision with which they locate, track threats and so on and so forth. And that's because we had to refine, we know now that we have to refine how we do Ocean Acoustics and improve the accuracy with which that's carried out in order for us to get propagation physics correctly so that we can make our sonars work real well. And that feeds the entire chain from the perspective of picking contact with threats and ultimately dealing with them. Next slide. So inside the acoustics division itself, the dominant discipline is physics. Most of us are physicists. They're a handful of other disciplines, including we have one chemist in the acoustics division, but I would say ME is the second most prominent discipline. Most of us, not all of us, but most of us came to this, came to acoustics with other disciplines, other focused disciplines. I myself was a laser physicist from graduate school, but we're now have about 60 people that are on the technical side and most of them are physicists. Typically learning, not learning on the job in the sense that nobody's ever seen the wave equation before, but physicists have a saying, a wave is a wave. And ultimately being able to move into a new field is relatively straightforward if you did a good job of getting your skills under your belt when you were training to be a physicist. Next slide. So this last slide just tries to emphasize what we work on, which is improving the technology in what we call undersea warfare. The Navy is threatened by quiet, a submarine designs coming from Russia and other countries. A lot is going on in terms of seabed warfare all the way down to a full ocean depth. Unmanned underwater vehicles are becoming much more sophisticated. They're becoming weaponized and they're really hard to detect and track because they're small. Even the large vehicles are much smaller than a submarine. Mine countermeasures, mine hunting, also a very, very important application that we're focused on. And the problem's just getting harder, but ocean acoustics is the central piece of it all and how we stitch together all of our solutions. And that's it for me. Didn't have anything else to say. Awesome. Thank you very much, Brian. I think we're gonna move in now to the discussion period of the governmental panel, sorry. And I think I'll start that question off. Mike sort of touched on some of the current and future skills and needs that he feels applies to NOAA and its different lines. So the question I have for each of the panel members are, what are the current workforce needs and those expected in the next 10 years? Go ahead. Yeah, I think from my perspective, on the research side, I think it's what we're calling big data analytics. We've collected a lot of data over the years and one of the mantras of NOAA is collect once, use many. So we've collected a lot of data and we try to then utilize those data for things that were collected, that were other than the original purpose of the surveys. And so we're trying to do that. And in order to do that, you need to start looking into a lot of statistics and data statistics and analytical statistical treatments of the data. And I think that's kind of the big growing part from the research aspect side of the agency. The other need is really at the technical level. I just see that we're just lacking in a lot of the technical level competence that we require because we do collect so much data at sea. You really do need competence at sea and for people to be able to make decisions by themselves without having to email or rely on people on shore to answer the question. So we really do need that sea experience and retaining that experience has been extremely difficult on the NOAA side. Thank you. Jill or Brian? Yeah, this is Jill. I would agree with what Mike said. I mean, I think there's, particularly with a lot of the, just kind of acoustic monitoring data, just having an ability to explore how to analyze big data. I think we still have a number of questions sort of on the sound source to some extent different understanding, characterizing that more, but also there's always the ongoing questions about impacts to different groups of marine life and what just started of course with marine animals is applies now to turtles, fish, benthic animals. So there's a lot of research questions and an ability to have folks that are gonna continue to be able to sort of explore those. I think working in the government sector, I think my one slide that sort of showed people's degrees coming in kind of represents what I think are sort of our current as well as our expected future needs as far as qualifications from a degree perspective. Yeah, but I think that's what I would add to it. So I'll bump it over to, I guess, Brian. Yeah, so the, from our perspective, just because physicists tend to be more flexible, oftentimes just a handful of physicists that really paid attention in school and did pretty well are the most flexible people we can throw at our problems. We need numbers just because the demand side from the Navy has gone up tremendously with the Cold War disappearing. A lot of the funding dried up in undersea warfare, ocean acoustics was de-emphasized largely and the Navy paid attention to other things. Today, the Navy is screaming at us. They want technology, they want discoveries, they want to make all their sonars work better. They want new sonars to handle some of the new problems. And we have a strong demand signal just because of the degree of funding that's involved and the level of importance that the folks in uniform and outside of uniforms are demanding when you look at the future, a lot of the leadership in the Navy now is responding to this notion that we're gonna be at war with the Chinese in the next couple of years, 10 years is way out there and it's probably going to happen if it does happen inside the next few years and they want technology. And so what we're doing, we find the most productive path for us is to not excluding other disciplines but to get physicists in who have the mathematical physics training, obviously generally speaking and the skill level to understand a lot of the physical issues involved with propagation and interaction with structures and so on and so forth. And there's a lot of demand of course for those kinds of skill sets from the general economy. And so our problem is numbers. Thank you. Caroline, I saw your hand went up. Yeah, so I, as a fellow of Fed, I guess I will ask this question. I find when I'm hiring pretty difficult time because of the limited applicant pool of US citizens and this is obviously relevant to all of you. And of course you don't know the people who don't apply but you must have some sense of whether that's a problem for you because obviously you are kind of limited in needing to identify US citizens. So do you have any sense of whether that's changed, whether that's a problem? I know if I want to hire a non-US citizen it's got to be as a contractor so that's a whole other set of problems that's much more expensive. I'm sure the Navy can't even do that. So could any of you speak to that issue a little bit? I think it's definitely a challenge because we know of, particularly as we've moved into this more remote workforce or virtual workforce that opens the door quite a bit too for working with folks. But I think it would require, as far as I understand at least coming from moment it would require a change in policy like OPM, Office of Personnel Management. So, yeah, that we're sort of in the same boat where we'd have to go through a contractor to achieve that. It's a problem for us as well. There's a desire because of COVID and all the obvious things that happen there. There's a desire for people to move to other locations around the country and just work from home. Our problem is we have so many things that are held close that are at the secret and higher level and it's hard to do any credible work with people 700 miles away. We've got to fly them in and things like that. And we're trying to discourage people from taking on this notion that perhaps they can live on the West Coast and have a job on the East Coast and so forth. So far we're sort of at a standstill. We don't have a stampede of people headed for the door. We've lost, I would say we've lost two or 3% than my division alone. Thank you. From the NOAA perspective, it really helps to have an idea of the ultimate purpose of your data while you're working on the team. So, I was saying, within the, probably the navigational charting that's probably more the physicist level kinds of or mathematical level. But once you get into the fisheries and habitat that's where you start integrating the biological information. And then it's, I found over the years, I'll just give you one example. I've been working with machine learning and I've gotten into it much, much more than I intended because I just had hoped I could pass my data over to a computer scientist and they would come back with the answer. And that's not it at all. There is, I don't have a great understanding machine learning and the computer scientists have even less of an understanding of fish, or squid or whatever the natural resources. And so, we've been having an extremely difficult time getting that. So it's a lot of iterative processes. And so, I think it depends on kind of the background of what you want the data to do. So, if you're more in line of the physics side of things and I think it's a more direct path to the end result of data, if you're on the biological or oceanographic side then it's a much more difficult problem. And the same thing with, we have the same thing with US citizens also as the other panel members have to. If I make a quick comment. So, because of the kinds of problems we were working on with regards to developing high performance classification tools for acoustic signals, ASW, mind counter measures and so on and so forth. Particularly in highly cluttered environments we moved to AI machine learning about 20 years ago before it was fashionable. I'm sorry, I'm just, this is just the truth. But we didn't have too many people who were trained in the art, but it's a mathematical physics problem. And the physicists, you know, people who were trained in high energy physics, et cetera, et cetera, I mean, they were all over the place and the acoustics division of all places, they took to that and were very, very productive in learning it and applying it. And today a lot of the people that we have, we do have a few computer scientists who understand it and can apply it. But physicists are generalists, right? So if you work on a bio problem, their minds work in a way that allow them to learn a little bit of that real quickly and get the job done. Our problems are all focused pretty much on machines that go under the water. But, you know, biology is not our focus. Preston, you had your hand up? Yeah, thanks. I wanted to follow up a little bit on Mike's comment about the kind of decision or the branch at which it was decided that some other people would build the sonars and the users would kind of separate from that. There are parts of our kind of overall community where that doesn't occur, which is, of course, the Navy, the user and the developer tied together. And that's very useful. And that's where I come from, UT Austin Applied Research Lab. So we do train people to do that. So I guess my question is how did that come to be? Could you comment a little bit more? Is it lack of people or lack of mission or what was it? That's a great question. And I've been trying to, I don't know the exact reason for that. It's probably lack of people. Noah's mission is, again, it's more applied. So we're not in the basic research of developing electronics like that. I've almost seen it as the evolution from an applied standpoint of almost the analogy of a CTD. A CTD, at one point, was the focus of the research and how you actually measured salinity using electrical sensors and temperature and that. But now, I mean, it's ubiquitous. And I don't know exactly how a CTD works and yet I use those data. And I think we're starting to see that a little bit in the echo sound or fisheries perspective and that we use it as a tool more than the tool itself. But so the benefits are that we don't need to spend the money on the R&D for that. We don't need to hire that expertise. We can hire other things. The limitation is that then you get what the manufacturer provides. And that is often, you know, and they have certainly, they certainly want to serve the community, but they also have financial obligations to the company and they have to make the economically viable. So, you know, there's the trade-offs and we do try to work very well. And we actually do work very well with industry. So it's not like there's a complete disjunct there, but there are benefits and limitations to that. And I don't know if it's just the evolution of using a technology or, you know, it certainly wasn't conscious, but it seems to be going on. But aren't there a lot more vendors around today with the kind of equipment we need to do metrology and then water acoustics? It's got to be at least a little bit. Yeah, I know, I agree. I think that's true. And as people use it more, there are more entities there to serve those folks and build these systems. So it may really not be needed. As long as there's a way to do some, you know, customization or things like that, I can see it working, you know, in multiple ways. But my point is, you know, as Brian mentioned, you do need specific tools to solve specific problems and we don't know what the future problems will be. Hence, we can't build the tools today. We'll have to build them in the future. So who does that? This, we're getting pretty narrow at this point. So I'm gonna step back, thank you. Bill's got our hand up and she wants to respond, so. Will, I was gonna shift to another sort of need if that's okay or not. Yeah, so I think whether you're sort of dealing with agencies that have different mandates here and, you know, national security and, you know, energy development, all these sorts of things. Every one of us though is also regulated to some extent. And so the sorts of requirements that either we put on, you know, into our operators or put on us are determined by people within the government, right? So there, I think is a need for on the regulatory side and the policy side for just a more connection and ability to understand the issues a bit more so that the requirements maybe become a little bit, I'm not saying they're not reasonable. A lot of them are, but there is a lot that are not. And you can kind of tie some of it directly to whether or not a particular agency has either any acoustics experience to help with that or enough. And that's often the challenge is that they may have it, but there's so much happening that they just don't have enough time to really look towards the solution. So one example too would be monitoring. So I think there's a lot of room for us to really improve upon, you know, you have research that gives you sort of the fundamental understanding, then you approve a project and then you're supposed to monitor for impacts. And I'd say that's one area, particularly real-time monitoring where we could really grow and have a better understanding of what are those real impacts so they can feed into future decisions and then understanding them more timely. And I feel like acoustics has a very important component in helping that space. Thank you. Wu Zhang, you have your hand up. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on, I think one of the, at least one of the panelists had mentioned earlier, the retention problems. And I'm just curious about sort of at which stage do you see it happen? Like do people come into a job looking for another job or do people get trained on the job and then they jump for another job? And also what do you see as the potential core problem of why there is a retention potential problem there? Go ahead, Mikey. Okay, so I think from the North side, it's the ladder, they're coming in for a job and then they either get trained and move on, which happens a lot or the career ladder is just extremely limited from where they started in the government and that's a big issue sometimes in the government. Do you have freedom within a certain band? But to go above that, it requires a lot more, either more degrees and which costs more, you need the budget. And so there's, it's a vicious cycle at that point. And the retention problem I think is really just how to keep people interested. Cause there are people that really enjoy it and like to do it, but others it's their job and they enjoy the job, they do it well, but it's not their life. And so I think we need to be able to keep those career tracks, those that mindset in terms of what people need in mind when we have, when we create these jobs and create the careers for the people also. One thing I would note related to this and this just happened for us cause we're a small bureau, we have to require people to sort of be a little more interdisciplinary. So they may come in with a really strong background in one area, but we're gonna train them up. So our physical scientists are learning biology and our biologists are getting into the physical side of things and everybody's inter mixing in the policy. And what that does though is give you like a much, a much larger area of learning. And so I think people tire of the position a lot further down the road because you're constantly learning. I mean, I was at an age at a large agency, I was at NOAA and in a large agency you are sort of stove pipes a little bit more. And so I felt like I had gotten to my, I hadn't maximized my learning but I got up that curve pretty quickly where if you start offering these maybe as more interdisciplinary positions so people are working across different sub disciplines in this area, I think that does entice people cause it's constantly leaning into their need to learn. Awesome, thank you. I'm glad you brought up interdisciplinary cause that's sort of been going on. Mike said that biologists sometimes don't have that physical or quantitative background and vice versa. So that's something I want to explore further before we end but Gail had her hand up before. Thank you and thank you to our speakers for your insights. It's very helpful. What I'm hearing from you guys is that there are some key needs certainly for folks that can handle big data also for technical level, people that are trained at the technical level and then also a need for flexible physicists as Brian described them. And so I'm wondering if there are go-to institutions where you're recruiting or if you're not actively recruiting if you have a sense for where your workforce comes from are you seeing some bright spots? Well, we have two of our individuals that came out of Jennifer. So she really trains up good graduate students. And then we pulled some out of contractors, modeling like Jasko and Green Ridge. So that's where ours have shown up from. Thank you. Yeah, University of Washington is well in place that has some formal training in the fisheries acoustic sides of things and also at the APL. So we've picked up students from there. UNH is a very good program with Jennifer and CECOM and that center is also on the East Coast. It's been very successful for us. So we've, Brian Houston here. So we've made a course in my career we've made a concerted effort to establish relationships with universities and the specific departments that generate the kinds of people that we think we can use. And sometimes you can't develop that relationship because you don't have common research areas but we've been successful in getting students from some of the local universities in the Washington area but also across the country as well. You just have to put the energy into engaging these places developing relationships and then postdocs, hire postdocs out of those organizations and so on and so forth. And it's a little bit of a hit and miss process but if you invest in it, it usually works. We're coming to the end here and I just wanted to end on one thought process that Jill brought up with interdisciplinarity. Acoustic, Kylie, there's so many facets of acoustics and so many needs that go into that. So one of the things that I think Mike brought up was the versatility of people that have a very interdisciplinary background may not have the quantitative assets or is it more attractive to hire somebody that has a very sort of stove pipe traditional degree and it's very quantitative? I think, I know what I think but I will ask you guys from your organizations what is more attractive to you when you are looking to hire people? The interdisciplinary breadth that they have or their quantitative skills? We do our first brush to say do they have the technical capability, right? And whatever it might be but we know to complete our picture which is partially complete with our center but it could be a greater... We want people to have fundamentally like sort of a home discipline. But then as we go through the hiring process we look for those people who are flexible wanting to learn, willing to sort of engage and go into becoming more interdisciplinary. If they have it coming in, great but we're gonna build it once it's in but you can tell often in a hiring where there's somebody who really just wants to stay in their lane versus somebody who's willing to sort of expand and we only look for those people that are willing to expand. Brian, you look like you were ready to jump in. No, I was just... I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings but we've been much more successful with non-acoustic majors. We have a couple of them. There's no question but a lot of our stars in the division and these are people that started here before I did. So it's not me, just it's not my bias. A lot of people contributed significantly to our problems here at NRL and in the operational Navy who were never trained in acoustics to begin with. Keep an open mind, I guess. Mike? Yeah, I was gonna just echo what Jill had said. I think we need people that have quantitative abilities and it can be a little difficult to figure that out but they do need to be flexible again because of the needs of our mandates and what we need from people. So I think our first thing is to have someone quantitative skills. So you can take a biologist and in fact, I've actually had a little bit better luck teaching biologists sometimes to quantitative skills than trying to get a computer scientist to focus on fish or something biological because people go into different disciplines for different reasons but keeping an open mind exactly as Brian said is really important. But trying to get someone with at least quantitative skills regardless of their biologist, ecologist, physicist or whatever, they need to have those quantitative skills and then you can bring them up and to do the job that you need them to do. Thank you. All your answers sort of reinforce my thought that it's context dependent, quantitative skills are important. I tell all of my students, you shouldn't be afraid of math. And so that has to start early on. Okay, we are at our time. I wanna thank the three federal organization panelists. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. I hope you stick around and listen to our industry panel that's coming up next. And so everybody's giving virtual applause. You've got my virtual applause and heartfelt thank you for spending the time with us. We are gonna shift now to our industry panel and I'm gonna do the same thing and ask each person to, how many of you have one, two, three, four, five, keep it to three minutes if you can, the intro of you and your organization. So that we have enough time to discuss in depth. I'm gonna call on Bruce Martin first. Thanks, Jen. Can you see my screen now, everyone? Yes. Great. So yeah, I'm Bruce Martin. I'm from Jasko Applied Sciences here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I'm representing Jasko for this since our US lead is on vacation this week. So I wanna talk to you about our workforce. So worldwide we have 120 people within Jasko, all focused on acoustics. Six of them are acoustic scientists or managing acoustic scientists. Then we have nine software people, nine mechanical, electrical or systems engineers, nine techs that support the engineers. We have 15 naval architects who are in a company called DW Ship Consult in Germany. And then we have 18 support staff to help with all the things that have to be done. For today's discussion, I am focusing on the acoustics team in particular. But as everybody's been saying in the government side, you need the support staff. So you can see we have, you know, 27 listed here, software and engineering staff that help make our equipment and help make the processing that the acoustics teams need. So I sort of scraped through our resumes to come up with these numbers here. Of the 60 people we have, there are five categories I put them in, from junior biologists, junior scientists, management senior biologists and senior scientists. And you can see the numbers across the top. We have more juniors than we do seniors with management in the middle, which makes a fair amount of sense. And you can see that there's more and more PhDs as you go up in seniority, which also makes a fair amount of sense. Of our 60 staff that I've called the acoustics realm, 28 are PhDs, which kind of surprised me when I saw that. On the right hand side here, we're looking at what are they doing? The junior biologists, there's definitely a tilt towards the marine biology side and data analysis, whether it's field work as a biologist or sitting at the desk and drawing boxes around marine mammal calls, which is the marine, the manual analysis. The scientists are focused on data analysis and propagation modeling. So the quantity of skill side is what we have there. And a few people are focused on animate propagation modeling, animate modeling. The senior biologists, some are manual analysis and its interpretation. Some are more focused on taking that data and actually looking at what it means, what are, where are animals actually living and what are the implications of that? And we have two people who are experts in the effects of noise and have been in that field for a long time. And then in our senior scientist side, it's primarily propagation modeling with a few that are focused on data analysis or effects of noise and animate modeling. Where do we get them from? So this left-hand side here, it's where they went to school as the colors and where they're working now. You'll see that there's definitely a trend towards working in the country where you're educated. On the US side in particular, we have 16 people working in the US of which 14 were educated in the US, one who came in from Ukraine and one who came in from Australia. In Canada, we see that we are getting a lot of people from Canada as well. But we are taking people in from the US and from the UK especially. So what are the fields? Very similar to what the government side were saying, it's people are coming in from all over the place and winding up in these acoustic disciplines. We do have 15 people that were in acoustics to begin with, whether it was acoustical ethnography, physical acoustics or our related field. Marine biology and biological oceanography has another large contingent. And then there's a scattershot across a whole bunch of other fields with physicists and oceanographers are being probably the largest separate group. But we have a medical scientist, we have a couple of neuroscientists, geophysics, mathematics, computer science. We have a few of those, one that we desperately wanna hold onto who is in machine learning and who was gonna go to Google, but he found out that what we do is more interesting. So he's signed on to work for us when he's finished in a couple of weeks. I thought I'd take a shot at just looking at what we have for diversity, at least in the sense of gender and was reasonably happy with what we found. When it comes to degrees, it's the senior degrees, it's pretty close to an even split. And when it comes to the genders and the roles, we probably could do better on the management side having more females involved. But other than that, I think we're in reasonably good shape trying to keep good diversity. And that's nothing we've done in particular, that's just who's in the field and who we've been able to recruit. What do we need? Bruce, we're gonna have to move so everybody can have a chance. Can we just leave that up to Reid for a minute and then I'll move on? Yep. Awesome. I'll stop sharing now. Thank you. All of these slides will be saved and they will be made to the public as part of the National Academy's process and they will be made available to each one of the panel members also. Thank you so much for those breakdowns and those stats. I know that took time to do and I very much appreciated. I found it fascinating. Our next person, Dave Bradley. Okay, I hope you can hear me. Go to the next slide, please. I'm probably in the wrong session. Look at the alphabet soup. We actually work out of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations and Environment. You see the SERDP and ESTCP definitions. Next, I'm in the second row right hand box. We're a hundred plus million dollar organization and there's exactly the number of people that you see representing the office. We, our support is a contractual. Next, for those that might not know the program based upon either SERDP or ESTCP follows what you find in the Department of Defense part of the organization. That is the SERDP is the 61 to 63 end of things and ESTCP is the higher category funding. A difference that we represent in the office is what I would call accelerated RDT and E. That is to move from SERDP to ESTCP doesn't occur over decades, it occurs over years. The support people that are part of my technical committee represent the receivers of the technologies and science that we introduce. Next, this gives you a quick picture of what we're trying to do. What is our job in general? The general job is cleanup. You're looking at the mess that the Defense Department has created over the years that are in various, in this case, marine-based locations, ranging from the year left, which is a 155 or basically a six inch artillery round down to grenade size things. So as opposed to ASW, our targets are quite small. The other aspect of it is that they can be extremely dangerous and the cleanup is oriented toward that. Next, this is the focus of the program. Find, identify and localize the munition. In many cases, it's been found that the cost is too much so we manage in place and after you found it and identified it, you have to figure out some way to dispose of it, not necessarily on site despite what that slide says. Okay, skip the next two and go to the last one. Okay, good. This is actually from your charge and I put it up for a very particular reason. From the viewpoint of trying to answer some of your questions, one of the major things that I feel neatness is my soapbox. So please bear with me. One of the major things that needs to be understood is that acoustics in general and especially underwater acoustics is a science in its own right and it needs to be recognized as that. People need to be trained to move into that field as Brian and Mike and a number of people have already told you. There's, you know, most of the people that are in it today came from some other profession, quite frankly and they more or less kind of fumbled their way into it. So to me, the major soapbox thing that I believe needs to be addressed is just the recognition that the various sub-disciplines of ocean acoustics together have to be represented as a card-carrying science. Over. Thank you very much, Dave. Couldn't have said that better myself there, that last slide, I like it. The next person is Awin Sarma. Is Awin here? Yes. I'm here, yep. Yeah, it's Ashwin, by the way. Ashwin, thank you very much. I'm sorry I mispronounced. That's okay. So yeah, my name is Ashwin Sarma. I work at BA Systems. A little bit about me, just real quickly. I've been basically a DOD employee for the last 20, 22 years at Newark. I'm a statistical signal processor and I also work as a professor at URI. I teach graduate signal processing. So that's my background. Right now I've been at BAE for the last six years and enjoying it. I also am the chair of the IEEE UASP workshop, which is the underwater acoustic signal processing workshop started in Rhode Island by Don Tufts and others and the Providence signal processing chair by IEEE. So I'm a big Celtics fan. Go Celtics tonight. My next slide, please. So my work can be in many areas and in our group here, our work is in a large set of areas. We work on buildings active sources where we do supply the Navy and other small businesses with those. We also do a great deal of signal processing and development of ocean sensing and underwater warfare kind of systems that we all have good deal of expertise on that we've built up over time. The slide kind of shows what some of the other speakers have been talking about. Ocean acoustics is a field that permeates a lot of what we do, but it isn't the field, so to speak, in and of itself as Dave was saying, and it can be, but it is a multidisciplinary set of skills that we would need to thrive at a place like the IEEE or any of these other places. So double E, physics, oceanography, statistics, math, biology in our cases, mechanical engineering is also very useful. So, and of course, life experience. You do need a lot of these things and you need to be invested in this for a good deal of time to develop enough skills that you actually come up with something useful and new. So next slide, please. So as far as training the future workforce based on the prompts that we have in this session, obtaining and training the workforce and what we need more of. What do I do? I organize conferences and invite up and coming researchers along with well-established people in my field, some of which are on your panel here like Art Bagger and I work at this UASP conference together. We, I read and review a lot of papers and use the network to learn of candidates that could work suitably here. Teaching graduate classes in electrical engineering, signal processing, especially information theory comms, tracking and pattern recognition, machine learning allows me to find out who's interested in this kind of work. Because as you've probably seen in the previous speakers, there has to be a level of interest that may or may not translate into a long-standing career in it. You have to almost generate that yourself, that level of interest. So I deem those kinds of people as something you can do when you teach. I serve on local government, academia and industry committees to identify such people as well. The NIUVT in Rhode Island and Connecticut is something that is a good vehicle for that. So what we need more of as far as BAE is we kind of need more of different types of engineers and scientists. My background is physics and doubly. We need more specialists. We need more ITC engineers. We need more system level engineers and multidisciplinary as you've heard. Suggestion that I would have is early on in the curricula of many of these majors. We need to potentially offer more cross-listed courses and develop more cross-listed courses. People who are interested in mathematics, statistics, physics and electrical engineering, there's a lot of overlap there in those majors. And acoustic propagation, for example, is something that can come from the physics side of it, can come from also the math side of it and the computer science side of it. So there's a lot of overlap there. It may be something that I think that based on my teaching, a lot of students would find interesting to take a class like that, especially if there was a future in that, that they could find themselves in a place like BAE or someplace else where they could use the course material that they would have gotten from such an interdisciplinary course. I know for a minute. We're gonna have to move on. Can you please wrap up your last two points quickly so we can move on to the next? Sure, yeah. And I think what we also needed more of is better elevator speech development. For example, include perhaps pass, fail, teaching components in various courses. And finally, physical oceanography. Ramp up the rigor here because when we get new employees, sometimes even if they have a physical oceanography graduate degree, they don't have the skills to be able to implement those acoustic propagation quickly. And all of that. Thank you. We're gonna move right on to Scott Lawrence here from Kongsburg. Oh, sorry about that. So I did not prepare any slides, but I do have some remarks that I can read instead. Perfect. Perfect. So thanks for putting this together, Jennifer, Caroline and the rest of the committee. Appreciate getting the chance to talk to all of you. My name is Scott Lornger. I'm the sales manager for Ocean Science at Kongsburg Discovery, which is a division of Kongsburg that manufactures sensors and robotics. And I'll quickly run through my background just so you guys know who I am. And then I'll talk about what I think are sort of the three focus areas for ocean acoustics expertise, especially in the research and industry sector. So I began my career as an undergraduate studying biology at Cornell, just like a few other folks have been biologists and then jumped into acoustics. I had the pleasure of graduating during the financial crisis and recession in the early 2000s and quickly discovered the difficulty of finding work in a contracting economy. So I decided I need a skill that would set me apart from other marine scientists. And that led me to studying underwater acoustics at the University of New Hampshire. And with my PhD, I studied the physics of how sound interacts with oil in the marine environment. And then after the PhD, I entered the job market again with it during an economic downturn. But this time with an acoustics background, I found a very different job market than the one I had found after an undergrad. My education on acoustics meant that I was highly in demand and I had a choice between several postdoc positions. I ended up taking a postdoc position with the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, as well as with Dalhousie University and Woods Hole Oceanographic. Where I studied acoustic instruments for monitoring seafloor carbon sequestration and acoustic scattering from physical oceanography and biology. And then after my postdocs, once again, I found myself in a job market with a lot of opportunities as an acoustician. I had opportunities from federal labs, renewable energy companies, academic institutions, an instrument and platform manufacturers. Ultimately, I ended up taking a position with what is now Kongsberg Discovery, where I work with the science community providing the proper equipment and expertise for acoustic investigation of the ocean. I took this position with the goal of providing support to end users of acoustic instrumentation and of expanding the use of acoustic methods in marine science. And as a side note, Kongsberg believes that there is a sufficient evidence for an increase in the demand for marine sensors and robotics that they've just established Kongsberg Discovery, which is a separate business area within Kongsberg that's focused on sensors and robotics, where it used to be part of Kongsberg Maritime. It's now a long group. All right, so acoustic education is something that I'm pretty passionate about. And I believe the main needs for ocean acoustics expertise can be broken down into two into three main foci. So we need acquisitions who study the physics of sound and how it interacts with the world. We need acoustics end users with sufficient knowledge to apply acoustic methods. And we need educated technical experts who can design, construct, troubleshoot, and repair acoustic instrumentation. So that essentially breaks things up into the instrument itself, the forward problem, how acoustics interacts with the world and the inverse problem where you're using acoustics to understand the world. And the demand for these positions, I think it's likely to increase, to see a significant uptake driven in part by increases in things like more infrastructure in the ocean. So the development of offshore wind and tidal turbines will require an influx of acquisitions to design the infrastructure, to understand the environmental impact of the infrastructure and to develop solutions for mitigating those impacts. There's also an increasing demand for acquisitions in the defense sector, not just for unexploded ordinances and some marine hunting, but also around things like surveillance of critical infrastructure, which pulls you back into offshore wind, as well as pipelines and communication infrastructure. In other sectors, such as fisheries and environmental research, there's increased demand for enhanced signal processing and data analysis skills. Broadband acoustics has moved from laboratory development instruments, as we've talked about a little bit before, to off the shelf products. And so broadband acoustics, sort of like going from black and white to color, there's a significantly more information that can be gleaned from broadband than narrowband data. However, wide adoption of the broadband analysis requires a community that is comfortable thinking in the frequency domain and switching between time and frequency with knowledge of the potential pitfalls and 4A analysis. And so to develop this community, I think we need more programs in academia that focus on acoustics, not just as a course in the mechanical engineering department, but thoroughly developed multi-course instruction on understanding acoustics and 4A analysis. And that will help, I think, to develop more of the acousticians who study the forward problem. But the burden isn't just on academia. I think it would be great to also see immersive short courses in broadband acoustics as like a combination between academia and industry. And hopefully this could work to develop those end users who are sufficiently proficient to use acoustics, but that's not what they're studying. They're studying the inverse problem. These kind of courses exist for multi-beam sonars, modeling, remote sensing, stable isotopes, and all kinds of different topics. I'd also like to encourage industry to develop tutorial materials for their instruments that includes data processing. So I focus a lot on these remarks, but I want to emphasize that data analysis tools are critical to adoption of acoustics in the marine community and to developing more acousticians. And I also like to emphasize that all this work in the development of ocean acoustics should be done in concert with increasing the community's familiarity and understanding and comfort with automation on autonomy. So these instruments, like we've said, are part of the solution to understanding the ocean. I think we're going to see them more and more integrated into uncrewed platforms. And also as a tool for things like adaptive sampling where they're integrated with other instrumentation and they're just one tool in the suite of technology. I think that's about all the time. So I was just going to say thank you and I'm looking forward to talking to more. Thanks, Scott. Our last intro is going to come from Brandi Murphy. Hello, let me just share the screen really quick. I'm already jumping ahead because for time. Can you see that? Yes. Okay, so I'm here on behalf of the US Academic Research Fleet and the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System. The University National Oceanographic Laboratory System, UNALS, is a group of PIs, funding agencies and ship operators whose goal is to provide platforms for world-class oceanographic research. And thankfully, every one of you has touched on all the different ways that acoustics are involved. When I first was asked about this, I was like, I really need you to narrow it down because literally every system on board the vessel has acoustics involved. So I'm going to jump ahead into who we hire and why and what they do with acoustics. So this slide is meant to convey the wide variety of tasks that we're asking our technicians to do. There's been an explosion of technology that is expected to be on board these platforms to provide research, which includes network, satellite comms, overboarding CTDs, have been mentioned as the backbone of science in the past, but at this point I almost think it is some form of acoustics, biology and nets, operating cranes, acoustic releases, multi-beam mapping, GPS, MET sensors. The things that we're asking of our technicians are so widely varied that it's getting to the point that specialists in any topic are almost worthless on board the vessels. Here is the same information, but in tech and what I couldn't get in there in those images is wire lubrication and termination, personal safety, computer programming, hazmat safety. These are all things that we are asking of one or two people on board every research group to be responsible for. And then here's just some of the common acoustic systems that we have on board, multi-beam echo sounders, often Kongsburg, sub-bottom profilers, biological sounders, current Doppler profilers, ultra short baseline positioning systems, releases portable 2D and 3D seismic. Now, we have all those things on board. Why don't we have more specific skill sets when it comes to acoustics? And part of that comes to bunk space. Every expert that we put on a boat for technology, for supporting the tech is a scientist that cannot go to sea. There's also the frequency and need of use. These vessels are general use platforms. Not everybody who goes out is going to be multi-beam mapping, not everybody who goes out is going to be doing a CTD. And so do I need a full-time employee that is an expert in multi-beams? Or do I need somebody that can do a wide range of smaller tasks? There's also quality assurance and QC. So we have the stuff on board. Does it work is one thing that we can do? Lights are green. Can we troubleshoot why lights aren't green? Yes. So we know it's outputting data. Do we know if that data is any good? Well, that takes time and processing away from launching a CTD. And so some of those things are being moved onshore. And then the other issue is in the US academic research fleet, every operator is a different employer, every single one of them. So every academic hiring issue that you have ever had, we have in the US academic research fleet when it comes to hiring. So one of the things that we have done, and I have heard mention of CCOM and UNH is we've developed facilities that are specialized in some of these systems that are not on board the ship, but they can remote support us. And they help with things like installing equipment, patch testing and calibrating, troubleshooting, quality assurance, R2R also collects data and make sure that it's got some amount of value to it. And then planning and logistics for how we do a good survey for a particular scientist for a particular project when not everyone on board is a multi-beam or current expert. So that's the end of my slideshow and it is a unique problem than what some of you have. We have similar issues with retention and recruitment and things that we're noticing is, I heard someone mentioned dead-end jobs. We are requiring people to work in cities that host world-class oceanographic institutions, but we're not paying them as if they can live there. So we need them to be on site, but we're not paying them enough to do that. And so there's a drive for people to do it remotely. Thanks to improved internet access, there is some help with that. Academic hiring practices are a problem. We've heard of salary inversion where the longer you've been at an institution, the less you make relative to new people who come in because the hiring practices don't actually increase pay the longer you've been there. So the only way to get what you're worth is to leave an institution and go to another institution. Thankfully, we're made up of lots of institutions so technicians go from one to another and that's how they're, but that is a recruitment and retention problem. And also dead-end jobs, some of the things that you could potentially move into have arbitrary requirements like, oh, you have to have a master's degree. You have 15 years of troubleshooting shipboard electronics, but in order to move into a manager position, I need you to have a master's degree. And that means that there's nowhere for them to go. So, yeah, that's about what I got. Anything else I can answer in questions. Thank you. Thank you very much. This was really great to hear from five different people with five different backgrounds and five different needs. I'm going to go to the panel to see the Academy's panel or committee to see questions to start us off with. Yes, I can start us. So thank you for all that information. That was very helpful. Could you tell us a little bit more on where exactly your company or agency is primarily hiring from? So this might be institutions or if they're coming from other companies or where you're seeing your new hires coming from. You want to start with someone in particular or is that for all of us? For all. So whoever wants to jump in. For JASCO, it's a lot of people coming out of University of Victoria and Dalhousie. Those are two big oceanographic universities for sure. We've seen lots of people coming out of Portland State. We've got several people from Portland State out of the US. Southampton in the UK is a big one. Curtin in Australia is another one. I think the VA depends. If you're a senior employee, you're really probably coming from other institutions. You've been in the field for a while. If you're a junior employee, UNH, University of Rhode Island, University of Massachusetts and any of the other private schools, we have a lot of MIT Cornell grads as well. WPI, RPI. The US academic research fleet gets them from a wide variety of places. A lot of times we're hiring recent STEM undergrads of any kind. Honestly, the best skill for being a Marine technician in the academic research fleet is to have self-taught yourself anything technical. And if I can see someone has done that, then I'm like, oh, you're a good fit. You will learn on the job and do it yourself. The other thing is we have a program called the Mate Internship Program where we take folks from community colleges and undergraduates and landlocked places to introduce them to the Marine tech role as an intern temporarily on a vessel. And it's been so successful that a lot of our hires are coming directly out of that. Myself and several of the other people who recently started at Conesburg are coming from UNHC.com. They're slowly infiltrating all of Conesburg. We also hire from within industry. We pick up some people from Sail Drone. And a lot of those people that we even hire from within the industry come from NOAA where they come from the research fleet. And we also get a lot of engineers coming out of the Navy. We contract with probably in equal portions government laboratories, small private companies and academia. Little bit of an emphasis on the academic source of folks. Was that everybody? I think everybody got on the panel got to answer. And Lisa, committee member, go ahead. You have a question. Thank you all again for your presentations today. It's super helpful information. We heard multiple times I didn't have a background in this and I learned it once I got on the job. So I would like to dig into that a little bit more and try to understand if there are formal on the job training opportunities. Is it going to the bookstore buying acoustics for dummies or is there other opportunities that you have that you use either like professional societies or some sort of like in-house academies or is it all just learn on the job and hockey approach? For Jasco, we have a fairly formalized training plan for field work. That one, especially we need people to go through and do the videos, do the hands-on training and then go through multiple layers of doing field work and being accredited for the field work. That one is very formalized. Modeling is semi-formalized. There's again, training materials, exercises you go through and then you mentor with a senior modeler. Same thing for the re-biologists who are doing analysis. They will mentor with a senior biologist past the tests effectively and then get reviewed and feedback between themselves. For the data analysts, we have a tool set and then same thing you work hands-on with the tool set and advance through that. For a lot of the incoming engineers we have, it's not a formalized, but if there is a mentorship program where you'll have someone senior who walks you through for the first year or two. My on-the-job training and acoustics was in academia and I had no background, but I just sort of got handed a textbook and a lot of really good conversations from my advisor who is on this call right now. So I'll only say nice things about him. But the on-job training that we get, the problem with on-job training in my opinion is that it is great to find out exactly what you need to do. It is very difficult to find out what you don't know from on-the-job training until suddenly you have a problem in front of you and you don't have the information you need. Which is why I think things like short courses and things like some sort of formalized training for people who don't wanna necessarily be acousticians but wanna understand the processes that helps to fill in some of those gaps you may not know you have until you really need that information. Sorry, could I just jump in and layer on a question? I heard a couple of times of we have programs. Are your, do your mentors have to go through any sort of specialized training to earn that title of mentor? Our field leads have to, they have to be a field lead and then they can graduate to be a field trainer. We only have two or three of those. In the US academic research fleet, you kind of have to hit the ground running. And so usually most of our vessels sail with two technicians for each cruise. And so new technicians will often be the second technician. And it could be for even more than a year because you don't see everything that we do in the course of a year. But there is no formal like, oh yeah, it's just, well, I've been here 10 minutes longer than you. So I'm gonna be the one to show you the rules. I would say in our field, I'm in SAS labs which is the R and D wing of the AE. And I think it's pretty difficult to do mentoring. You have to have the opportunity to, the student has to have the opportunity and the interest to most likely be working outside of the job either on a degree or something they're interested in. Those are the cases that are the best in terms of getting an output, a good mentoring output when they're working with other students, other mentors, older mentors. I know for example, that's kind of how it worked for me. We do have official mentoring programs and usually we are paired up with somebody who's interested in getting an advanced degree. I also wanna add a layer of complexity for the academic research fleet which is almost all of the technical services is funded with grants. And when it comes to funding with grants, we've all used grants before, we're using every penny of that to get as much research as we can. And sometimes that comes at the cost of training or development. And so that's another issue that we have. And one of the reasons that we don't have a more robust training program for marine technicians. I think part of the answer to the original question is I would use the term happenstance, quite frankly. It's a mixture of somebody who can mentor together with somebody who develops an interest. They may not have begun working on their degree with a particular goal in mind, but it's more they begin, they meaning the junior person begins working in an area gets attracted into it in a more robust way because of just personal interest. And that to me is happenstance. It's hard to imagine how many people sitting on this call actually at age 16 had any idea what they would be doing at this point in time with their life over. That's a good point. That's a very good point. People happen into this a little late. How do we do a better job of making these real job and career opportunities visible earlier on? That's a good point. Carolyn, you have your hand raised. Yeah, so I was wondering for the panel, we always hear anecdotal, sort of anecdotal mutterings that, oh, things have gotten so much worse in terms of hiring in a certain field, et cetera. I guess I'd like to know a little bit about your anecdotal on the ground experience. Are you seeing more applicants, fewer applicants? Do they have the expertise that you're looking for or are you like the government people we spoke to earlier identifying certain characteristics, flexibility, quantitative ability, and then hoping that you can bring them in. So I know it's anecdotal, but whatever you can say to that. Yeah, I can jump in here. One of the things that I've seen is the rate of change in our industry means that the hiring practices and requirements are not keeping up. So what we actually need out of our new hires are based on old job descriptions. And we cannot go to sea anymore without having some experience in satellite communications and IT. It's not only science that needs that anymore, but if the ship can't call a doctor, we don't get to go to sea. And that was never something that was a part of the original intention of the marine technicians. And so I find that we're hiring based on past experience instead of looking for future, for future needs. We were finding that the hardest people to get are the software folks. They're the ones that are really hard to get your hands on. For the marine biologists, we generally kind of, we either can hire good people from Dalhousie or UVic or we have been involved with them as students through honors or masters. So we know what we're getting. Electrical and mechanical engineers, same thing. We work with the university. So we often will hire the people that we have already worked with that had the summer positions with us. In the US, there's been a lot of hiring lately to support East Coast wind. And there they've had a pretty good success working with students and doing the interviews, finding people who have the right mindsets have been well trained. But question and follow-up, you said software folks. Is that software related to signal processing and analysis or software related to GUI development and non-expert user software? It's more the embedded signal processing kind of software. Yeah, but also some of the, like we have some web service stuff, but finding people for that is also challenging. The data analysis, getting a report written kind of software that's mostly done by people who've come out of an academic program where data analytics was something they had to do anyway. So, but it's not the professional software that's needed. It's the professional ones that are hard to find. Thank you. We're just wrapping up. We're having a tough time finding field technicians. People who will be in traveling 60% of the time jumping boat to boat with the knowledge we need to be able to troubleshoot these things, to show up at the UNOLS fleet and troubleshoot a multi-beam. That seems to be a, the field technician at CE expertise seems to be a theme that we've heard across both panels, both industries, all of the industries. That is a huge take-home message for this committee. Yeah. One of the issues is a lot of the field technicians are often paid at much lower compensation rates because it's considered like, you know, I don't know, it's less glamorous. There's sometimes fewer requirements for graduate school. And so what that means is like the pay is lower, but we're asking them to give up their lives for six months of the year. And that really needs to come with compensation that recognizes that. Yes. Gail, committee member, question. Good afternoon, everybody. And I'll offer my thanks to you all for spending time with us this afternoon too. I'm wondering, you know, based on what I'm hearing about not having enough folks in the workforce and with the right skills and the need to make career opportunities, the news about career opportunities more available earlier in the pipeline. I'm wondering if any of you have outreach programs or outreach activities that reach into high schools or community colleges? So in Canada, there is a fabulous program that I don't know if there's a parallel in the US, but it's called the MyTax program where we can put in about 45% of the money and get half the student's time. And the government puts in 55% of the student's money. And that allows us to have collaborative programs that that's working really well. We do do a bit of outreach to high schools just when our kids' classes need somebody to talk to them. And the other one that has been really successful for us is a program with the Nova Scotia Community College for ocean technology. And so generally speaking, they already have a technology program or like a bachelor's in marine biology or marine science and then they do this ocean tech program. It's a two-year. They touch all the different kinds of equipment. They touch multi-beams and they touch CTDs and they get real familiar with how to maintain these, troubleshoot them, build them back up. And that program we've hired numerous people from. It's been very successful. So I don't know if there's a parallel to that, but that one, it became out of the fact that the government said, what do you want? What do we need? We said, we need ocean techs. I said, okay, we'll make an ocean tech program. But that's been a really successful one. The Navy has a very successful program that they started about a decade ago. The acronym is NREP, the Navy Research Enterprise Program. And it's all about getting people young all the way up through a PhD program. So we've been very successful in getting talented, hardworking people that way. And it's basically a program that you can access online and you can submit your package online. And they have calls once a year, starts in the fall and they make decisions. And then the, we get as a Navy organization very much like even the operational Navy offices as well as the other Navy labs can go in and view the candidates in the fall. And typically they do the selection in and around the December timeframe. So it's been a very successful program for us. I'm actually quite surprised at how well it's run being something the Navy does, of course, which is not always the case. We have the MATE program, which goes into community colleges, but the success of getting the word out is there's more places that you haven't gotten the word out than have. Ocean acoustics is a tough one too because you need a certain level of resources to be able to get high school students involved. I know that at Newark and Newport, they have a very good program, which gets low-income high school students from New Bedford involved. And they do make underwater, they make UUVs, a small toy UUVs and they go through that process. So to get people involved at an earlier age is tough. A lot of the committee has already talked about things that we do. They're not necessarily ocean acoustic-based, but they are STEM-based. A lot of these people will give time for the running the robotics team for their high school or something like that. Or tutoring, they do a lot of STEM-based lower-income tutoring, that's something I do. But it is an ocean acoustic-specific. I think you need some infrastructure for that to get people involved. You also need the proximity. You need to be close to something where there's something like that, like a lab available for those people to come. One of the things that I talk to students about a lot is that you don't have to have a PhD to work in science. Science requires everything from IT support to electronic support to da-da-da. And so I think that one of the things that we should look at doing more is being specific in what we're hiring for in the task. As Scott mentioned, there are like three different things that we need out of them. We need people who can develop, we need people who can interpret, and we need people with the electronic sensor expertise to fix them. And so if what we need is someone to fix electronic sensors, do they need to be an acoustician? You know what I mean, to do that. Or could they fix electronic sensors and be like, I wanna do that in a field that supports acoustics, because that's a hobby I'm crazy about. That's kind of how I got into marine research as I was doing geophysics and I hated it. And I realized I could write programs and do the overboarding stuff and still support science instead of being a research scientist to do that. And so I think that we could improve our recruitment and retention by being specific in what the skills we need are. Where the field is just interesting and cool, but not necessarily what you're doing in your minutiae day to day. And I'm gonna jump in here with a question for the panel members. Industry is very different than academia. Academia has definitely elevated the value of DEI in their organizations. And I was wondering, how is DEI perceived and how is that incorporated in recruitment if it is at all within your industry? We're very aware of DEI, but we don't actively use it as part of recruitment. So we're looking for the people who have the skills we need as opposed to saying, okay, we need a visible minority for this role. So I'd say that we're aware of it, especially in the sense of inclusion and making sure people who are here don't feel like they're being discriminated against or aren't part of the team, but it's not part of the recruiting. Other than a couple of people said, hey, this slide pack is awesome for showing where people come from. Can we use it for recruiting? But that's the first time I've heard it even remotely considered. We see it is considered. In fact, in the interview process, there is a requirement for that. So I think we are taking it pretty seriously in VA. Just in the interview process, but also having representation at different levels of management, different levels of scientific advancement. I think we do take that pretty seriously. I'm happy to hear that. I think we're pretty serious about DEI efforts. Our biggest concern is that we have a pretty small footprint in the US and that we want to be more selective and be more engaged in DEI when we get so few applications that we're just sort of stuck with what we've got. And I think that the burden for us is that we're not reaching those communities with our job announcements in order to say, hey, apply to this. We seem to be attracting the same environment that we have behind us and ahead of us. And so we don't really have the resources either to find where those places are that we can advertise better our jobs. And so that's something that would be incredibly useful. I know things like the Equal Society of America Job Board tends to reach a little bit more of a diverse crowd, but there's got to be better places that we can put our job ads up in order to reach a different group of people. So if anyone has the recommendations, that would be great. That's what this committee is here for. So my industry is academic. So it kind of bleeds back and forth, right? I'm in support of academic. And one of the things that I noticed is, as I mentioned earlier, unnecessary restrictions in your job descriptions. Because if you require a master's degree, why are you requiring that master's degree? And if you look at the demographics of who's getting a master's degree in that field, you're limiting your potential applicants. And if you can get rid of things like master's preferred or PhD preferred, people will not apply because you're only going to hire the one with a master's or a PhD. And so to really increase who's coming to apply for your jobs, you have to look at what's in your description that's gatekeeping individuals from applying. That's a great point. Could I ask a question? Are you saying that people with master's degrees and physics degrees, I'm sorry, PhD degrees are in fact not of value? No, I'm saying, is that really the requirement for your job? Yes, it is. When we do it, we need PhDs. A lot of these- Because you don't need to adjust to your job description. Then you don't need to adjust your job description. But if we're talking about analysts and that sort of thing, then sometimes they're carried in as, well, this is what the role was in the past. This is what- A lot of analysts have PhDs. A lot of the good ones do. But some of the great ones didn't, too. I can speak to sort of both sides of this. I understand where you're coming from in the environment that you're in at Navy. But on the other hand, I also haven't been a see-going scientist and been a chief scientist on a lot of you Knowles vessels. I understand where Brandi's coming from, which is that the technical staff on those cruises, the people who are fixing the instrumentation that's going over the side. I mean, I come from the USGS, I bring my own. But the point is, those people don't necessarily need a master's degree. And we're often asking them to have that because it's just an old job requirement, as opposed to someone who is a doubly undergrad or something who's out there fixing my instrument. That person doesn't need to have necessarily an advanced degree if he's got- This is true. This is true. You know how many people in my shop have PhDs and what their background is, what their skin color is. If you want to start talking about skin color, I've gotten so many people from Oriental, so many people from India. I want to clarify that that doesn't mean that higher education degrees are not necessary for all jobs. I'm just saying it's important to look at your job descriptions and make sure that they accurately reflect what your needs are instead of carrying old, unnecessary information. I don't want to get too far into the weeds on this topic because we're really here to focus on the ocean acoustics education and not hiring practices or anything like that. So I'm going to pull it back to our statement of task at hand. And it looks like we are just about out of time. It is four o'clock by my computer. I think we covered a really wide range of topics today amongst the two different panels. I want to sincerely thank all of the expert panelists that have come in and shared their thoughts and their opinions and their organizations. Now it is the committee's job now to take all of this information back and make sense of it in a way that improves the ocean education, ocean acoustics education to meet all of these needs in the present as well as in upcoming into the future. In your briefing books, everybody who received that briefing book at the very end, there is a timeline with a description of how these different panels and surveys sort of factor into the community or to the committee's activities in preparation of this report. So I highly encourage you to look at that so you can get an idea of when you'll see how all of your comments have been integrated and synthesized as well as comments from our upcoming panels and from our upcoming community survey that will go out. So hopefully keep your eyes out over the next week or two as our community survey goes out related to ocean acoustics for academia, for industry, for government, and for technical societies. So thank you again, Caroline. Are there any housekeeping things that we need? I just wanna echo your thank you and appreciate the time from all of our panelists. I will send that timeline out to all of the panelists has the expectations of when our report can come out and we will be conducting continued information gathering sessions throughout the next several months. Please also follow our website for more information and I will throw that in the chat here momentarily about this study and future information gathering sessions. Dave Bradley has his hand up too. Go ahead, Dave. Just a quick question. Do you have any further requirements for us as part of your initial panels? Nothing further. We will, as Jen mentioned, we have a community survey that is being developed and should be released to the public in early May and if everyone on the panelists is okay with it, it will be sharing your email addresses with our team that developed the survey. So that will also go to informing and support and the link for our project webpage is in the chat to follow the future meetings as well as see the recording of past meetings under past events. And I would say too to all of our expert panelists, if there is something that we didn't have time to get to with our very restricted amount of time that you feel is important to express or consider on this topic, please email or in some way connect with myself or Carolyn or anybody else that you may know who is a committee member. We want that feedback. We want your ideas. We want your opinions and thoughts. So if there's something that you feel very passionate about, please let us know. Yes, just to echo that. Everybody has my email address. Please send it and I will make sure that information gets to shared with the rest of the committee. Awesome. Again, thank you for your time and enjoy the rest of whatever day you may have in whatever time zone you are. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.