MyOcean

Current Activities

Faculty Hiring

Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color are severely underrepresented in the Earth Science professoriate compared to the US population. This issue can be exacerbated by the fact that we predominantly recruit from our current networks with narrowly focused searches, which results in a less diverse pool of applicants, both in background and in research focus, than the broader marine science community. As part of the School’s ten-year review, we have the opportunity to build a decadal framework to create and support a more diverse and inclusive department. Embracing continuous and broad scouting practices will allow us to build a diverse future faculty who, through research and mentoring, will have the breadth, flexibility of expertise, and vision to be scientific leaders with the background and skills to support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity Communication - Increasing access to information within the School of Oceanography

The DEI Committee seeks to establish an interface for leadership, faculty, staff, and students to communicate their ongoing efforts to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive School of Oceanography. To address the lack of transparency within the SoO, we propose a repository of all school-committee (i.e., faculty, faculty council, DEI, hiring) and director meeting minutes; and a system to report activities to address concerns, diversity, and equity actions, and outreach programs, among other things. We seek a centralized structure that will be long-lasting and impactful while creating opportunities for engagement, development, and collaboration between all department members. It is important that DEI be seen as part of our everyday tasks not as a separate issue that we work on when time allows. We also seek to decouple DEI and outreach as they are often confused as the same issue.

By creating a centralized system, accessible by all SoO members, we seek to disseminate information about ongoing projects and departmental efforts to all community members.

Banse Early Career Scientist Seminar Series

This series was named for Karl Banse, who has been a long-standing pillar of our community. Karl has stated that besides hard work and perseverance, major turns in his career were decided with a great deal of luck “be it through an accidental conversation at lunch, an almost-missed phone call or attendance at a somewhat strange seminar.”

In the spirit of Karl’s words, the Banse Oceanography Seminar will be refocusing to the Banse Early Career Scientist Seminar Series (BECSS). We will focus on bringing graduate students, post doctoral scholars and early career scientists from underrepresented backgrounds to our department to share their innovative research and to connect with our faculty on future career opportunities. These BECSS scholars will come from all over the country and the world to bring their research to us at UW. We will host them in person and virtually to create collaborations with researchers here in the School of Oceanography.