Voices from the Ocean Sciences Meeting
In addition to our Travel Award recipient Andrea, we had a lot of members participate in February's Ocean Sciences Meeting! Read about their experiences below!
SWMS members met up at the beginning of the week for an informal lunch on the Mississippi River! Picture Credit - Katherine Gallagher
Dr. Bruna Sobrinho, Horn Point Laboratory, University of Maryland
Participating in the Ocean Science this year was a very special experience for me. This was the first time I was able to attend this great conference. It is always refreshing to be in an environment with scientists from all over the world and learn from their stories, experiences, and research. It was great to be able to encounter friends from Brazil, who are spread across the world, in a city as exciting and full of life as New Orleans. Also, it was the first time I was able to represent the Horn Point Laboratory chapter as co-chair at a conference. It was really special to be able to share some of our internal activities, like the book club and social events, and the outreach activities we have done in our community like the Science Saturday we organized at the end of 2023. Our chapter enjoys being involved with environmental education and scientific communication activities, and I loved the opportunity to share our experiences during the SWMS Town Hall. It was great to meet other SWMS co-chairs and members in person during Town Hall and to learn more about what other chapters have been doing at their universities. I returned to Horn Point with several ideas to share with the rest of the members, who unfortunately were unable to attend Ocean Science this year. Being involved with SWMS is one of the most valuable experiences I have had during my PhD and I am looking forward to the next conferences and to being able to meet the other members again.
Dr. Bruna Sobrinho presenting on her chapter's activities at the OSM Town Hall Picture Credit - Dr. Katherine Gallagher
Dr. Diana Fontaine, University of Rhode Island
The 2024 Ocean Sciences Meeting was the first in-person oceanographic conference I attended as a graduate student. I know that is hard to believe as a 6th year Ph.D. candidate! But because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my in-person conference attendance was limited. I couldn't believe what I had been missing all these years. Excitement filled the conference center. From catching up with previous mentors and cruise-mates to learning about the most recent oceanographic research, my experience at OSM 2024 was more fulfilling than I had anticipated.
Dr. Diana Fontaine presenting on the new SWMS manuscript at the Town Hall. Picture credit - Dr. Diana Fontaine
One particular experience that added to the fulfillment was co-presenting during the Society for Women in Marine Science (SWMS) town-hall towards the end of the week. The town-hall marked the apex of my SWMS journey throughout graduate school. I first learned about SWMS as a first semester graduate student when I attended the SWMS Symposium at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. After that I was hooked! I participated in various events over the years and even co-led a Symposium as a co-chair at my institution, URI. Joining SWMS has been transformative for me as a graduate student. Through SWMS, I learned the power of community to foster resilience, empowerment, and collective progress towards inclusivity in marine science. While presenting during the town-hall at OSM, I looked out and was inspired. A sea of conference attendants, from undergraduate students to professors, decided to spend their lunch break learning about SWMS. I hope that among these attendees were individuals embarking on their marine science journeys, who, akin to my own experience after the 2018 WHOI Symposium, recognized the invaluable support offered by the SWMS community.
Trish Albano, NOAA Ocean Exploration, SWMS Vice President
SWMS VP, Trish setting the norms for our Town Hall. Picture credit - Dr. Katherine Gallagher
This year, the Society for Women in Marine Science hosted a town hall event session at the 2024 Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans, LA. With a strong attendance, this town hall convened current and prospective SWMS members, representatives of other affinity groups, and the marine science community at large for a discussion surrounding women’s representation in marine science, status of ongoing initiatives, and best-practices for future efforts. The session focused on sharing the results from the first SWMS peer-reviewed publication Building an inclusive wave in marine science: Sense of belonging and Society for Women in Marine Science symposia, hearing from chapter leads on what their chapters have been up to, and collecting feedback from the community for future SWMS programming. This was also a great opportunity to catch up with SWMS friends, meet new potential new members of the SWMS community, and, for many, meeting in person in-person the first time! In a busy week, the SWMS town hall was a welcomed opportunity to shake out the conference craziness and have some fun! Thanks to all who attended and presented!
Dr. Katherine Gallagher, Stony Brook University, SWMS Communications Lead
The funny thing about getting a PhD in the middle of a pandemic is that a lot of my conference experience was virtual conferences. Luckily, now (mostly) on the other side of the pandemic, that is starting to shift. This was why I was particularly excited to attend the Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans - I had only attended in person previously, so I was excited to see what the meeting was like in person!
Having been to other large conferences before, I wasn’t intimate by the size of the conference. I was happy that it was smaller than the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting, and that we didn’t have to walk all the way across the one mile long conference center multiple times a day. What I wasn’t expecting was to constantly run into people I knew. On day one, I ran into some friends from graduate school that I hadn’t seen since starting my postdoc! This lasted until the end of the conference, where I even ran into some friends from undergraduate that I hadn’t seen in nearly 10 years. The highlight of my week (other than the SWMS Town Hall) was a dinner with my former lab mates from my PhD lab, many of whom I hadn’t seen since they had graduated or left the lab for new positions shortly after I started my PhD. Seeing old friends and sharing my work with them was the warm hug that I needed after a few years postdoc-ing in a lab whose specialty was seabirds or whales, not oceanography.
Dr. Katherine Gallagher presents her research at one of the many poster sessions of the week. Picture credit - Dr. Danielle Haulsee
I presented on two different postdoc projects in an oral presentation and a poster, as well as assisted with the SWMS Town Hall, so to say it was a busy week was an understatement. But the exhaustion was well worth the connections I made and strengthened.