te partnerships but I didn't have time to put it in in this slide but Luis Demersen emailed me today to say that of the 300 actions in the UN decade of the ocean, more than half have some type of public partnership private partnership already, and there's actually a specific office set up to facilitate public private partnerships. So the UN decade of the ocean is a good way to facilitate partnerships and it's set up to sustain the these public private partnerships for for the seven decade outcomes which include productive productive ocean. Next please. Our own particular one of our actions in the UN decade is what I'm involved in which is the world ocean database, which is kind of a an aggregation and data to information point for for oceanographic data we have the oceanographic observing which which feeds the data into the NCI archive and that's that's where all that data is preserved and then from from there the world ocean database aggregates all the data from all the different observing systems. And I should specify that I'm speaking of the subsurface ocean, most specifically although the surface, this applies to the surface as well. The world ocean database integrates these different sources from global temperature and salinity profile program, our goal more to raise ships gliders. Anything animals with with instruments instruments mounted on animals, anything that we can get and synthesizes that enhances it common format metadata and assess the quality of the data, and then make it available to the community and also make information to the world ocean Atlas, which are benefits to the nation and globally. And so with this we're trying to meet the goal of the UN decade, which, which are contingent on the ocean monitoring on equitable data access and on tools for transforming that data into accessible information. Next please. So this this is this is historical database and so the data go actually all the way back to 1772, but for most of the time we these data have come from ships from instruments on different ships from mainly from research vessels, merchant ships and, and so on. And you can see a big bump up a little bit after 2000. That is this is somewhat of a golden age of ocean observations you have the Argo floats. In purple there you have the gliders that both Karen and Henry mentioned on unmanned systems. You have pinnipeds, you have more buoys. So we are in the golden age, it's still not enough data but it is at the same time a fire hose of data coming in. Next please. And so where the public private partnerships fit in there. So, so a lot of those data, the ship data do come from merchant ships. Anyone who works on the ocean merchant ship companies and so on have a high interest in understanding the ocean Karen mentioned that a lot of the marine global meteorology information and a lot of that from ship based comes from merchant ships, but also for the from the ocean, even subsurface ocean, a lot of data comes from merchant ships. And because the merchant ship fleet and the owners have a an interest in the ocean that's that goes beyond self interest even in weather forecasting and ocean currents and so on, just to an understanding the ocean. And this is an example the only under it's a merchant ship that was actually retrofit, they allowed researchers to drill a hole in the ship, and to put some special oceanographic instruments for 45 years. The only under has been part of this public private private partnership to to measure the ocean you can see in the lower left there. That's those are expendable bathy thermograph lines across the Gulf stream from the only under 45 years worth a gold mine of information on the bottom right there we also have kind of the other end, we have actual private institutes that have been set up that maintain their own research vessel, and they do contribute the data that's that they measure to to the the general public access. In this case, the Falcor and Falcor to all the Falcor I'm not sure the Falcor to is part of the National Science Foundation's rolling deck to repository so those data are part of the public record. Next, please. And other. This is another example. This is a data exchange agreement with private companies that this is from 2012. And on the left you see this is a memorandum of understanding between Noah and shell and and other oil companies that are we're exploring on the on the shelf on on the Alaskan slope where it's very difficult and costly to get research ships up there, they're taking information. So this information was shared with Noah and then publicly shared through the World Ocean database and through the archive. So there's a public benefit to this and there's also a benefit to the oil companies in that we take their data, and we compile with all the other source data and then provide it in a quality control form back so they, they get a whole picture not just their data but a whole picture of the area of their interest and publicly, there is a much augmented understanding of those areas. And so I'm going to talk a lot about the Argo program because this is the the main subsurface ocean observing system right now and you see it on the top right merchant ships any ships are fantastic but they're going along shipping lines, and even research ships don't take a lot of data in in the winter in either hemisphere. Argo floats are autonomous profiling floats that have been developed and have been operating for about 25 years now. And it is, they have only been operating and only been able to keep costs within within possible bounds by collaborations private public collaborations. And you see here, the instruments, the solo to on the far left that was developed as scripts Institute of Oceanography that was one of the, well, it is one of the main floats that's out there. But really, to be cost effective, we need a commercial manufacturer. And so there's been a partnership with MRV systems to manufacture these floats and floats that were also developed at Woods Hole. And you can see that the sensors on top the CTD sensors have also been developed with public private private partnerships in close collaboration with seabird. And with RBR, I'm sorry, I don't know what RBR stands for I couldn't even find it on their website, I used to know, but it's become one of those acronyms, that is, is the word now. So, this is this is another example of public private partnership. Next, please. And this is ongoing right now a new float is is being produced in collaboration with Steve Reiser and the University of Washington and and seabird the excuse me and MRV systems. And so this is the next generation of floats, and it can can handle biogeochemical sensors, which is the that originally Argo was temperature and salinity but now there's biogeochemical floats and these instrumentations are extremely expensive and and difficult to to to maintain. And so this partnership with MRV is is getting the next, the next generation of the BGC Argo floats out there and hopefully keeping costs down and keeping up quality of the commercial manufacturer. Next, and this is through I really should mention this is through the National Ocean Partnership Program, which has developed most of the facilitated most of the development of the Argo instrumentation, or much of it I should say next please. And so this is biogeochemical the sensors. So nitrate sensors here and this is Ken Johnson of Marine Marine Bay Aquarium Research Institute Steve Reiser of University of Washington, in conjunction with with with commercial in this this case again seabird, and they've developed this biogeochemical sensor for nitrate, which is extremely important for understanding the ocean system. They're also carbon sensors out there, which will help us understand the the carbon cycle and other sensors and so this was developed. You see on the right this is the seabird specs page now these are out there and then they're starting to to be used. Next please. Thank you Richard, rank or research. And this this is another type of collaboration and this is with the Argo is extremely difficult to maintain a much much easier than going out on the ship and getting these measurements, but seating the Argo floats and maintaining them developing the instrumentation and deep Argo. Most Argo floats go to about 2000 meters deep Argo is is full depth of the ocean and we need that to understand the changes in the earth's energy imbalance and the heat and the current changes in the deep ocean. And the Paul Allen Foundation saw this as as an important, a really important scientific question, and has actually funded the deployment of these these Argo deep Argo floats off of the off off of the Brazil basin. And so this is extremely important because it is difficult to get even for a program like Argo to get the funding to to develop the Argo array, the deep Argo array. Of course, the maintenance of the Argo array will still be the responsible the Argo program. Next please. And so moving on. So this is a lot of getting the instrumentation developed and and taking the measurements. So now we need to get those measurements out to to the public. And this is where the, this is the NOAA, this is the NOAA open data dissemination. And this is a public private partnership with with the three through with three cloud providers with with Amazon Web Services with Microsoft Azure, and with Google Big Query. The easiest way now to get data out is is through the cloud, but there are costs associated with that. But so the not is working with the cloud providers so that they, they allow for those data sets that they see as environmentally important and also for which they then can incorporate into their search engines into their artificial intelligence and so on, allowed for the free input and output of these these data. Next please. Tim, I'm just going to give you the time check as well. Yeah, sorry about that. I'll, I'll, I'll try to zip through these fast. So this is actually, we are able to the world ocean databases now available through Amazon Web Services in the cloud free free and open access through the not. So this is a great public partnership for for getting the data accessible and equity equitably accessible to everyone. Next please. And so finally okay the data is out there, but we at least my group doesn't have the the resources to to to we do make the world ocean Atlas which is one step in getting from all of those data into a coherent information and that can be used by models and so on. But the next step really communicating that information to to the public to the users. We don't have a great facility for that. And so there's a public private partnership. It's not actually ours. It's use geological service with Esri a private company and they've developed ecological marine units which take in the world ocean Atlas information which uses the world ocean database information from from the ocean observing system and they take it a step further, both in into a tailored product for customers that that they are aware of that that need this something called ecological marine units which will help them make and assess ecological areas in the ocean. So this is a public private partnership for that last step, really going from data to information that that consumers can use. That's, that's what I have next. Oh, I do have a summary but I'll just leave it up there. Thank you. Thank you. And then we have one last speaker in the session, Dr. Amisha Campbell. She's the assistant vice president of the research and economic development at Jackson State University. She'll be talking to us without slides on partnerships with and assess technology innovation and partnership. Thank you so much and thank you for having me here and I see my buddy. Dr. Gordon here. Hi, Dr. Gordon. Good to see you. One of the things that as I listened to the presenters before me and the innovation and the technologies that they're discussing is how do we ensure that these technologies are protected and also that how do we deploy them within the new blue economy to impact economic development. And one of the things that we have been working, Jackson State has been working with USM on for a number of years is how do we work on and helping these emerging technologies that would impact the new blue economy. So we started with the Build Back Better program, working with them through our NSF iCore program that was mentioned earlier, teaching the lean startup methodology to some of the teams there at USM, working with the early stage technologies and through all those efforts we have been able to have many successes. Some of those successes will be, of course, collectively in our collaboration as the Mississippi Research Consortium, working with our state legislators and our institution of higher learning to find seed funds that can support these emerging technologies. So from the private-public partnership with the Mississippi Smart Business Act of giving credit to companies that work with universities on research, they can get a rebate back. But we also looked at the other side of it. How do we support those early technologies that are coming out of our universities to impact our ecosystem? And so we now have what we call the SMART Accelerate, and that gives up to $150,000 in funding to support some of these early stage technologies that are coming from our institutions that we consider state-owned IP, which is state-owned intellectual property. So as we work through some of those nuances at first of not having the funding, and now we have some opportunities where we do have some funding to do some of these work and to impact what's happening. Working with them as well and the Blue Navigator program and looking at how we support in those companies that are getting those investment to come to the coast and work in the new blue economy. And doing the training, the entrepreneurial training that's needed, making sure that they have what they need to pitch in front of investors. We're getting them ready now to come to Jackson State University for the SBIR Road Tour. They'll be able to talk to program officers on the SBIR and STTR side to see how they can develop their proposals to get some of those follow-on funding to support those technologies. Because the whole idea is we want these technologies to be based in the state of Mississippi. We also want those companies to relocate in the state of Mississippi. And so whatever we can do with those resources, the training as well as helping to find the follow-on funding is some of those things that we've done. And I'm proud to say that in a short space of time that we've been able to win not only the Phase 1 of the Build Back Better program that was funded to EDA, but we were able to win the new program by the National Science Foundation, which is the NSF Engines Type 1. It's a $1 million Phase 1 for us to see the feasibility of us running an engine in the state of Mississippi, covering from down the coast all the way up to the some northern parts of Mississippi. And with that program, so far we're looking at our different stakeholders. We're looking at what we need in the new blue economy in terms of the technologies that are needed. And this whole topic is around food and water security. And of course, you know, all of that, we will be looking at aquaculture. We will be looking at healthcare. We would also look at export. So we're talking to companies like Dole and others in how they can support the work that is happening here in the state of Mississippi and among our two institutions. We also with USM leading has now won one of the newest program by the National Science Foundation, which is the Accelerating Research Technology Program or NSF Art. And that's a $6 million program that was funded to University of Southern Mississippi. So I give them very good kudos for the hard work they're doing to ensure that we have the resources that are necessary to make sure that the companies that are relocating to the Gulf Coast, as well as the technologies that are developed are successful. And that they really get towards impacting society because everything we do is about societal impact. And then comes behind that is those investments that will come into the state and help develop our economic systems here in the state of Mississippi. So I wanted to bring those pieces out because a lot of times when we are talking about these new technologies that are developed, sometimes we fail to think about what can we develop in the state, what can we develop to solve some of the problems that we are having, whether it be in the ocean systems or whether it be in other areas that may impact the new blue economy. And so we are looking at some of the lessons we learned during that is that understanding that there are different types of technologies that are going to come through that may impact ocean science and how do we address those different areas. As no one mentioned AI before, I was listening to a podcast and the conversation around government is not regulating AI, right? They haven't had conversations about AI. Now is it too soon to have those conversations? We know the impact of AI when it comes to anything we are doing in terms of technology, when it comes to movement of people, when it comes to the ocean, when it comes to other areas. And how do we use that? I know the conversations going on about who owns the intellectual property when AI is involved, that's completely different. But how do we use these new tools and technologies to impact and enhance the work that is taking place in the new blue economy? And how do we support those early stage technologies and to support the workforce that's going to be needed to do some of the things that we're trying to do? Because everything we think about, even though we have AI, there has to be a human component behind that to drive those data, to put those data incorrectly and train that AI tool in order to make sure that what comes out of it, it's accurate. The AI will not operate without that human element providing that input that's needed. We've seen a lot of new technologies coming out. I will give kudos to my partner in Chrome, the USM, and the Office of Innovation Management, who really has his hands on the polls about what's taking place. Everything from the on-cruise systems to all the way up to the species in the ocean, looking at those technologies, looking at the faculty that are developing those technologies and making sure that they're provided with the resources that are needed. And not only are we looking at funding from our federal partners like NOAA, National Science Foundation, NASA, and others, but we're looking to our companies that are investing in the economy and seeing how we can partner with them to develop new technologies, how we can get workforce development opportunities for our students and sometimes our faculty as well. But I think with all that is happening, those conversations about making sure that we have the right workforce, make sure the talent is there in the different spaces that we need would be critical. And that's why those funding that we are receiving from the federal government to do the training, the entrepreneurial training and the commercialization training, that we are staffing up our offices to provide that support. Because the technologies that are happening, we have to make sure the technologies are working the way they need to do. We make sure the protection is there and then how do we deploy those technologies to have that positive impact. And so now we have, I would say for the first time in a long time, and must thank the Chips and Science Act and must plug here our Senator Wicker for champion that Chips and Science Act on behalf of the state of Mississippi and the ex-school states to make sure that we have that funding. And not only that we have that funding that we are able as state institutions to compete for those funding as well. So again, as a recap, some of the lessons learned is understanding that we need the human capital to help us do some of this work, understanding the different type of technologies and how do we work with those technologies. Some of the technologies have a social component to them that we now have to pivot and be able to help train social entrepreneurs to do some of this work. We also making sure that we have the resources to scale up because before we can serve certain capacity but now we have scaled up with the resources that we have and the training of our new staff that's on board and we're happy about that. And then of course, as we are recruiting companies into the Gulf Coast, making sure that they have what's needed to stay in the Gulf Coast and to stay in Mississippi setting up their business headquarters. So I think collectively with the team that's surrounding the efforts that are taking place in the Gulf Coast that we have a solid partnership. We have company support and we also have support from our federal partners. So definitely have to give kudos to all those different public-private partnerships that are taking place. And that's necessary for us to really have a meaningful impact in the new blue economy because we, Brian and I talk a lot about when people talk about the blue economy, they often forget about the tech side of it. And that we have to make sure we have those tools and resources that will be able to accelerate process. And I'll step back and say, you know, for someone who more on the tech-based side, a lot of people do not know that six years of my career was in the shipping industry, right? So that's what my love is. And so having to do this partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi, it gives me that opportunity to go back to my first love of being on the dock and seeing the ships and looking at the tools and resources that they use in that process.  That's how we learn. But now there are new tools and resources that can be used to really manage the operations and the export process within the shipping industry. So with that, I'll stop there and just say thanks again for this opportunity. This is a space that I really love working with and I'm glad to have, you know, the tools and resources as well as the partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi and the Office of Innovation Management to really help these companies and these technologies that are coming in the Gulf Coast region. Thank you so much. Thank you. So we have time for some questions. There's quite a few questions in the chat. I'm going to call a tuba's model in order to elevate the committee questions first and maybe hear some voices we haven't heard yet. So there's a question from Chris. If you'd like to go ahead and have. When I wrote this, it was initially for Henry, but really any of the speakers might have comments. I saw how academia can be a critical connector in public private partnership, but I wonder if these were happening in your experiences more because of some initial individual connections that are already there. You know, someone they, they, you know, all of those things that are sort of happy chance for our specific strategy implemented to identify and bring multi-sector groups together and launch these partnerships. So here we have the third Wednesday night of each month we have the Gulf Blue Navigator networking event and it brings people from government and from academia and from industry all together because I do think initially it is just who do you know and having those conversations. That is part one. And then part two is having the infrastructure and the practices in place and some experience and connecting all those from a contracting and grant and collaboration perspective. What do you need them both. Thank you. And I'll make sure it's him. Do you want to comment there. I agree the networking is is key and I'm getting involved. Yes. Absolutely. And if you've been working in also if you've worked in the area in the arena, it helps too because you build a lot of you build a lot of connections that way. I wonder to professionals that play any role in the development. Or with that look on your face and thinking. Doesn't see it seems like those tend to be siloed a month that might just thinking is about like the marine technology society. So that's a good that's a good example. I'd say there are some exceptions like the marine technology technologies that technology is a good example of maybe the exception to the role. It does seem like for the most part they just those things can maintain silos. So the next question, certainly for me. And I think this is one that any other panel is going to address and I'm wondering if you all have to continue this conversation about networking. Do your thoughts on developing teamwork, teaming frameworks and proposal submission models for us to consider maybe as a recommendation to NSF to help us focus on use inspiration and ultimately increase the use of fundamental funded science. I will start off and answering that we currently have a program that is funded by the National Science Foundation is for translational research and we teach in team science so we bring in faculty right now from the different institutions in the state. And they go through a series of workshops together working together figuring out how to collaborate and working on major proposals together as a team to impact that interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary standpoint, but also looking at a grand topic. So right now the team is working on food security and the next cohort will be working on resilience. Oh. Other thoughts here. Could, could you repeat I'm having a difficult time hearing from the room. The question was that was on developing team teaming frameworks and proposals for submissions to NSF to focus on use inspiration and ultimate success of fundamental ocean research. I, it is difficult. I have tried to, to join or initiate proposals through through the knob, or as well as through the UN decade and I don't have an answer, a good answer for you, but because I, I have not been able to to finish. I don't have the. I don't know how best to team, and it's been very difficult, at least from the government side to find ways to team with with NSF and with with with private organizations. I know the knob is very successful and a very good way to do that. But I, I guess I would turn, turn the question around, and, and, and ask. I need help on that as well. So, I don't have a good answer. We have a couple of questions from Pete and Allison kind of on them the same nexus. Do you want to ask yours. What about Allison? Thanks. The question was when considering the advantage of the public private partnership, what are some of the biggest challenges to establishing and maintaining these partnerships and then as a follow on, I had asked, what are your biggest recommendations for successful partnerships to be maintained. So, biggest challenges in or strongest recommendation for insurance is that So, I think that the previous question also hits on one of the biggest challenges, which is getting the teams created. Often the biggest problem is there's a deadline and just getting the meeting set and the agreements and the paperwork and so forth. There's a lot of energy initially and then you just sort of put the pieces together and decide I don't think we can get this done by the deadline at all. And what frequently happens is you have some set of entities who have done something in the past and so the paperwork is already put in place and so those are the easy partners to continue to work with, which is fine in one sense but it makes it difficult for new entrants in the ecosystem because they just don't have any of that in place and makes it hard if not impossible to be a team member in a timely fashion. And so I would recommend just like what I understand about what Amisha described a second ago, grow actively putting the teamwork in place before you actually know what the opportunities are going to be. It's just necessary to actually meet the opportunities when they arrive. And academia as my first slide showed is very frequently the best way to do that because it is just about impossible from experience to create teams without something already existing between a small company and the government. But you can have agreements in place between small companies and universities. And which take a little while that they can be put in place proactively so that when the government opportunity comes along the university and its infrastructure is able to respond quickly and bring those. Those industry partners of small businesses in particular. And when there's just nobody could have otherwise. Yeah, I'll speak to that a little more I want from my experience the biggest hurdle has been there's been between public partner part private partnerships has been the time frame within the government side. And actually by the time things are released and we're able to take any kind of action it's a relatively short turnaround and trying to and then coupled with that we have to jump through a number of legal hurdles to enter into any kind of new partnership. So the best thing to do, if you're planning on entering any kind of partnership is you do need to plan in advance and look out to the opportunity may not be available at this time but what can you do if this opportunity becomes available. So that means working to build the teams in advance, and those teams will be comprised of the academic sectors, cooperative institutes, the commercial sectors, and maybe even other governmental sectors, and look at what you can do if this opportunity becomes available versus waiting for the opportunity to become available and then taking action. You definitely have to be proactive. I don't know if you want to leave on schedule. Okay. Okay. Though Tim has his hand up, maybe just give the last word to Tim. Absolutely. This isn't so much the last word but a real difficulty in public private partnerships that I've encountered, especially on the data side is the difference between the need that we have for free public complete public access to data. Yes, there you go. And on the private side more of a proprietary attitude towards it. There you go.  No, that's the. That's the, that's the nub, because you're talking about a very different seascape of private academic government partnerships used to be the private sector was a, you know, they provided the gear. Or maybe they were an outsource recipient to now they're trying to make business on what used to be a government or maybe a government academic partnership. And that's, that's really different than where we've been. And so you have very different values and governance structures in place where companies want to cost schedule and performance and delivering value to investors or shareholders. Academic wanting promotion and tenure government trying to keep Congress happy or their constituents happy, etc. And, you know, just as I put in the, in the chat. How do we make private proprietary data transparent, particularly in terms of quality control and quality assurance. And also, we're for the ocean we're looking at infinite timescales. We're looking for decades and a lot of these little companies. If they go out of business because of market forces, we're left holding the bag and critical time series all of a sudden become not available. Okay, thank you to our panelists appreciate your time. All right, thank you sir. So we, yep. And so for those of you who are online, we will be at one o'clock. This topic of this next panel, I think this committee has been so much my thinking and talking about the topics of inclusivity. And so it really, really important conversation and I'm thrilled that we're having such a robust panel on this topic. And so, Mona, I will hand it over to you. Thank you so much about should I tell me should I unmute myself when I talk or should I just talk just talk just now. Okay, great. Okay, well, thanks. Thanks to all of our, we have a basic panel today everyone. So the thanks to all our panelists for for agreeing and for their willingness to participate in this in this discussion with us and engage with us. We had a couple of cancellations due to a variety of reasons but still we have a pretty solid group of experts here with us. So Christine Chen is from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for Garza from University of Washington, Brandon Jones from the National Science Foundation and Arana from UCLA. And so we, how this is going to work. I am going to drop a link in the chat window to some definitions for diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, accessibility, because these are the terms that we will be using throughout the conversation today. By the way, we have two hours so we can dive deep into this conversation. So, we'll, we'll share some of those definitions. Each of us is going to share a couple of remarks. And then we'll have a couple of discussion questions with the panelists. So I would suggest that you, once again, use Slido to add your questions will take the questions after a specific discussion with with the panel that we had today. So with that, let me first invite Christine. Christine, are you with us. Hello, yes, can folks hear me all right. Yes, we can hear you. Okay terrific. Let me start sharing my slides. Okay, are folks seeing something on the screen. Yes, we are. Okay, fantastic. Hello everyone. Thank you very much to the committee as well as the program organizers for having me here today. For my remarks I'd like to briefly summarize the main results of a paper that me and several others pictured here co authored in 2022. In this paper we examined publicly available data on funding rates by PI race and ethnicity at the National Science Foundation from 1999 to 2019. And we found evidence of persistent racial funding disparities. And after, after this after just providing some high level highlights about this paper, I then like to offer some thoughts about how these funding trends impact science and society. So I look forward to discussing this more with the committee and the other panelists afterwards. So, diving right into the funding trends. Okay, so I think most of us know this NSF received many tens of thousands of proposals each year. And unfortunately the NSF cannot fund them all. And so, like most other funding agencies, the NSF undergoes a merit review process to try to figure out which of these proposals to fund. And over the past two decades, overall funding rates have fluctuated between 22 and 34% due to changing budgets as well as overall proposal submission numbers. Now, despite these year to year fluctuations, when we look at funding rates based on PI race and ethnicity, we see patterns that are sometimes remarkably stable. Here we've normalized fluctuations in overall funding rate to see what differences remain. And we see that proposals by white PIs have been consistently funded above overall rates over this period. In contrast, most other groups appear to be funded below overall rates, most if not all of the time. Black and Asian PIs are consistently funded at lower rates. And you'll notice that some groups experience greater year to year variability than others, specifically for American Indian and Alaska natives in purple and native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders here in orange. Now, that difference has to do with the number of proposals that each group submits. So I'd like to show what these funding disparities represent in that context, in the context of total proposal numbers. To do that, let's just look at one year the year 2019 as an example. I'm going to show you a graphic where each box represents 10 proposals. And that means a five by five square is 250 proposals and then four of those squares together as a block represents 1000 proposals. So in 2019, white PIs submitted 20,000 or so proposals. And this is what that number looks like in terms of boxes. And here's the number of proposals submitted by other groups. Now the overall funding rate in 2019 was 27.4%. If each group were funded at the exact same rate, we'd expect these many awards outlined in black to be granted to each group. So if everyone were funded at this rate, 27.4% in that previous plot that I was showing with all those lines, they would all all those lines would just fall along the 0% relative funding rate line. However, this is what the actual breakdown of awards was for that year. White PIs were funded at a rate of 31.3%, a rate that is higher than all the other groups except for American Indian and Alaska native PIs. And because of the differences in the total number of proposals that are submitted by each group, each percent difference in funding rate has a different impact in terms of absolute award numbers. So for white and Asian PIs who submit the most proposals the funding rate differences represent hundreds of awards and surplus and the deficit. Yes, so this is a snapshot of overall of trends in 2019. I don't have time to go into detail on the other results we found. But I'll just say here that for some years we were able to examine more detailed disaggregated data on trends by proposal type so research proposals versus non research proposals, as well as by scientific discipline or NSF directorate. And when we looked at those more detailed data for those years we found that regardless of proposal type or scientific field, these trends generally remained white PIs are funded above all overall rates, and that rates higher than most other groups regardless of proposal type or scientific field. So, yes, so coming back to this schematic here, if we consider the annual number of awards and surplus and a deficit to each group. For all of the years, not just 2019, you start to see the extent of the cumulative impacts of these funding disparities. This is really a story about cumulative advantages and disadvantages. A back of the envelope calculation using these totals, and the average award size given suggests that this could represent several billions of dollars in unbalanced funding. Given how important funding is to the success of a researcher's career and productivity. It's more than likely that these funding trends have played a huge role in why the racial demographics of stem faculty have not meaningfully improved over the past few decades. These are compounding trends that, again, play an instrumental role in the stagnation of diversifying stem. And I also want to emphasize that these trends, oops, sorry, also impact our body of scientific knowledge. Here it's worth noting that similar racial funding disparities have been reported elsewhere at the NIH, NASA and the UK various philanthropic funders. These trends are widespread. And similar to the NSF at the NIH, they've been happening since at least the year 2000, with no changes to the magnitude of funding gaps for 20 years. At the NIH, they found that topics more commonly proposed by Black PIs like community oriented disease prevention, minority health, and ironically racial health disparities were funded at lower rates compared to other topics. And not only that, they were also underfunded with much smaller grant sizes compared to white PIs. So basically, we know less than what we should know about these particular topics because the funding structures at the NIH were set up to be prioritized such topics. During the pandemic, I read about how racial differences and mortality among COVID hospitalizations were occurring. Say it bluntly, Black and brown people were dying at higher rates compared to white people when affected by COVID. And I can't help but wonder how things might have been different had the NIH managed to close this Black PIs right funding gap over the last 20 years. So I asked the committee to consider these same questions in the context of ocean sciences, in the context of climate change. What don't we know about the ocean because of these funding disparities, racial funding disparities, and what does that mean for which communities benefit or do not benefit from our ocean science research. To end my remarks, I wish to emphasize the following. In the absence of inequalities, our body of scientific knowledge would more closely reflect the spectrum of topics relevant to all of society. And so these racial funding disparities therefore jeopardize the integrity of knowledge as a public good for all. And if we're going to have any chance at eliminating these inequalities to make sure that science doesn't perpetuate or exacerbate existing social inequalities, then we have to go to the root of the problem. And that means we need to reorganize what causes inequality in the first place, which is unequal access to social prestige, insider knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, material resources, money and funding. Okay, so thanks very much. Looking forward to discussing this further. Much gratitude, Christine. Next up, we have Dr. Garza. Take it away, please. Can I share my screen? Yes. One second. You see that? Yes. Great. So thanks for having me here today. So today I'm going to talk to you just about my sort of take our perspective and how I approach working with diversity in the ocean sciences. And so I think some folks are familiar with this paper came out about five years ago. It's Bernard and Cooper doc paper talks about no progress and diversity. And 40 years and really it's a summary of about 40 years of diversity based geoscience programs for minority students in the US and funded by NSF. And this is one of the key figures that you want to take a look at here. And that if you look at the center part here, race and ethnicity, the black line are sort of those who are getting KHD, but who are classified as white. These lines down here are those getting PhDs but come out of groups that are considered minority groups in the US. You actually have to zoom in over here and people see to actually get a better sense of what those trends are like. And you can see for geoscience PhDs, you know, Native American on Hispanic black non Hispanic, right, they're attaining PhDs as much lower rates than other groups that blue liner Hispanic or Latino groups in the US that are attaining PhDs. You can see that that rates still not high. And I've got that red circle there for a reason. There were five Hispanic Latinos who got PhDs in the geoscience. The reason I highlight that I was one of those five so it's helping to put a face to the data in this case here like who is actually getting their PhDs back around that time. So when we talk about, you know, the ocean scientists, we also have to deal with some of the implicit biases that result in the lack of diversity. You know, some of these center around, you know, basic engagement inclusion of who we're bringing in to the ocean sciences resource allocation, power allocating resources, right individuals from different types of groups. And also our academic identity and the currencies, you know, that we work in one of the things that I'm starting to get a bit out of it's just solely focusing on student programs. That's one of the more common things they see whenever I ask when how they're going to deal with their GI issue. It's always they're going to they're going to develop another student program. You see, we have a lot of those. As my colleague Brandon Jones is here today with how you also have to deal with the environment right that you're putting students into as well because we don't improve that we're not going to stay. And so I'll talk a little bit about that in my comments today. We talk about your engagement inclusion. This is usually the first step right for somebody coming into the ocean sciences. You know, often there can be a really unclear understanding by those outside the ocean science. You know, what we actually do, you know, if I were going in a room full of ocean scientists, they're going to describe ocean science is based on their very specific research area that they look at subsurface microbes in particular parts of this paper. You know, I'm a renecologist. I might talk whether I look at Fred or Fred interactions. You might have other colleagues and talk about doing modeling of fishery. So you can get a really unclear impression. But if you look at, for example, the biomedical sciences, they have very clear messaging about what they do. You know, it's messaging that resonates with the student populations that they're trying to get to. And so the other thing that we struggle with is this ineffective messaging and engagement that we have with student front or represented groups, particular that early undergraduate stage. Even some of the imagery that we use is an image that I've been using for a number of years on the left there.  You know, I went in Google construction jobs and that's actually the first picture that pops up right there.  These don't look any different right from one another. You're also sending different types of messages right to an individual is looking at this before even get to talk them wanted to have a manual labor. If you're physically disabled, you're out of luck. You have to be a guy. Right. There's all types of messages that you're sending just through the imagery that we use. And because they can often have this lack of community and belonging. If you don't fit into these very specific models, right, that we put out to the world about what it looks, what it means to look like a notion scientists. Right, but even when we get students in the door, they often also struggle with finding their footing in there. It says a paper by Hofstra it all in 2020 it's called the diversity innovation paradox. It's actually talking about to a large extent how once you get graduate students minority backgrounds into graduate programs, they actually when you do a retrospective analysis of their DCs over 40 years. They're actually innovating at much, much higher rates, but they rewarded less often with that rewarding they weren't getting faculty jobs. It was happening when you go back and you analyze that is they were doing work that wasn't the norm for the time so often because they were doing work that different it tended to be grounded in the fact that, oh, because they don't know how we do work in our particular discipline here so they're not actually getting rewarded here. So it's a diverse innovation paradox and that that innovation, it isn't getting recognized until much, much later on that in this case. Yeah, and then resource allocation is another one, you know, where we struggle here.  Right, we have to talk about the old boys network, you know, I remember any college either tend to be a small series subset of schools that only work with each other right in that realm and so it can be very exclusive. There's a student who receives funding, you know, this just came up in the previous top certain institutions have a tendency to get more funding than others. Even internal barriers that we face, you know, I was at a minority serving institution for the last 15 years of my career in there, and it can actually really tough when you even get the funding in there to actually get the internal resources to support the types of work that you want to do with the funding that she might bring in from an external source. Another way, you know, that this crops up as well as you probably heard this term parachute science, you know, this is a paper by Siphanoutis at all in 2021. And they're actually using the coral reef research to me as an example of where the kind of resource allocation issue right pops up here, where the majority of coral research when you look at publications that's being conducted by Western institutions, an example of the two of the top 10 countries in the world and producing papers on coral research are Germany and Canada, a country that actually they themselves don't have coral reefs right in their territorial waters there. I mean one thing that happens is, is they noted here that local researchers and their knowledge that are often excluded, even though you've got researchers coming in with lots of funding and resources that local knowledge base and the people who have that knowledge are being included and so it creates a resource and accessibility right in equity and what happens is that then feeds into your future hires and the discipline. And so really a big part of what we have to start thinking about is how we reframe our science identity like how we want to actually sort of frame ourselves as scientists. Now I have this quote up here because actually from a colleague of mine. And I had asked him about taking over an education program that I was getting ready to move on for and the feedback I got was I'm not an educator I'm a researcher and I was like well you're absolutely members tends to be part of your job right is also being an educator. Right but this is a photo of a colleague of mine Josh Cohen from Rutgers and he's a really good example of someone who's kind of reframed his identity. A lot of people know him as somebody who's got an active, you know, glider program down in Antarctica is really cutting edge work. You have telemetry work with penguins down there, but he also takes a lot of that and uses it to try to understand like how he can engage audiences in polar sciences. Right this is a program that we ran for a number of years where we were actually taking polar data right from Antarctica and then working with elementary school teachers to help them write craft lesson plans where they could actually use the science of the polar regions. Right to engage, you know, student populations and student groups that wouldn't normally have access to that and so it's really great example of how doing this type of outreach work it actually doesn't sort of cut down on your science right they can actually be seamlessly merged with one another and that's really where we need to start going in the ocean sciences. And so finally, you know, why do we want to change our research model and how we're doing research in the ocean sciences, but one, it improves the diversity of those that we're engaging right and stem as a whole right we're bringing in new perspective. Right new ideas right the solution so the story probably been dealing with for the last few decades might be in a community that you haven't historically engaged with or it might be at a university that you haven't historically. Right engage with and when we do that results in new ways in conducting research and the types of knowledge basis that we can sort of form in the ocean sciences. So thanks and I think I'll be coming back a little later. This thank you so much Corey. Next up we have Brendan. Thank you Mona, I want to get started here. All right, is that visible. Yes. All right, excellent. Thank you so much for the invitation and obviously I'm at NSF. So I'm going to be primarily in listening mode today, but I did want to come with some information as it relates to what we're doing in the directorate for Geosciences around this broadening participation issue. And so what I'll be presenting is not ocean specific, but it is applicable to, you know, all disciplines and stem obviously with the earth system sciences being in the forefront and what we're talking about today. So I'm in a division within the directorate called the rise division and you see that description there. It stands for research innovation synergies and education. And it's the interdisciplinary home. I'll have that a little bit more on a slide coming up for the types of work that are needed around education. Workforce development, but also big issues like climate, global related activities as it relates to earth system science and things of that nature. So I sit with other team members in what is referred to as the education and broadening participation incubator. And so that's what I'll be presenting on today. So the mission of that incubator is all about talent development and broadening participation for the earth system sciences or geosciences. And we have four kind of sub themes or sub areas that we focus on that you see there at the bottom sharing knowledge, applying consistent methods, promoting promising practices and developing innovative ideas. And I would probably say this aligns with what Corey kind of finished his his talk with that we seek to build a community of practice across the earth system sciences to engage in this kind of work and also help develop necessary changes at different levels that will help us take full advantage of all the human capacity that's out there that is needed for the issues that we're facing today. The goals, again, just breaking these down. We seek to and everything that we do in that incubator, whether it be a program or internal activities across the agency is to emphasize broadening participation elements and everything. And oftentimes in the community people are saying, well, this is a or they see broadening participation activities as something extra that they have to do. And as soon as it is categorized that way, it becomes a burden when really there are probably a whole lot of things that people are already doing that just can be elevated. We will say we marketed or rebranded as broadening participation activities, but also there is work that needs to be done to make sure these these elements are raised to the level that they should be interdisciplinary home for broadening participation work. Oftentimes, scientists need to partner with social scientists or educational specialists or those experts that are not in their disciplinary arena. And given that NSF is a federal agency, we are unfortunately still siloed a lot of times by our budget structure as well as some other kind of structural issues. But this particular incubator and rise as a division is a interdisciplinary home for the community. Okay. We will have areas and programs and initiatives that allow the community to submit ideas of proposals and engage with us to move things forward. So we are excited about it being an interdisciplinary home. Also, the information dissemination in place for innovation gets to that latter point I made about building a community of practice. We see rise and specifically for what we're talking about today. We see our education and broadening participation incubator as a virtual maker space where the ideas can come in and the resources are available in an equitable way and everyone has a voice. Everyone has a value. And we just come into brainstorm and then move things forward. So, programmatically, when it comes to our ecosystem, I'll use that word, we have several flagship programs and then we have other smaller initiatives that connect to the ecosystem to build this full more holistic approach to supporting students. And some of what I will say basically repeats what Corey was saying about the necessity for building an inclusive or welcoming culture. So we have 3 main thrust in our ecosystem career development champions and then culture and career development is more about the traditional preparing of undergrads graduates or those that are early careers and upskilling them and moving them into the workforce. Champions is about the professional development needed for many individuals like yourselves who are already established experts in their fields in different entities, different parts of the research enterprise. But what is it maybe that we did not receive in our academic training or even our professional training that has us misaligned with the needs of the early career folks that are coming in now in 2024 and moving on. And then the culture piece is like what Corey was mentioning. What is it about how we're socializing and where we're socializing our early career people into academia, federal, private, nonprofit, what have you in the research enterprise and that is not welcoming or things that can be changed to allow them to bring all of who they are so that they can be fully engaged in the work that is necessary. And with that we have 3 flagship programs that touch on each one of these main thrust for career development. We have the geopaths program that is temporarily paused. But we are and stay tuned because we want to engage with the community to develop the next phase of geopaths. It's almost 10 years old. So we're kind of at this decadal review point in the program. For developing champions, even at the institution level, as well as the faculty level or expert level, we have the golden program and that is still stands for geoscience opportunities for leadership and diversity. That's still viable. And for the last 2 years, we had the cultural transformation in geoscience community program. Which focused on the culture of the geoscience is that's currently suspended because we are working on a new initiative, which I can't really talk about in detail that takes CTGC or this culture program to the next level. So last few slides. I wanted to pull out a prime example from 1 of our golden or actually a golden suite of awards. We made a couple of years ago. These were eager awards. And so if you're unfamiliar, those are kind of the exploratory awards. A mechanism that we use at NSF and we make the suite of awards. You see the column on the all the way on the right. These are the institutions that those awards went to. But across the top, you see the themes that each of the projects focused on is some projects focused on multiple themes, but I wanted to highlight those 2 kind of in the middle in that goal highlight. Most of the projects we're looking at mentorship, which is what we wanted to see in an alliance with the program goals of golden professional development at that expert or mentor advisor professor level. But the institutional policy projects we are keeping a close eye on. These are projects that are looking at institutional policies related to tenure and promotion related to workload and the disproportionate weight that in academia that workload falls on women and faculty of color. And what tenure and promotion values beyond publications and grant dollars, all the other work that is necessary.  I'm not an educator or whatever that statement was. So looking at our value systems and that's 1 thing that I would like to emphasize for the committee to think about what what is it about our value systems and the ratings and rewards that can be adjusted. So finishing up the last 2 things. As I mentioned in our ecosystem, we have the programmatic ecosystem. We have these main projects, but we also have a suite of projects to fill in the gaps so that we are doing our best not to leave leaky places in the ecosystem where people can fall out. And so we have several supplement programs for veterans for people with disabilities in the geosciences for post backs who have finished their bachelors, but maybe haven't really decided to move on to grad school yet. We don't want them to slip out. So we have a mechanism to catch them at that post back phase. And we also have an experience for teachers and we see that as part of building those champions that can help seal up the cracks and build out the community. So the last slide. I just wanted to leave this as consideration for all of us. If you don't know Gus, Beth, he's an environmental lawyer. I think he was 1 of the founders of the national research defense council. I think I have to go back and look, but anyway, this quote resonates with me and I try to use it as much as I can. And basically Gus is saying he used to think early in his career that it was all about the natural and physical focus on the natural physical system and the research science that is traditional. But what he's realizing now that it's really about the individuals. It's about our perspectives as humans. And it's about what we bring to the research enterprise that will help other humans be optimized so that we can take advantage of the full human capacity to address these issues as I mentioned before. So I'll stop there and look forward to the conversation. Many thanks, Brandon. And next we have a lot of welcome. We can see your presentation or you have to do with yourself. Great. Can you hear me now. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks. All right. We go. Yeah, so thanks for your time today. My name is Rodna Tripati. My pronouns are she they I'm a professor at UCLA where my expertise is in paleo oceanography, paleo climate and geochemistry. I have also worked with others here to found the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, which focuses on reparative climate action and environmental justice. One part of the center CDLS oceans is focused on equity and ocean sciences and ocean justice. Part of my motivation for forming this is because I wouldn't actually be here in academia if it wasn't for opportunities for access. My family is from the Fiji Islands with ancestry from India, due to the colonial histories of both places. My mom's parents were sharecroppers, they grew sugarcane. She was the first generation in her village to be literate. And in the US there were a number of issues my family faced as immigrants. We've had to be resilient and often our hopes for the next generation have been would have carried us. Now I learned about stories like those of my family of my own so often from our students today. But what I see that is different is that in my case I had these remarkable opportunities for access. I participated in programs at Cal State LA, a minority serving institution, and UC Santa Cruz, which is now also an MSI. At these places I had advisors, mentors role models, learning communities with supportive peers. These included things like a women of color research cluster that Professor Angela Davis set up at UC Santa Cruz when I was a grad student working with Jim Zachos who is here. You know that meant that I was able to become one of three Asian Pacific Islander women to get a PhD in the US in my field in 2002. You know those statistics that we were seeing earlier. And the various formative experiences that I've had have been part of the inspiration for the center. So what I'm going to do today is describe how through a focus on evidence based interventions and inclusive equitable ocean science we can bend towards justice. We can advance stewardship in ways that are that are meaningful. And so we do this through support of an ecosystem of fellows. One of our fellows, DeMarcus Robinson from FAMU, where he's an undergrad, is now a PhD student at UCLA in Ocean Biogeochemistry. He just published with other co-authors the first US ocean justice strategy. Ocean justice derives from environmental justice and the vision for from the report is actually described here. Equitable access, meaningful engagement, recognizing the value of indigenous engagement, expanding and improving ocean education to improve our workforce and also to build knowledge. So there are a whole series of recommendations and outcomes that come from this. So the work that is being done right now that you all are discussing I think is really at a meaningful time. So the work that we do with the center draws on the scholarship of National Academy of Education faculty member Sylvia Hurtado and others on effective practices for inclusive science based on a meta analysis of effective programs in the biomedical sciences. And that's what this figure shows here. So drawing on all these elements, the work that the center does is really largely focused, although not exclusively focused on indigenous partners. The center is actually based in part in our American Indian Studies Center as well as our Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, the Institute of Environment and Sustainability and other units. Part of the reason why we do this is because UCLA is a land grant institution so that has its own meaning to native peoples. We are settlers here, we're located on the lands of the Gabrielino Tongva people. We're still present today and their stewardship of the lands and waters of Los Angeles are really been critical for our own presence in this in this area. Now, indigenous communities, communities of color and low income communities in many regions, including coastal ones are considered frontline communities. And so our work with CDLS oceans focuses on these communities. We do this through our diversification of ocean sciences, but also through the research that we do, which is community engaged. We emphasize the social context of what we do because of the interconnected nature of the different systems at play and the way they intersect when it comes to the oceans and environment. From vulnerabilities to rising sea level storm surges to the community expertise that holds often vital information for environmental resilience and health. So the ethos for the work we do is to be deeply respectful, reparative and to engage in reciprocity as we build relationships. So our model for cultivating leadership with a center is a network leadership model. We cut across departments, colleges and universities with the fellows we support. Our ecosystem of fellowships program supports community fellows, we support faculty fellows and most importantly we support the next generation early career fellows from high school through postdoctoral people from two year and four year institutions. Our work brings together different interventions from community building, mentoring, team based research, community engagement, technical and higher skills training through co curricular workshops. Now we've supported at this stage more than 250 fellows across green steam fields at the center about 20% of them are in oceans related areas. Our levels of diversity are quite high that's what's shown this this figure on the lower right from a survey a couple of years ago. Now this type of work is really important to be grown and sustained at multiple institutions because we're doing this work in a field where there's a growing diversity gap. This figure from Steve boss at the University of Arkansas compares demographic trends in the country to diversity trends in the workforce. This matters from thinking about, you know, who are effective ambassadors to communities when it comes to ocean stewardship to who gets a seat at decision making tables. And what's interesting and sad to see is that in many fields, including ours, even though the diversity of the country is increased dramatically, the diversity of the workforce hasn't kept up. In fact, it's actually equivalent to levels of diversity in the US during the Jim Crow era some 70 years ago. Now, what I think is also important to note is that to with the center's model, in addition to very directly working on addressing those demographic demographic issues, we intentionally work to support mentorship from people of different generations, activists, community leaders, people in higher education, people working in different sectors. We center on the resilience of those who are systematically marginalized. So we uplift resource and support people who might otherwise be expending enormous effort to persist in ocean science training or to work on ocean advocacy issues. We support them with an equity lens and we build community around them. At the same time, we motivate and equip and support those who are passionate about the issues who see that there is a convergence of interest so that they can also share in doing the reparative work that's needed. So the center is for everyone. We don't exclude anybody from applying. And there's, and there's many aspects of our work I jokingly say we're like an octopus, the community and tribally led research projects we do or one heart of our work. This includes a service learning partnership with the Amamutzin Land Trust that I'll describe more in the next slide, but also partnerships with the Northern Chumash Tribal Council for their proposed Chumash Heritage and National Marine Sanctuary to work with the Bay Foundation and Heal the Bay who have now with us. We've supported public participation of hundreds of community members in sampling efforts in marine protected areas and non MPAs areas where there's seagrass and kelp restoration. We've supported over 30 undergraduate and graduate students. Just in the last three years. And they've been participating in service learning and research. We've also been sharing revised curricula to support inclusive classrooms. And this has impacted over 700 students and we provide field based oceanographic experiences and this has now occurred for about 100 students. In our work with the Amamutzin Land Trust we collaborate to support research with tribal stewards around tribal priorities around land and coastal marine stewardship. This includes sharing different knowledge systems to support community power, community health, climate adaptation and resilience from training in cultural resource management, geochemistry, environmental genomics, drone mapping and to assessing the impacts of stewardship and the access of climate models and ocean models. There's all sorts of work that's being done. The work is also being brought by tribal members into a youth leadership program where people in higher education are sharing language and culture. Relating to stewardship from kind of Western Marine STEM and also from traditional knowledge systems. So with that I want to acknowledge that with the work we're doing in Centering Equity and Ocean Science, we've been inspired by the pathbreaking work led at HBCUs by Dr. Bob Bullard, Dr. Beverly Wright, but also others like Ashanti Johnson with the MS-PhD program and we continue to be inspired by work that's being done at minority serving institutions and non-MSIs around the country as we learn of it. There's also really exciting vision from the next generation of marine scientists including Dr. Tiara Moore from Black and Marine Science. I mean, you know, there's this sense that actually there's a lot more work that's there below the surface of what we recognize than what we might otherwise recognize. So that's what gives us hope. We also believe that our ceiling is for the next generation, their floor, but it is critically important to sustain and grow the type of work that people here are discussing. So I look forward to the discussion on how we can do that. Thanks. Thank you so much, Aradna. So panelists, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and I encourage everybody to ask questions using Slido. So our statement of task reads that we ought to identify novel opportunities to regarding ocean related views inspired social solutions oriented research and innovation. And we ought to think about opportunities and strategies to promote innovative multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approaches. So my question to the panel is what kind of improvements are required in the research infrastructure to foster equity and justice in ocean sciences? Are there any frameworks for use in science, non-disciplinary research that the committee should consider? And if there are, could you provide some examples of any kind of robust community university partnerships that the committee should consider? So I threw a lot in there, but basically the gist is are there, what kind of improvements are necessary in the research infrastructure to facilitate the kind of innovation in ocean sciences that we seek to foster? Maybe I'll bring something up. I think there's a really important model that actually comes from Dr. Beverly Wright, who I'd mentioned. She talks about the community place where university and community expertise is kind of at the same level, right? And so there's an opportunity for university researchers to think about how can we support the work that's being prioritized by communities and work to really execute that vision, but also do that in a way where community members are elevated, you know, with respect to the work they're being resourced. Often there are young people, people of all generations who are, you know, in higher education or who are interested in work opportunities and can be supported for in doing this type of work. So I think that that model, seeing that kind of developed and implemented in ocean sciences at a broader range of institutions would be really key. And, you know, I think that there are ideas we've been thinking about based on what we've heard from our community partners about, for example, having mobile field labs that, you know, they have that are on traditional lens so that people can sample for environmental DNA in the coastal environment and do sample processing, you know, and also have the ability to look at data to see how conservation and mitigation measures are making a difference. That's just one example, you know, but it's, then that means that the research infrastructure is not just sitting in the university but there's some of it that's also sitting in the community. Thank you, Rodna. Others. I'd like to hang a lantern on Rodna's suggestion here, which was really excellent. I guess I'll share that at a recent conference where I talked about the NSF funding, racial funding disparities, a scientist who's also a tribal member approached me, and to discuss specifically the trends for American Indian and Alaska Native PIs. And she wondered about how, well, she shared with me that she noticed that when she visited various proposal calls put forth by NSF and other funding agencies, that none of the topics that were being, the proposals were being asked for seemed to be relevant to her community back at home. There was a mismatch between the science that the funders fund and the science that indigenous scholars like herself wanted to pursue. And so I wonder, in a very similar way to what Rodna's proposing, I wonder if there are ways for funders to better fund the topics that these scholars are interested in pursuing that actually bring back benefits to their communities. So there has to be a way to fit that into funding infrastructure in some way to do that better than it's currently happening right now. Thank you so much, Christine. Any other thoughts, Corey or Rodney? Sure, I can go. You know, the funding was an important one. I was actually a postdoc at an NSF Crest site at Cal State LA for two years. And, you know, that was, you know, running at the same time as the STCs are spinning up, but at a much, much lower funding rate. You know, they were expected to have this research impact, but it was maybe a quarter of the funding rather than STC was getting.  So we couldn't do the capacity building that she needed to do. We often had to, you know, go to our provost and our deans, you know, to get that additional money.  Right. And that creates an additional burden because oftentimes, you know, the type of work being done out of minority serving institutions. You know, it's one of those things we tend to overlook is they're often already doing in community work for there and really what they need. It's the funding infrastructure, the personnel infrastructure right to carry it off, right? It was unusual to have a postdoc at a Cal State campus. It just wasn't a common thing back then. But, you know, it actually helped us. You know, we actually, the small groups are three or four of us back then actually helped to do that. And so I think that's something to think about it as well that if this is something that, you know, NSF as a whole wants to elevate that you can't expect an MSI to do it on a shoestring budget, right? With shoestring facilities and shoestring personnel. Yeah, we can do it. It's just, it makes the work a lot harder to do it. And frankly, it's unnecessary to have to do that, right? When we can show this work. The press work, I mean, that was a really great program and a number of us are faculty and we're working at NOAA and we're going to Cal Fish and Wildlife, right? And so on. So we show you can do it. You can go to communities don't traditionally work with. They can do really impactful work. But I can imagine if that particular center and others like it were funded at the rate of the NSTC, I can only imagine what that impact, you know, would have been. Very good. Just quickly, just this this line and thank you for starting the reply. This line of response is resonates heavily with a lot of what we've been talking about. And our incubator at NSF and so to that last point, Corey was talking about the institutional capacity, not, not the researchers or the faculty or preparing the students, but the folks in the sponsor research office, or the lack of them, or all of those that are, are. Part of that support system to assist faculty and students with their awards or submitting proposals or applications and things of that nature. There's a huge disparity across our academic institutions in that regard. NSF has a program called granted. It's really new, but that's its focus. It's it's not on the science, but it's on all of those support systems, particularly at emerging research institutions and how to bolster them so that because it's not about the intellectual prowess. There's there's intellectual excellence at every institution, right? It's evenly distributed across the human through the population. But as Corey mentioned, some institutions don't just don't have the capacity and I believe the pandemic unveiled a lot of that. And so how do we capitalize on that? And it's something maybe for the committee to help NSF even move a bit more forward on. Last thing I'll say on the other point that Arana and Christine brought up is the constraints that NSF has a lot of flexibility in the federal government, but it's still a federal agency. And so lots of times we at NSF have to be in alignment with the rest of the government and that constrains us. However, organizations like professional societies or like HMI or something like that that operate in the boundaries. We can partner with them to help move forward in some areas that we might be constrained on if we were just to move forward solely. So just just a how to Arana's and Christine's what on that part. Do you want to add something? Yeah, I think that the one other thing that I would add to this discussion is that is the importance of actually having sustainable support for research infrastructure. So particularly the human and cultural elements of doing this work. I know that there's a lot of interest in kind of exploratory funding, seed funding. Cory talked about Crest as a model. That's a really, really important model, right? Science and technology centers based at MSIs that have long term support. The importance of having those types of centers, particularly at MSIs and particularly programs that are focusing on broadening participation in the ocean sciences. That's key. Noah has also examples of this, although they had like only a certain number of slots, you know, and so with that, you know, it is key to grow that type of work. The other side of it is that looking for funding that lasts for even longer than this. There are expectations typically around higher education institutions incorporating these into their budgets. But, you know, given what's been happening with the politicization of higher education funding and and so forth. And, you know, the shifts on this from the public to student sector. You know, that's that's not something that's likely going to going to happen, given all the asks. So there might be interesting areas for thinking when thinking about kind of public private partnerships for federal agencies to provide seed funding, but then maybe engaging in their relationships with private philanthropy and getting endowments for long term funding, you know, things like that. I just came from a conference on higher education and climate. And some of the folks that I'm mentioning leaders at MSIs, particularly HBCUs endowment, you know, to make sure that the works sustained for the next generations is really, really key. Otherwise, you have a shift in leadership and work gets defunded and then that's that. Thank you all so much. So my next question, and by the way, these questions are inspired by a subcommittee of this committee and that includes Carlos, Kersi, Kristen, Peter, Shannon and Sheenee. So thank you so much for your contributions. But my next question to the panel is is related to workforce development. So we identify there are reports that have identified a plethora of skills that are required for young people to be successful in the day and age today, ranging from cultural competency to communication skills. All of this is in addition to the core competencies that we require students in the ocean or atmospheric sciences or other sciences. So are there newer kind of frameworks, workforce development models that we should be looking at to accommodate the skill sets that are needed to address these, these, the problems that we have that we face as a society. And, and inspire people to to work in on problems that that they feel energized to solve. So are there any examples of workforce development models, more frameworks that we should be looking at. I was in a cooperative science there from NOAA for about seven years, you know, and that is a work, that's literally a workforce development program.  There can also, you know, coming back to the last conversation, there can also be a mismatch in the infrastructure that the institution has at the capacity to support that training. Just to kind of give you an example, you know, when I was rotating out of my previous position to hear the new science and technology focus areas coming out of NOAA for training or, you know, autonomous systems, AI, big data, genomic, a lot of institutions being supported through that. So centers, they didn't have quite the, they didn't have the infrastructure to, you know, support that degree, because even though you might have the money or the funding coming in on the grant, right, to purchase the equipment, you wouldn't have the long term infrastructures. For example, where I was at, you wouldn't purchase a sequencer because there would be no way to support a sequencing facility, we just wouldn't have the capacity to do it. You know, that said, though, it does highlight, I think for students, you know, early career professionals early on the type of skills that you need because they're going to be the non-traditional skill. One of the things I ran into is an educated 15 years.   Well, you really need a background in programming and, you know, communication because that's where the skill sets are at. And so sometimes the way that we think about engaging people early on doesn't really match up with what they need going out because there tends to be this fear that if you present the discipline as too scientific, too technically oriented, there's a lot of hard skills you need there that it's going to discourage people from going into it. And I think, you know, one of the things we need are better models. And there are some of those models that are coming out of those NOAA centers. But how do you start to support those models with the actual infrastructure, right, those institutions that start to ease in that next generation into the ocean science workforce? Yeah, I think, I think to compliment also what Cori has said, I wanted to highlight that, you know, there are frameworks out there that talk about the importance of kind of problem-based learning in preparing people.  That is really a way to then, I think, motivate some of the, you know, harder technical skills, you know, or the relatability of fields that people might not otherwise feel that relates to them. I've seen that be a really kind of strong motivator and the amount of growth that I've seen in students has been remarkable. There's a lot of, you know, STEM educational literature on this. I also put into the chat a link to a paper that was collaborative with colleagues at Conservation International and Arizona State University, where we actually asked employers in the conservation field what sets of competencies do they need, right? What are they finding that they need and where are their gaps for people coming in, but also people to become and go into a leadership role so that people have, you know, a kind of trajectory of the workplace. And, you know, of course, they're the foremost primary things are the scientific proficiency, the theory-based knowledge, technical and analytical skills, that's a priority, but also, in addition to that, problem-solving skills, practical experience, project management, writing abilities, communication skills, and so forth. And so this is just a short letter that we wrote and of highlighting that. And that then allows us to kind of think about what the next generation of curriculum should look like, right, to prepare people. Yeah, just building on that point that Aradna said here in GEO, we funded probably eight over the last eight years some work at the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT. So obviously that's not ocean, but there are a lot of lessons learned because the workshops, there were a series of workshops focused on undergraduates in GEO and graduates. And the format of the workshops was to bring the private sector in with the geoscientists, so to Aradna's point, and ask with the data showing that the majority of students coming out of STEM with STEM degrees are not tracking into academia. And so what does the private sector require as far as skill building for individuals that they're interested in? And there was clear misalignment with what the private sector needed and what students were being prepared to do. And so what do we do with that? So it certainly needs some help as well as designing programs that can meet all of those needs and to build those holistic skills exactly as Aradna was listing there and Cori was mentioning also. So I wanted to offer that. I'm going to try to find those reports and the websites and put them in the chat. Thank you so much. Cori or Christine, anything else? Yeah, go ahead, Cori. Yeah, I was just going to add to, you know, Brandon's that the non-academic pathway, I think it's an important one. I recall yours about four or five years ago. You know, we made a visit to Headquarters and, you know, the other folks who are also on the board in leadership, they're actually surprised here from, no, I think it was at the time of like 40% of their workforce was contractors. They were contractors, you know, in the workforce.  So it's focusing on going and being, you know, a faculty researcher at a, you know, at a big R1 and so hearing that with a bit of an eye-opener. So I think, you know, finding a way to highlight these different pathways into the workforce, right, as you're developing people through the student post-op, you know, early career professional pipeline. I think that's really important. You have to really, you do need to start to develop that. Yeah, I think that there's, I think, relating to something that's been brought up in the chat by Katie Inder-Bitzen about workforce development, that there's also a need for more post-doc early career researchers. Yeah, I think that's really key and something that's also specific to needs from ocean-oriented folks. You know, one of the things that the Center has been looking at is where there are, we've mapped out co-curricular opportunities on our campus and other campuses that are our partners for both technical skills and higher skills. So basically where are their workshops on financial management, you know, mental health, conflict resolution, coding and R. But when we also see that there are gaps for particular educational career stages or gaps, you know, with respect to content, then what we do is we work to bring in facilitators for, you know, that particular area. And so, you know, with that, we've also started looking in different places. And I've seen this specifically benefit our oceans fellows. Like we work often with American Indian Studies and refer our undergraduate and particularly graduate students and post-docs to sit in on courses and working with Indigenous communities so that they can learn about the protocols, right, in a way where they're getting a very structured course, something that is at a high level, has case studies, has theoretical frameworks and talks about this with respect to many different contexts. And I also want to emphasize that, you know, wellness, mental health, financial management, things like machine learning, AI, you know, the things that we know are really kind of key for doing well as a researcher in any sector that is in oceans kind of going forward. Those are also things to kind of be looking at offerings for.  Can I first go to Shannon? Shannon, would you like to ask a question? You have two, you can ask one. I'll start with you first. Yeah, I'm really curious about this diversity and innovation. And so why is that persisting? What's going on in institutions, culturally, what is the institution or incentive structures that are there in place that are not rewarding innovation? Which is like, I think it's like, it seems like that's what we want out of that. So, I'm curious about what's sayable about that. Who wants to go? Could you repeat the question I had a little trouble hearing that. Yeah, the volume is a little low. Now, sure, I can speak loudly. So the question is, what are some of the cultural and institutional factors that are allowing the diversity innovation paradox to persist? Can you identify some incentive levers on this? Yeah, so I think that there's, you know, there's literature on kind of why diverse perspectives are utilized and not rewarded in the, you know, to begin with there's some interesting literature from social psychology on this. And so I don't know what you think. I think that being aware that this pattern exists is probably one of the first things to do to address this. So I think it is really key to teach about this pattern in classes, encourage people to think about citation bias, for example, and why that might come about. And to think about what they're doing in, you know, a paper that they might be writing to actually address this issue really could get people to think about kind of the historic roots of the Academy. And why that means, you know, there is this kind of historic cultural legacy that's that's present there, because I think we all agree that we want to see that's key to science is actually having the very best perspectives out there and that's not necessarily always the perspectives that rise the rise to the top right so if we want to see fairness and see a garden of ideas where you know evidence is what results and things taking root, we can really actively work on that if we know that there's bias there for cultural reasons and that we all have it right. And so that that's kind of a starting point so what we do in our education again it's around the training that we do and if we spend all of our time saying this doesn't exist. We're not being very scientific about it. Right. Um, yeah. I will just add to. I'll just add that the diversity and innovation paradox that was written about by Hofstra at all. That is really one component of an entire system where our evaluative evaluative practices and stem just continuously you cyclically reinforce unequal outcomes at every stage of woman and people of colors careers. It's it can start early on as an early career. As a scientist, there's data showing that for the NSF graduate research fellowships those prestigious grf P's that there are that many more of those awards are awarded to white students compared to non compared to students who are people of color. These kinds of disparities emerge and recommendation letters. They emerge in where people of color get placed like what types of institutions that get placed. They get placed into it's in publications as that diversity and innovation paradox paper. And teaching evaluations service expectations I could go on and on. And, and so, and of course, funding disparities of course which I discussed earlier so that the diversity innovation paradox that shows differences and citation rates based on topic and researcher identity. It's one part of an entire ecosystem that causes cyclically reinforced unequal outcomes. So, I don't know if that helps with identifying like causal incentive links. It's just to say that everything is reinforcing each other unfortunately and we have to apply multiple multi pronged approaches to solving these issues it's not going to be just, you know, if we fix peer review, everything is going to magically fix themselves right there's no silver bullets to this problem. It would be better for us to take a mosaic approach to these issues of culture change. Add on to that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there's some of it where it's a little harder to get at the, you know, some of the popped up during the height of pandemic closure, but you know, you can see where folks identities get really tied up into the type of work. They've done for a long time and so, you know, bringing something different in some ways threaten, you know, that identity and I recall one call early in the pandemic where we were asking how folks were doing and somebody mentioned how they weren't able to go do their research and somewhere in overseas.  And what I really started to realize when I talk to their colleagues is they're kind of identity was tied up and they're that person who goes to that place to do for all research every summer or, you know, they come to moderate if you help for his research or they go to Panama or wherever it is over there and so sometimes, you know, changing the way we do science changes. It can sometimes be unconsciously viewed as a, you know, the threat against that identity that to some extent, you know, there's a more direct, you know, it can be the funding, you know, that you get that you're always used to getting funding for doing things the same way. You know, I, people know, I run it, I run a drone program at Monterey and I've run it here in Washington now and it costs a lot of change. Remember, we getting because in the Marine Ecology Community, I mean, it's a very, they've been using the same data collection approaches since the 60s. But it really hasn't changed, you know, how we go out and we monitor, you know, coastal systems and, you know, recall, we first started going out talking about using the drones and I don't know how serious folks were, but they were talking about like, I was going to cost people their job. And I was like, that's a really odd comment to me because we really, you know, we're coming in with a new way of getting data, examining these systems open a question with a comment. It was going to change sort of the labor structure, right? It is there, you know, the funding that you get. In fact, you know, it, when I left, I do recall, you know, a couple of the states, you know, funding entity, they started to require that you had autonomous systems when you do coastal monitoring and it caused a little bit of a kerfuffle. And the stakes was very different from how things were going, but I think it was the challenge there, people were so used to getting funded for doing things the same way for about 50 to 60 years that this change was it was really sort of stressful for them. So, yeah, I said, it's not one thing or another, but it's this confluence, but a lot of things, some that are harder to get at some that are more direct like who's going to get the rewards right for the way you do your research. Yeah, and I'll just chime in. I wanted to hear from the academic folks there because I was taking a lot of notes. I got to take a lot of this back to our team for discussion. I just dropped a commentary in the chat from Mike Hulme that I just read a few days ago and he emphasizes values and this is what Corey was talking about. We have and, you know, everyone has some sense of their identity tied into their work others and some more than others. And then that automatically drives what's valuable to us. And if you happen to be sitting in a position of authority, a gate or something like that, and you have a certain value system, then it's going to be really tough for you to see and not good or bad, but just to see other value systems from other people or other communities, etc. So, you know, how do we, how do we deal with that? Right? That's a big question and something that is in the commentary is that. And this gets back to Gus Speth's quote that I had in my presentation. We're asking scientists who were all trained to hone in on a solution. And we're asking ourselves, our community to hone in on a solution to a question that is open-ended. And we're not trained to do that. When are we going to figure out that we need the experts that are trained to do that to help us do it? And so when natural and physical scientists figure out that social scientists are of equal value. But there's centuries worth of history of nose-down looking from the natural and physical scientists towards those who are social science experts or educational researchers, etc. But what we're talking about is a human problem. It's not a, it's not a science problem. It's not a research problem. It's a human issue. And we need those that have human expertise to help us deal with that. So, I just want to offer that. But I'll know that you have something to add. I don't think I can follow that. Yeah, yeah, Brandon, you said it, so. Okay, thank you, Brad. Did you want to ask the question? Sure. Yeah, I guess the question is whether there are good examples and thinking of just to probe your kind of thinking on this, I mean bias in funding assistance and under discussion, different times for a long time. So, age bias or entry bias is something. There are ways then to differentially treat first time applicants or renewing applicants. Anyway, the question is other, in other funding agencies, other good examples and thinking in a different space around indigenous participation for other countries that certainly deal with indigenous issues differently. I mean, from Canada, indigenous reconciliation is everywhere. And in the data side of things, the Assembly of First Nations created a protocol called OCAF. There's an expectation that if you engage with indigenous partners, you take OCAF training and bring that experience and knowledge to your engagement. And so they, they've actually created that the indigenous communities. So I'm just looking for other examples like that that might be best or better practices so that we could point to something to change what everyone agrees is an imperfect world. Thank you. Are there any additional examples, panelists that you would like to share? If not, let me know. Okay, Ajit. I just want to say that the masses have been playing with double blind. I have no idea how successful they are, or how it has improved or helped with any of these things, but it is an example of trying to get up. So, there are good examples to learn from this. Okay, I think you're seeing this. Go ahead. Yes, thank you. It's a really excellent question. I'm going to share, I'm going to answer your question, hopefully a little bit indirectly, just to share what I've gathered from what the NIH tried to do to resolve their black-white funding gap. They actually first reported racial disparities back in 2011 in a report that was commissioned by the NIH. And despite having done that, you know, more than 10 years ago, even as late as 2019, they still hadn't closed the black-white funding gap at the NIH, despite many efforts. And in fact, it was at the exact same magnitude where white PIs had a 1.7 to 1.8 funding rate advantage over black PIs, still in recent years compared, and that was the same magnitude as it was back in the early 2000s. So, when I learned that, I wanted to know, well, what did the NIH try to do, because it's clear that what they were trying to do didn't work. And I'm hoping that those lessons get transmitted to the NSF so that they don't repeat, you know, try to do the same things that they already tried that clearly didn't have an impact. And from my reading of what the NIH tried to do, they really hyper-focused on the peer review process, trying to find any way to reduce the disparities and review scores. Between proposals by white PIs versus black PIs, they overhauled their merit review system, you know, expanded the number of criteria that they used from whatever it was before to nine different criteria, changed the rating scale from to so that people assigned numbers from a scale of zero to nine. They did all of these things to try to narrow that the impact of bias within the review system, right. And none of those changes affected the black white funding gap. They did do a short trial, trying to double blind proposals. And what that had the impact of was that it kept the scores for black PIs the same while reducing the scores for white PIs, which I think is interesting because it implies that if there is bias in the system, which there is, we might want to reframe our thinking and think more about positive biases being given to proposals by white PIs. But that was on a very small scale and it's not clear at all whether or not that could be, you would get the same impact if you deployed that on a wide scale basis. And in terms of the deployment of double blind at NASA, that has also had disparate impacts on research institutions that don't have these like mega research offices that can support all the additional labor that goes into needing to double blind your proposals. It's a lot of work to, you know, fulfill all of the requirements to make sure that your proposals don't reveal identity information. That is all to say that the hyper focus on just trying to reduce bias within the peer review process. I think social scientists would probably agree with me when I say this but that ended up being a distraction from real solutions that involve looking at the actual distribution of material resources. I guess we can continue to look into ways to improve the peer review process, but it should not come at the expense of actually again addressing the things that produce inequality in the first place, which are differences in social prestige, material resources and insider knowledge so I encourage folks to not think about, you know, the peer review process as a one universal fix to all of our problems it's very clear at the NIH that that just did not work. So we need to find other solutions that again, talk about redistributing social prestige material resources and insider knowledge. Thank you. I wanted to just kind of highlight some strong examples of models that I think the ocean sciences can draw from. You know, I think Christine did a really nice job of talking about what can be done on the funding side. So I'll start to talk about examples of models in higher education that can be drawn from. I think the program that Ambrose year old at that set up at Woods Hole oceanographic institution is a really strong example of a program. There's the indigenous resilience center at the University of Arizona set up by Professor Carlotta chief. I think that's another really invaluable program. There and so things like this, but thinking about the ocean sciences. You know, examples, I think there are, you know, another example of an MS MSI that's made enormous headway and equity and access issues is Howard University, you know, in partnership with Noah. They produced 60% of all African American atmospheric science PhDs in the past decade. And top 10 programs produced fewer than 10. So people so that's just like that. It. That is really remarkable. I think that looking at the work that the deep south consortium for environmental justice HPC consortium, also the bullet center for environmental and climate justice is doing the EPA has recently funded them as through their tic-tac program so that they're a technical advisory center. And so they're basically then redistributing funding to community based organizations. And so they're, they're, you know, yeah, they're kind of serving in that leadership role and then supporting community based organizations with this. CUNY is and the New York environmental justice alliance also is in a similar to partnerships and so, you know, you don't quite see anything like these yet. But there, there are I think opportunities in, in ocean sciences, even in the agricultural sciences, you know, the USGS. And USDA have been supporting different types of centers, the USGS climate adaptation science centers, their partnership driven. And yeah, so I think that there's lots of examples around the community engaged side and also on the workforce development side. Jim, go ahead please. Yes. NSF has had our programs research experience for undergraduate programs for a long time. And my experience with them is that they tend to have much higher ethnic diversity in them than the graduate programs at the same universities are in place, or diversity on the faculty and some but I've never seen a an analysis of the RAU programs that would say whether they were very effective at attracting minority students into the ocean sciences. And, and then there's also different models that the UCARS source program where they bring students back multiple years is very different. I don't know which one's more effective in terms of recruiting minorities, but is there any comments on how effective they are and trying to build up the graduate student population initially and then eventually into the field of ocean science either as faculty or private industry or whatever. Yeah, I can comment on the one I read before I moved here for about 10 years. Yeah, we were a little bit differently started because we had a couple of different, we had a very different model and that was distributed across all the Monterey Bay. So we had about six institutions. involves one of the successes and recruiting students was one we leveraged our. Our network through SACNAS to engage a lot of HSI tribal colleges, big Islander serving institution like we said, well, I think we still do we have a little pulse of students that apply from Guam every year as well as HBCUs. But part of what work is that we had a because we have so many institution type so many faculty there are the big diversity of disciplines for students to choose from so we're actually really successful with getting. Computer science students from community colleges because they'd often work with the ocean engineering folks at a barry or the naval postgraduate school. In fact, a number of them are either in ocean engineering grad programs or they're working, you know, as you know, researchers. At this point, the tracking of them was a bit more challenging. So, if this was innovative at the time, I think it's innovative more we were using and we're using Facebook back and it was. Now, it's considered novel because actually how we recruited students, we were actually using that as their recruitment tool.  In the platform, we always had a grad student assistant would tell us what the hottest, you know, social media trend was and we go to that and so our students are on that. We keep engagement on the face with Facebook platform. It's the families because they will actually send us updates through there. You know, when we would sort of do highlights on alumni, they would say, oh, by the way, you know, they're doing this now right that it's actually you wind up having to use a lot of different. Platform, you know, email, we have an alumni group. You know, we actually ran a fall program for REU because that was one of the things we had noted. It's students would leave an REU then disengage. They're going to go back to their home institution. So we kept this online platform that we would engage with them through the fall to help them prep to go to their first conference. You know, we would do stuff in the spring to help them get ready for grad school, you know, and there are a number of them in grad school. I know one just finished up at Woods Hole, but not too long ago. I think one, our first PhD got their PhD about 2 years ago that were the EPA. So we keep track of them. And so, but we wind up having to use a lot of different platforms that actually required a lot of staffing and that was the other key part. Our program was unusual that we had a full-time education leave and administrative assistant and a full-time graduate student and most REUs don't have that. I think that's the other thing to consider here. It's not just one person. There was like a full staff that was doing this part of their full-time job. Yeah, just as a quick follow-up, any thoughts on the different models? Because I've always been impressed with SOARS at UCAR because they bring the students back year after year and they seem to have so much confidence when you visit them and so on compared to perhaps a program that OCE demands, which is that they only come for one summer. Yeah, I want to, I think your point about SOARS is a really strong one. Not only the kind of continuity of relationship, but also the specific mentoring model that they use where they have multiple mentors, writing mentor, you know, for example, professional development mentors, mentors in many different areas. So I think that the care that's been taken to develop that has meant that it is, it's known to, and they also, the tracking data, it's a really effective program. I think PAP, which I'll put a link to, and here is also known to be an incredibly effective program also with respect to the tracking, and that is one that, you know, is in the Ocean Sciences. Corey's programs I think are ones to draw on as well for best practices. Our center, we support people coming back also for multiple years, and we've seen, though our numbers are quite small, we certainly have seen that that has been really effective, so I'm glad that Jim, you brought that up. But I did put into the chat earlier a link to a special issue that Corey and others, Lisa White and others have edited, where there are different kind of case studies that are presented. And I think actually you'll, you know, some of the case studies that are being presented are actually from people who are running REU type programs. Of course their effectiveness is going to vary a lot depending on the structure and also there's a lot of creativity and variation in structure, structure, so some of the papers and especially she'll actually have some really nice examples. Is that the one in oceanography? Is that the one? Yeah, okay. Terrific. So I'm going to move on to Shini. Shini, did you want to ask a question? I feel like there's been a lot of chat conversation about this, so it's okay. Perfect. Leila, did you want to ask your question? Yes, I kind of keep asking or finding a way to ask the same question. We've talked about the peer review process and I really appreciate the thoughts that you all have that, you know, peer review is not going to fix it. But I think that some of the committee is looking for some thoughts on how we can shift the social science currency from the gold standard of NSF funding to the outcomes of science, especially when that gold standard is built into the peer review. Comments? Maybe we've exhausted the topic. No, I mean, I think that's something that NSF would want to hear from the committee because we are currently, I hate to keep using the word constrained, but we are by our merit review. But that doesn't mean that at the program director level. How panels are constructed and administered and managed, et cetera. There's a lot of flexibility there. So to hear from the committee about, hey, at that grant, at that level of granularity. What can be done in that review part of the whole system. That can loosen a lot of the traditional ways that we, and Christine was hinting at this, that we review, that we apply our merit review and still, as you mentioned, keep it as the gold standard. And I don't think there's any danger of adjusting what needs to be adjusted and losing any credibility. I mean, I don't see any problem with that. But this gets back to some of the attitudes that some of my esteemed panelists have mentioned that some people do think that, that if you start to tamper with the traditions that somehow the rigor is going to be diluted. And that's, you know, that that's just a prevailing attitude out there that also needs to be dealt with. So can I follow up question to the door for the second question. Is there are there examples that could be pulled out of deficit minded language that is showing up in reviews. Is that is that one way to, and I know it's tricky business because peer reviews are confidential. But can we elevate some examples or maybe point the committee to some literature where we can help shape our recommendation. I have a quick comment on that which is that the, you know, NSF has each division has these committee committee of visitors that come in every two or three years or four years to look at the. And their job is to look at the review process and they write a report and. So there is some information I don't think they're particularly thorough but the based on what I've read but it there are there are a large number of these reports floating around book for ocean science. The most recent one is 2023 that that do bring in a group of experts and they look at the review process and make comments and including on everything from whether you really career scientists are discriminated against or whether there's what it looks like in terms of diversity about another ways for those who are funded versus those who are not. Christine, did you have something to add. Yes, thank you. I sincerely appreciate this question from the committee and I wish I had you know the magical answer of what recommendations you all should offer. The only thing that comes to my mind about one way to frame this is. So the NSF is federally mandated to, you know, fund basic research right, but it is also the only stem funding agency with the federal mandate to train the next generation of scientists and engineers in the United States. And when we talk about NSF funding, the best science for the, you know, for the good of, you know, the nation and whatnot. I think we should also consider that we need NSF also needs to fulfill that other piece of its federal mandate right to train the next generation of scientists. And that could be further emphasized in this merit review process where when we are choosing the best science to fund, recognizing that given the current demographics of stem and who are the reviewers, the best science that current scientists might think is best may not actually reflect what is truly, you know, best for for the public good, such that everyone, regardless of background and identity is benefiting from our work. So we could further emphasize that important aspect of the NSF's job, right, and maybe make that more clear in the merit review process that that is also part of what we should be considering as the best science that needs to be funded at this time. So food for thought. Thank you Christine. Thank you all for your really thoughtful comments. My point of view, and my experience over the last several months in particular is under assault. And I don't think that's going to get better. This question I'm hoping is really for those primarily who work with NSF will work at. But as we consider, you know, our recommendations. What are the ways in which we can support you and making the case for the continued efforts to diversify our ocean sciences community. And I'm really hoping you might have some specific examples of pitfalls that you've seen from your point of view. Language or ideas that that tend to be less effective than others. And this is too much to ask that I understand, but I think it's an important point because we are really our partners. Thank you. Brendan fighting to get us started. Excellent question and an unfortunate one. An example of a pitfall. That are going to impact institutions, researchers, students and science overall is that public institutions in states with anti policies. Theoretically will not be able to submit proposals to particular grants. From funding agencies, because their state policy says no, and the federal we are hands off. We're not going to change our priorities in the programs. Under this current administration and that's another elephant in the room because November is. So what you know where this is impacting state institutions and it could. Theoretically those researchers there, those, those students, et cetera, and. And not just for the scientific enterprise, but for the, the building of the infrastructure of emerging research institutions in those states that are public. Because of the overhead that comes along with a grant. You know, they so. Is this going to end up causing a greater divide in the academic haves and have nots. Because the score states happen to be the states where these policies, and you know, you look at the maps, right? So that's, it's a, it's a huge issue. And what I think. One thing I think is needed is. More interaction with this is this is a weird statement more interaction with our business sector colleagues. And marketing and branding. And academics do it all the time, but anytime you and I don't want to bra brush. I apologize for saying that the academics that I often. Engage with. They don't even like to use those terms. But they do it all the time on their websites and when they're when they're at meetings, recruiting students and all that kind of stuff. What do we do as far as D I because I agree with you 100% it's under attack and it's. It's been looped in with all kinds of other kind of. Weird ideologies and things of that nature, but how do we rebrand retool and refocus ourselves that this work of broader impacts or brought in participation continues. A political sense. So, you know, it's not a political thing. How do we find the value. For anyone and what it is that broadening participation brings to the whole enterprise and to the planet. That is outside of ideologies and to help in a self. Figure that out. Maybe that's. I don't know how do we bolster our social behavior and economics director it. Right that director it as opposed to not as opposed to, but in addition to also keeping the discovery science in the core research directorates. Where it is or even higher, what you know, but we certainly would love guidance and ideas on that. Thank you, Brendan. I'm actually going to use this. I don't need to speak on the job, but I come from a university that's directly impacted by this. So I'm at the University of Texas at Austin. And I think it's important for people to understand what those laws, regardless of what you think about them. And I completely understand what they actually said. So there, at least in Texas, and I can't speak for any other state, but I know that this is one of the ones that people point to. The law does not prohibit you from getting a grant to to look at diversity initiatives. Nothing that we've talked about here is expressly forbidden in that long, Texas at least. So I think what's really important when you think about these things is not to be hindered by by what you think the law says to make sure you know what the law says so that there's this tendency I think for people to be be scared of the law. And think that they can't do things that they really can do and that I know for for sure the University of Texas would support and does support diversity research. Regardless of the Texas law, which states two things by the way it states that there can be no consideration of diversity and hiring and it says that the university cannot have mandatory diversity training. Or diversity department, but it really states nothing about diversity research. At the university so I just want to make that clear that people should understand what the laws and not not prohibit yourself because when this understanding. I'm not sure about a really good point that I think people should understand. I think that the conditions and when the step my understanding is way better than I do the conditions of the grant might supersede that and that sense for example for students. But there are diversity initiatives that, you know, by the University is supporting for students that are only for certain segments of students and that's perfectly acceptable under the Texas law. They don't touch students to I just want to chime in here. We have similar considerations in the state of Mississippi, but when you I will echo everything that Marcia said when you look at the law carefully and really understand that there are the places to work in and most of these applied to staff, not even the faculty and not students. Because my understanding of the Florida law is that it applies in recent state funds, not producing federal funds. I think that there's all of us are a little bit different. Yeah. All right, so I'm going to bring us back to whether you have a follow up comment or it's another question. I have kind of a follow up comment that maybe. I want to point us in a certain direction. So some of the things that I'm hearing, you know, we're all followed with the data that Christine showed us right and we talked about the evaluation process and Christine, thank you for all the insights you brought about what NIH tried. That's actually information that I had not heard before. So I would I would love to hear where I can get my hands on that and we'll begin a little bit more. But I think one of the things that I'm hearing in this conversation about panel reviews and how the system sort of recreating itself is this idea that we have to find a way to align our stated values with our evaluation system. Right. And how do we do that? And clearly, Christine, you talked about how an age has been trying that unsuccessfully. I guess the one analogy I will draw on is the analogy of hiring practices. I think for the last 20 years in academia, we've really dug into our hiring practices. And there's been a number of things that people have tried, some of which did not work. But there are interventions that do work and that essentially make sure that the process is such that the evaluation criteria are aligned more closely to our stated values. And certainly in my institution, I've seen a huge shift through the use of these best practices in who we bring in. I mean, without a doubt, I know that we carried out searches over the last few years that clearly would have produced a different outcome 10 years ago than they did today. And I'm very proud of that. So, and I know that this is the case at other institutions as well. So what does it look like to do that in the proposal review realm or in the, not just in the review, but just the whole process, right? And so I guess I want to, I still want to challenge us to keep thinking about ways in which the whole structure can be altered to align our stated values with the evaluation system we're using actually. And Kristi had some ideas, right? What about elevating this notion of training the next generation? That could be one way of changing the rubric so that different proposals will rise to the surface. Just like I think we have refined the rubric for hiring that are now resulting in, at my institution, huge changes in the number of students from diverse backgrounds from graduate school and also changes in the faculty. So, I guess I would love to hear some thoughts that there was still time, though I also yield to Mona, since I know you might want to roll about things with the point. Let's see if folks have any comments related to what you guys just said. Yeah, wanting to think about you, you talked about the composition of your faculty. You can start to also think about the composition of the review panels themselves. You know, because even if you train, I mean, you can train a younger generation, but if they're being trained by that generation that's resistant to change, it might be hard to get through to them. You know, and I think the comments come out about some of the science that comes out of certain groups that it has more societal relevance and basic science application. So are you bringing in folks from institutions on those panels that actually come from those type of research backgrounds?  We don't think about the place where, oh, that's where I go to actually learn how to do community science the right way. Right. Oh, that's where that person's doing, you know, the type of research that way because they're limited by their budget. So they've had to do something different. That's different. So are you bringing those types of people right onto your panel that can inform the research? Yeah, I don't know. I've been asked to be on panel that are seeing where things like the big question about the infrastructure and facilities can become a thing. Well, they're too small. They're not going to do that. Right. Can somebody advocate for that? Well, if you give them the money to buy the facilities, then they can do the research. They can literally have the academic background to engage in it. You know, some of the social aspects, it's not unusual for folks who come from basic science background, like, I don't understand why we would fund this. If there's someone on that panel that can advocate, the reason that this work is going to be transformative because it impacts this community and that community that might actually be leading on the forefront of climate change issues. Right. You need those types of folks in there. In other words, you need a different type of reviewer that you probably have to think about. You know, having a panel, because you can do a lot of training. You know, I'm faculty member. We did a lot of faculty training, you know, my HR direction, like, they're going to say this, but the moment those applications got to the panel, like, they threw out that training and they looked for people who resonated with their pet issues. Right. And so you want to put in very non diverse, you know, candidate polls afterwards. Training can help, but you know, people have, you have this tendency to go back to the things that they're familiar with and comfortable with. And so I think in some sense you have to bring in these disruptor types. Right onto these review panels, we're going to take a look at these, these types of applications and proposals in ways that maybe not historically, in ways that these certain proposals haven't historically been reviewed. I also want to highlight the importance of looking at outcomes at NSF and noting, and of the importance of program officers themselves, ensuring that we have program officers that are broad representation that they're looking at the data is what's coming out of their programs, you know, what's coming out of their programs and that there are opportunities for, you know, accountability and discussion really within federal agencies because at the end of the day, the their, you know, people just like, like all of us right and so if NSF has a strong commitment to this, which it states it does it's built into the mission of this than ensuring that actually the processes within the agency at every level are reflecting that is key. And I think that the framings around workforce development, you know, ensuring it's r