BOAT: Bridge to Ocean Acoustics and Technology

Wu-Jung Lee (APL), Valentina Staneva (eScience Institute), and Todd Hefner (APL) were awarded a grant by the Office of Naval Research to democratize ocean acoustics education and research training. The new program BOAT: Bridge to Ocean Acoustics and Technology will develop open source education curriculum&tutorials and interactive training workshops that aim to prepare students from diverse backgrounds (biology, physics, electrical engineering, math, etc) for doing research in the interdisciplinary field of Ocean Acoustics. The modules will cover topics ranging from the scientific theory (physics) of scattering of the seabed and marine organisms, practical applications in oceanography and fisheries, to foundational topics in statistics, machine learning, and data science workflows which all are indispensable in navigating today’s data-rich science. They will be provided in the form of Jupyter Notebooks with interactive components, which can be adapted and ingested in various settings such as a university course or a summer workshop, and will serve as blueprints for building resources on other ocean acoustics topics. The goal is to build a community of practitioners who build and share knowledge on best practices on how to teach and train new scientists in the field. For those interested in learning more about the program and/or exploring potential collaborations, please, reach out to the PIs at emails: leewj@uw.edu, vms16@uw.edu, bth3@uw.edu.

Funding Agency: Office of Naval Research