Message from the Director: Leadership Change for OOI

I am pleased to announce that Michael Kelly will be taking over as OOI Program Director in January 2015, following my retirement from Ocean Leadership at the end of December. Mike has served as OOI Senior Project Manager since March 2013, and has demonstrated his extensive leadership and management skills in that position. He is well-equipped to lead the project through the final months of the construction phase. In addition, his breadth and depth of operational experience with large networked systems makes him uniquely qualified to serve as Observatory Director as the OOI enters the operational phase in 2015.

It has been a distinct honor and privilege for me to serve as OOI Program Director for the past six years. I am deeply grateful for the commitment, extraordinary skills, and many extra hours of work invested by members of the OOI team to overcome the considerable challenges faced during construction and to stay on track to design, build, and deploy the networked system of OOI instruments and platforms. The ocean sciences research community, policy makers, educators, students, and society at large will benefit from all that has been accomplished by the OOI project team, with an unprecedented range of data flowing from the air-sea interface to the seafloor through a network of moored, mobile, and seafloor instrumentation. It is both exciting and rewarding to anticipate the many ways in which this infrastructure, and the core data emerging from it, will be used and leveraged to advance ocean science, ocean policy, and a broader societal understanding of the ocean’s role within global processes.

Sincerely,

Tim Cowles