Oceanography | September 2022
4. Implement a waiting period (three
years or more) before awarding TOS
honors to people who have received
similar awards from TOS or other
societies. This action would increase
the chances of diversifying the pool of
people who are selected for honors.
5. Expand the number of named med-
als to reflect the diversity of those who
have made life-long contributions to
ocean science, conservation, educa-
tion, and access. These medals may
be named after individuals from com-
munities that have been historically or
currently targeted by or excluded from
academic circles in developed coun-
tries. If so, TOS must first build rela-
tionships with these communities and
bestow awards jointly. It is of utmost
importance that new awards have sim-
ilar prestige as existing ones.
6. To mitigate implicit bias, commit to an
ongoing review of the Honors process
every three to five years. TOS should
regularly reevaluate procedures, such
as award publicity, nomination pack-
age guidelines, award criteria, and
nomination and selection commit-
tee
procedures,
against
evolving
best practices. TOS should also pro-
mote implicit bias training for mem-
bers of the Nomination and Selection
Committees and make these types of
training programs a benefit of TOS
membership. TOS may consider offer-
ing this training openly and for broad
community participation, for even
greater impact on advancing diversity
and inclusion in ocean science.
Implementing solutions that will
enable TOS to recognize the many people
who help advance science, education, and
society is not easy. For example, those
from less-resourced countries encoun-
ter many barriers in developing a career
in marine science (Osborne et al., 2022).
The broader TOS community can help
identify and participate in a process to
achieve changes in the honors nominat-
ing and selection process that will result
in positive outcomes for the Society, its
membership, and our individual net-
works. We encourage everyone to nom-
inate role models in our networks and to
volunteer for TOS committees. We invite
you to work with The Oceanography
Society’s JEDI Committee to improve the
awards process to recognize individuals,
groups, and activities anywhere and at all
scales. Please send any ideas or feedback
to JEDIcochair@tos.org. In doing so, you
will help move us closer to the ideals we
hold as a Society.
REFERENCES
Ali, H.N., S.L. Sheffield, J.E. Bauer, R.P. Caballero-
Gill, N.M. Gasparini, J. Libarkin, K.K. Gonzales,
J. Willenbring, E. Amir-Lin, J. Cisneros, and
D. Desai. 2021. An actionable anti-racism
plan for geoscience organizations. Nature
Communications 12:3794, https://doi.org/10.1038/
s41467-021-23936-w.
Holmes, M.A., L. Myles, and B. Schneider. 2020.
Diversity and equality in honours and awards pro-
grams— Steps towards a fair representation of
membership. Advances in Geosciences 53:41–51,
https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-53-41-2020.
Legg, S., C. Wang, E. Kappel, and L. Thompson. 2022.
Gender equity in oceanography. Annual Review
of Marine Science 15, https://doi.org/10.1146/
annurev-marine-032322-100357.
Osborne, T., C. Pattiaratchi, and E. Meyer-Gutbrod.
2022. Limited opportunities and numerous barri-
ers to ocean science careers in under-resourced
nations. Oceanography, https://doi.org/10.5670/
oceanog.2022.117.
AUTHORS
Frank Muller-Karger (carib@usf.edu) is Professor,
College of Marine Science, University of South
Florida, St. Petersburg, FL, USA. EeShan
Bhatt is Postdoctoral Investigator, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA.
Erin Meyer-Gutbrod is Assistant Professor, University
of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.
ARTICLE CITATION
Muller-Karger, F., E. Bhatt, and E. Meyer-Gutbrod.
2022. Broadening participation in TOS
through honors nominations and awards.
Oceanography 35(2):4–5, https://doi.org/10.5670/
oceanog.2022.216.
COPYRIGHT & USAGE
This is an open access article made available under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or
format as long as users cite the materials appropri-
ately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license,
and indicate the changes that were made to the
original content.
In this Oceanography section, contributing
authors share all of the relevant information
on a homemade sensor or instrument so that
others can build, or build upon, it. The short
articles also showcase how this technology
was used successfully in the field.
Call for Contributions
Oceanography guest editors Melissa Omand
and Emmanuel Boss are seeking contribu-
tions to DIY Oceanography. Contributions
should include a list of the materials and
costs, instructions on how to build, and
any blueprints and codes (those could be
deposited elsewhere). See Oceanography’s
Author Guidelines page for detailed informa-
tion on submission requirements.
https://tos.org/oceanography/guidelines
See the Collection
Go to the DIY Oceanography web page to
view the complete collection of articles.
• pySAS: Autonomous Solar Tracking
System for Surface Water Radiometric
Measurements
• An Optical Imaging System for Capturing
Images in Low-Light Aquatic Habitats
Using Only Ambient Light
• A Simple and Inexpensive Method
for Manipulating Dissolved Oxygen in
the Lab
• The Pressure of In Situ Gases Instrument
(PIGI) for Autonomous Shipboard
Measurement of Dissolved O2 and N2 in
Surface Ocean Waters
• Inlinino: A Modular Software Data Logger
for Oceanography
https://tos.org/diy-oceanography
Oceanography | September 2022