The Open Ocean Seminar Series was a curated speaker series focusing on new technologies and capacity building approaches for deep sea exploration. Seminars were held biweekly in the spring of 2019 and spring, summer, and fall of 2020. The switch to virtual seminars on Zoom in 2020, due to COVID-19, was overwhelmingly successful with 530 attendees for our 7 spring online seminars, which continued through the summer and fall of 2020.

Open Ocean Seminar speakers garnered an audience looking for optimistic solutions for issues and challenges pertaining to ocean exploration, various domains of ocean sciences, diversity and inclusion in ocean research and water-based sports, and ocean conservation. We intentionally included artists, journalists, documentarians, and eco-entrepreneurs as speakers celebrating and acknowledging their ability to evoke change in the public mindset, where sparks of curiosity and the urgency of environmental concern can activate a larger body of ocean stewards. Through diverse speakers and a widening pool of audience members we aimed to inspire, offer resources, connections, and trigger new ideas within our growing community.

Spring 2019 Seminars

• 19 Feb: Finding Your ‘North Star’: Principles for Value-Driven Design
  Alexis Hope, MIT Media Lab

• 25 Feb: Laser-based Sensing in Aqueous Environments
  Dr. Anna Michel (SB,SM,PhD), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

• 11 Mar: Painting the Deep
  Lily Simonson, Artist

• 18 Mar: Sea For Yourself: How Deep Sea Processes Affect your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness
  Dr. Peter Girguis, Harvard University

• 29 Apr: Meshing Remote and Co-located Work: Human-technology Relationships in Space and Ocean Exploration
  Dr. Zara Mirmalek, Harvard University

• 6 May: Open Ocean UROP Project Reports
  Brian Wang & Rogger Montes, MIT

• 30 May: SeeBoat: In situ Water Quality Displays for Communities
  Laura Perovich, MIT Media Lab

Spring 2019 MLTalks

The Lowdown on the High Seas: What We Don’t Know About the Oceans can Kill Us
MLTalks with Wendy Schmidt, hosted by Katy Croff Bell. 8 May 2019.

We are standing on the edge of a frontier in terms of our ability to see, understand, and share information about the oceans. —Wendy Schmidt 

Spring 2020 Seminars

• 9 Mar: David Robinson, Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources

• 23 Mar: Dr. Randi Rotjan, Boston University

• 6 Apr: AI Approaches to Solve Pressing Marine Science Challenges
  Christin Khan, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center

• 20 Apr: Performing your Journalism
  Sonali Prasad, MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow

• 4 May: Exploration via Space and Sea
  Dr. Dava Newman, MIT Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and MIT Portugal Program

• 18 May: Building an Ocean of Hope
  Elizabeth Stephenson, New England Aquarium

• 27 May: Living and Working Underwater
  Dr. Grace Young (MIT-2OE), X

• 1 Jun: The Slave Wrecks Project
  Tara Roberts, National Geographic Fellow

Summer 2020 Seminars

• 15 Jun: Low-cost, DIY Techniques for Deep-sea Exploration
  Dr. Brennan Phillips, University of Rhode Island

• 29 Jun: Kupu: Empowering the Next Generation of Conservation Leaders
  John T. Leong, KUPU

• 13 Jul: Analog Research Programs to Design & Develop Mission Elements for the Human Scientific Exploration of the Moon, Deep Space and Mars
  Dr. Darlene Lim, NASA Ames

• 28 Jul: Impacts of Deep Sea Mining Sediment Plumes
  Dr. Thomas Peacock, MIT Mechanical Engineering

• 10 Aug: Overtourism is Bad––Undertourism is Worse
  Sven-Olof Lindblad, Lindblad Expeditions

Fall 2020 Seminars

• 28 Sep: Saving Lives and Creating Opportunities in Diverse Communities through Water Safety and STEM
  Miriam Lynch, Diversity in Aquatics

• 13 Oct: Building Guardians of the Ocean
  Schannel van Dijken, Conservation International, Samoa Voyaging Society, & National Geographic Explorer

• 26 Oct: Equity Through Access: Mitigating Obstacles for Underrepresented Scholars in STEM
  Catalina Martinez, NOAA

• 9 Nov: Co-producing Science from a Seychelles Perspective
  Sheena Talma, Project Nekton

• 23 Nov: Building Local Capacity and Capability for an Equitable Blue Economy
  Veta Wade, Fish N’ Fins Montserrat,

• 7 Dec: Revolutionizing Ocean Data
  Dr. Annie Brett, University of Florida’s Levin School of Law