FROM THE TOS PRESIDENT

Paula Bontempi

Hello all!

I hope everyone is well. It’s been a fantastic month of TOS engagement with student and early career members—our inspirational leaders in science, engineering, education, and beyond.

TOS has a strategic plan objective to “develop policy for science and science for policy.” Science is influenced by institutional and respective national policies that guide and impact how scientists work, progress through their careers, receive professional recognition, compete for funding, and disseminate their results. We refer to this as “Policy for Science.” Scientific data, analysis, interpretation, and translations are critically important to inform sound public policy decisions, which we refer to as “Science for Policy.” As such, TOS seeks to support clarity in policies and procedures surrounding promotion, tenure, and career advancement, and to take the first steps in building a more robust approach to support our members who would like to use science for policy.

Over the last few months, TOS has been hard at work on the first goal under this objective: to catalyze pathways to equity in promotion and tenure. This has been broadened to include advancement and career progression.

TOS Council members serve on a working group (WG) focused on addressing that first TOS strategic plan goal. As part of these efforts, WG members developed and released a survey seeking input from the oceanography community on experiences with promotion, advancement, and career progression. The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the formal and informal processes that underpin promotion and tenure systems and pathways to career advancement, including perceptions of fairness, mentorship, flexibility, and overall well-being. The survey was open during October-November 2025 and received 215 responses. The plan is for a summary of the results from this survey to be published in Oceanography in the coming months. However, early analyses identified differences in satisfaction with promotion, advancement, and career progression, and in perceived barriers to promotion and advancement, across both gender and career stage. Those who identified as men and women reported similar levels of satisfaction with the promotion / tenure / advancement processes. However, men rated administrative guidance a little higher than women. Similarly, early-career colleagues felt better supported by their peers than senior faculty did. The majority of respondents were White heterosexual academics from North America, which precluded disaggregation of responses by race/ethnicity, sexuality, employment sector, or region. These results both support prior findings and point to the need for further conversations in the community about developing and implementing best practices to achieve equity in promotion, tenure, advancement, and career progression practices across the ocean sciences internationally.

As such, TOS encourages all members and the community to join an upcoming TOS Webinar and virtual panel discussion on 2 December: “Demystifying Promotion, Advancement, and Career Progression: Ideas for the Future.” The panel will be composed of mid- and senior-career TOS member scientists, educators, and engineers, moderated by an early-career scientist who will open a Question-and-Answer session regarding promotion, tenure, career advancement, and progression. Although panelists are from US-based institutions, we welcome international perspectives. Even if you did not respond to the survey and are not a TOS member, TOS wishes to hear your ideas regarding current promotion and advancement pillars that are sound, and how the international communities might build on this foundation with modern, new ideas. TOS encourages all members to attend regardless of field, employer, or career status. Details of the Webinar will be forthcoming in a future TOS announcement, but please mark your calendars for 2 December at 1 pm ET/6 pm UTC.

A big thank you goes to TOS Strategic Plan Working Group 1, TOS Council Members Eric Wade, Phoebe Lam, Alana Sherman, and Hilary Palevsky for their hard work on this survey and seminar.

See you all on 2 December for this second event in the Early Career Webinar Series!

Thoughts? [email protected]

Best wishes and thanks to all for being TOS members!

Paula

SHARE YOUR WORK

PUBLISH A FEATURE ARTICLE IN OCEANOGRAPHY

Oceanography‘s Feature Articles section provides an outlet for making significant advances in oceanography accessible to a broad readership. While these papers should be thought-provoking for professional oceanographers, they should also be written to engage educated non-experts. Feature articles can include review papers that summarize the current state of knowledge of a particular topic, synthesis papers that discuss new findings and how they significantly revise our thinking about a topic, and more traditional scientific research papers from across the full spectrum of oceanography and marine technology.

EARLY RELEASES

Greenland’s Freshwater Flow from Ice Sheet to AMOC: The Known and the Unknown
By K. Schulz et al.

OCEAN EDUCATION • Ocean Turbulence and Mixing Course: Student-Led Instruction and At-Sea Experimentation
By A. Rodriguez-Marin et al.

DIY OCEANOGRAPHY • Let’s Go Nuts! Development and Field Testing of Low-Cost Biodegradable Coconut Drifters…
By S. Long et al.