Travel Support for Capacity Building: the Coastal And Ocean STEM Equity Alliance

Indiana University of Pennsylvania Research Institute will organize travel for approximately ten members of the Coastal and Ocean STEM Equity Alliance (COSEA) community-of-practice to attend the 2023 Aquatic Sciences Meeting of Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, (ASLO). Participants are from various institutions and states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Oregon, California, and the District of Columbia. COSEA aims to share information about issues of broadening participation in geosciences with a wider audience, to identify synergies, and to plan future projects to ensure that the Coastal and Ocean Sciences community is welcoming and thriving. ASLO23 will provide COSEA members with the opportunity to leverage the international community of aquatic science colleagues to reflect on the common issues and barriers to participation in coastal and ocean sciences. The COSEA community-of-practice is providing professional networking, promoting culture change across sectors, and fostering an accessible and inclusive space for dialogue and co-creation to shape the future of coastal and ocean sciences. COSEA supports the creation of a more diverse ocean and coastal workforce and closer engagement of scientists with all communities, especially coastal communities. The COSEA community-of-practice is focused on the overarching theme of equity, including issues of belonging, access, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion that are internationally important and that vary in character regionally for socio-cultural and historical reasons. COSEA can serve as a model community-of-practice for the aquatic sciences and the geoscience research enterprise more broadly. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.