January 2024 | Page 30

CityState : Q & A

storms , hurricanes , sea level rise ? What ’ s our timeline ?’ Other areas in IT [ are ] working with computer models that can improve prediction of weather just on a day-to-day basis as well as some of the intensifying storms as a result of climate change . More and more I see our graduate students recognize their connection to the world and their connection to the ocean and the Earth system , and they want to do something that makes an immediate impact .

Tell us more about the new research vessel , the Narragansett Dawn , scheduled to arrive in 2025 . Our current research vessel , Endeavor , she ’ s forty-eight years old and still very functional . We have a cruise requirement at GSO — to graduate , you have to do a research cruise . [ We ’ re ] working on making that a lot more accessible because that can be very exclusive for certain people who have physical challenges or otherwise . Our new ship will be completely ADA compliant . Whereas our current ship is powered by an old locomotive engine , the new one is this finely tuned IT computing device . The government is building three of them . One will be operated on the East Coast , which is the one that will be housed at the University of Rhode Island , one will be in the Gulf of Mexico and one will be on the West Coast . Their job will be to survey their regional waters . That whole area of the North and South Atlantic will be our domain to actually sample .

What was it like moving your life from D . C . to Rhode Island during the pandemic ? I signed my contract on March 5 , and who knew that two weeks later we were going to go full remote ? My husband and I had a son in the third grade . We had to sell a house , buy a house , and we were like , ‘ Forget it , we ’ re not going to sell a house , we ’ re not going to buy a house , we ’ re just going to rent a house .’ The other piece of this was that NASA launch windows for certain missions open up — if you ’ re lucky — every couple of weeks , every couple of months , some every couple of years . There were a number of missions that we were building in the Science Mission Directorate that had a launch window

that opened every seven years . That was one of the missions to Mars . And we had to figure out a way to keep people working when you couldn ’ t wear PPE in a clean room and you couldn ’ t bring hand sanitizer in and you had to keep the mission completely free of contaminants while also keeping people safe to work . Somehow we worked overtime trying to figure out — while we were all caregivers at home — how to keep those missions moving forward . I literally stopped working on a Friday at 5 o ’ clock , got in the car Saturday morning , drove to Rhode Island with my family , settled into our rental house on Sunday and showed up to work at 8 o ’ clock in the morning on Monday . It was crazy .

Hopefully you ’ ve had some time to settle in now . I ’ ll tell you this . I feel for all the people out there on the planet who are still trying to cope with the fallout from the pandemic , which isn ’ t at all behind us . It ’ s endemic now . I ’ m still trying to work with everybody on campus to find that work / life balance to bring physical and mental wellness back into our day to day .

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28 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JANUARY 2024