‘Ocean memory’ the focus of cross-disciplinary effort by UW’s Jody Deming

Ocean Wave — The new grant will fund activities around the theme of ocean memory, each led by participants from earlier NAKFI workshops. Deming is among the first group of leaders that also includes two artists, a marine biologist and cellist, and a cognitive scientist.

The vast oceans of our planet still hold many unsolved questions. Uncovering some of their mysteries has been a decades-long focus for University of Washington oceanography professor Jody Deming.

This fall, Deming embarks on a very different type of ocean exploration. A $500,000 grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, or NAKFI, will allow her and a group representing a wide variety of disciplines in the sciences and the arts to look at the oceans in new ways.

The Ocean Memory Project was one of three selected this fall as the inaugural winners of the NAKFI Challenge Grants, a program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine with funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation. Deming is among a small group of leaders of the effort that will create events, distributed interactive spaces and grants for cross-disciplinary mentoring around the idea of ocean memory.