Program Operations Specialist: Project Administrator

CICOES has an outstanding opportunity for Program Operations Specialist to join their team

The University of Washington (UW) is proud to be one of the Nation’s premier educational and research institutions. Our people are the most important asset in our pursuit of achieving excellence in education, research, and community service. UW is in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, with a dynamic, multicultural community of 3.7 million people and a range of natural environments from mountains to ocean.

The UW is a community of 80,000 students, faculty and staff including 25% first-generation college students, over 25% Pell Grant students and faculty from over 70 countries. The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) has existed since 1977 for the purpose of fostering research collaboration between UW and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). CICOES’s research is at the forefront of investigations on climate change, ocean acidification, fisheries assessments, and tsunami forecasting.

Reporting to Dr. Jonathan Sharp, CICOES is seeking a Program Operations Specialist to join the Global Observations of Biogeochemistry and Ocean Physics (GOBOP) Group at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL). Based out of PMEL, this role involves leading the administration and management of PMEL’s Adopt-a-Float outreach program. There are more than 4,500 robotic profiling floats distributed throughout the global oceans thanks to the international (30 contributing nations) Argo research program that strives to understand the ocean’s role in global climate.

These floats vertically sample the ocean interior from ~2,000 m (or 6,000 m) depth to the sea surface every 10 days, sending their data to shore via satellite while at the sea surface. Argo data are vital for weather forecasting, climate predictions (e.g., El Niño), and scientific research on ocean variability and change. The PMEL GOBOP group deploys ~80 floats annually, many of which are “adopted” by regional high school classrooms.

Students from these classrooms get to name their adopted float and engage with our team to learn about ocean concepts, explore data from floats in distant seas, and discover career paths in ocean science. The Program Operations Specialist will lead and manage PMEL’s Adopt-a-Float outreach program, increasing its impact by growing the number of schools we engage with and potentially expanding the program to include regional community colleges.

Specifically, the Program Operations Specialist will be responsible for engaging new potential schools and outreach partners, managing the budget allocated for the program, and organizing and leading outreach events. Other highly successful implementations of Adopt-a-Float in France and California serve as examples of how this program can make an impact. In addition to managing the Adopt-a-Float outreach program, this role will provide essential support to the PMEL GOBOP team by assisting with logistics, reporting, and external communications, to further the Argo mission.

• Manage the PMEL Adopt-a-Float Outreach Program (50%):
  Grow, manage, and administer the PMEL Adopt-a-Float Outreach Program by organizing and optimizing existing outreach content and materials, coordinating outreach events with teachers from regional high schools, and developing tools to track the success of outreach engagements, and managing the budget allocated to the program. This role will involve organizing approximately quarterly school visits that will be carried out by members of the GOBOP team in collaboration with colleagues and students at PMEL and UW.
• Support Group Logistics (25%):
  Ass…