At Stony Brook University’s Southampton Marine Sciences Center, a group of more than 25 graduate students participated in the Ocean Acoustics Summer in School program (OASIS), an intensive weeklong training aimed at providing hands-on experience in underwater acoustics. The event, held this summer, moved participants out of computer labs and into open water to give them practical exposure.
“This is often the first time students get to actually design, deploy and test acoustic equipment themselves,” said Andrew Singer, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “It’s very different from just working with files on a computer.”
The OASIS program is funded by the U.S. Navy and builds upon a boot camp model introduced last year. Its goal is to encourage interest in ocean acoustics among students while offering them opportunities to gather and analyze data directly from fieldwork settings.
Faculty members from institutions including UMass Dartmouth, George Mason University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, MIT, and Stony Brook University joined the effort. To prepare for the program, students viewed instructional videos made by faculty that covered topics such as hydrophone calibration and acoustic transducer design.
John Buck, Chancellor Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, noted: “The intellectual challenge of science combined with the physical challenges of working at sea is addictive — a certain kind of ‘action nerd’ personality gets hooked by these experiences.” He added that several students who attended last year’s camp returned this summer as teaching assistants.
During the initial phase in the lab, students learned how to calibrate hydrophones and transducers—devices comparable to microphones and speakers but used underwater. They worked in small teams rotating between calibration exercises and designing their own acoustic arrays equipped with multiple hydrophones to detect sound direction and distance.
As the week progressed, experiments shifted outdoors. Students tested their devices first in a large tank behind the station before deploying them off a dock. By Thursday they were on boats in Shinnecock Bay using their equipment to send and receive acoustic signals over distances exceeding one kilometer.
“The ocean is never still,” Singer said. “The boat’s moving, the water’s moving, and the data reflects that. It teaches students how much uncertainty there is in real measurements.”
For many graduate students involved in research programs elsewhere, direct fieldwork experience remains limited; most work primarily with datasets collected previously by advisors or other researchers. OASIS changes this approach by allowing participants to engage with all stages of research—from initial design through deployment and collection.
“You start to appreciate the effort behind every dataset, every sample, every measurement,” Singer said. “It changes how you see the work.”
“For me, the best part is working with the students as they get their hands wet,” Buck said. “Seeing them get excited as we approach the field test reminds me of how excited I was for my first ocean field work as a student.”
