I loved seeing “real data” for the first time

You don’t have to love being on the water to be an oceanographer, but it definitely helps. Ever since I was little I’ve been on and around the water, as our family went sailing every summer. I became a sailing instructor in Friesland in the last year of high school. All this meant lots of exposure to weather forecasts and tidal atlases, so when it was time for me to choose a study after high school it was immediately clear that I wanted to do meteorology and oceanography. So off to the IMAU I went.

During my time at IMAU I was interested in both the air and the water. At the time, me and my year-mates were fascinated by tornados and we were the first group of IMAU students to go to the University of Oklahoma for six months to follow classes there and possibly a tornado or two. It turned out to be a bad year for tornados, but we had a great time hunting storms and we learned a lot about meteorology and life abroad.

When we got back in Utrecht it was time to choose a master thesis project. There was an announcement for students to participate in a NIOZ research cruise to the Irminger Sea. I subscribed, joined and loved seeing “real data” for the first time and putting into practice what I had learned. Yes, it means getting seasick and getting up at early hours (on board, work goes on 24 hours a day in shifts), but that is totally worth it. You feel like an explorer, seeing things few people get to see. This motivated me to do my MSc thesis at NIOZ with Hendrik van Aken, followed by a PhD project which took me back to sea nearly every year.

Following my PhD I managed to get a postdoc scholarship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the USA, where I started in 2011. Woods Hole is a beautiful little village by the ocean in Massachusetts. The physical oceanography department there is quite large, with over 20 permanent scientists, many of them sea-going. It was great to be immersed into such a group and to learn from the multitude of scientists and visiting scholars there. I managed to start my own research project with an National Science Foundation grant and through my supervisor, Amy Bower, I also got involved into MPOWIR (Mentoring Physical Oceanography Women to Increase Retention). MPOWIR tries to support early career female researchers in physical oceanography in hopes of eventually getting more balance between genders at the senior levels. This was a great resource and I tried to pay this forward by joining the organizing committee of SWMS (Society for Women in Marine Science). We organized several symposia with panel discussions at WHOI and MIT, highlighting research by female scientists. These days, I still try to make people aware of these issues, for instance by going to high schools, hoping to serve as a role model for girls interested in science.

After three years at WHOI I moved into two new positions, partly as a research scientist with Susan Lozier at Duke University and partly as a postdoc with Laura de Steur at NIOZ. Both were in the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Project (OSNAP), in which we directly observe transport of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Why two positions? Well, I had already accepted the position at Duke when a littler later Laura asked me to come back to NIOZ to work in OSNAP on the Irminger Sea. Since I had maintained a long-distance relationship in the previous three years it seemed like a good solution at the time. But moving between Durham, North Carolina, and the Netherlands every three months also proved to be very tiring. Still, I’m glad OSNAP allowed me to do this.

In 2017, this split life finally ended when I got a tenure track position at NIOZ. I moved back to Texel and started my own research group in the Ocean Systems department. I am now a principal investigator in OSNAP myself and, together with international colleagues, design future ocean circulation observing systems. I’m also involved in the design of the new Dutch ocean research vessel and the purchase of new equipment at NIOZ. I find outreach important and try to inform both the public and policymakers about the importance of the ocean (and ocean observations) in our climate system. Adding up all my cruise-time, I must have spent several years at sea by now, and at least as much on sailboats as an instructor, which I still do regularly, trying to unwind from work. The water fascinates me and we’ll never be truly done studying it.

Femke de Jong