March 2019 OES Beacon

The New OES Vice-President for OCEANS

John Watson, New Vice President for OCEANS

Hello to you all. I’d like to introduce myself to you as the Oceanic Engineering Society’s newly appointed Vice-President for OCEANS (VPO). I will serve a two-year term from 1st January 2019.

As many of you will know, the VPO is a cornerstone position in the OES management structure for the OCEANS conferences. The VPO provides a link between the OCEANS management structure, the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) for the conference and the various committees responsible for promoting and running OCEANS. My role (in conjunction with my counterpart in MTS with whom we co-sponsor OCEANS) is to ensure that any OCEANS conference develops smoothly and efficiently from initial identification of potential locations to award of the event through to the ultimate delivery of a successful conference itself.

To ultimately deliver an OCEANS conference, reliable and efficient communication is needed between the OCEANS Steering Committee and the two operational committees, the JOINT OCEANS ADMINSTRATIVE BOARD (JOAB) and the RECONAISSANCE Committee (RECON), charged with selecting and delivering the conference. These committees comprise members of both OES and MTS and are co-Chaired by each. One of my first duties was to nominate members for election to represent OES and I took this opportunity to introduce some new blood, and maybe some new inspiration, into the teams. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the past members for their valuable contributions to JOAB and RECON over many years.

The OES members, who have all been approved to serve three-year terms, are:

JOAB—Bill Kirkwood (Co-Chair); Brian Horsburgh, Venu Palliyal, Chris Whitt and Rene Garello
RECON—Brian Horsburgh (Co-Chair), Bob Wernli, Fausto Ferreira, Lian Lian, Jim Barbera and Ken Tagaki
These OES members are matched by their counterparts in MTS.
In addition, Shyam Madhusudhana has been approved as the OES co-Chair of the prestigious Student Poster Competition.

Finally, the next two OCEANS Conference and Expositions are to be held in Marseille in June and Seattle in October of this year. Thanks to my predecessor as VPO, Diane DiMassa, these conferences are well advanced in their preparations and are promising to be amongst the best in the series, and I hope to see some of you there.