Hands-On Ocean Acoustics Training Gives Students Real-World Experience

At Stony Brook University's Southampton Marine Sciences Center this summer, more than two dozen graduate students from across the country traded computer labs for open water.

The Ocean Acoustics Summer in School program (OASIS), is a weeklong intensive training designed to give young scientists practical experience in underwater acoustics.

"This is often the first time students get to actually design, deploy and test acoustic equipment themselves," Andrew Singer, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said. "It's very different from just working with files on a computer."

Funded by the U.S. Navy, OASIS builds on a boot camp model launched last year. Its mission was to spark student interest in ocean acoustics while providing rare hands-on opportunities to collect and analyze data in real-world settings.

The program, at the Stony Brook Southampton campus, drew about 25 students and five faculty members, including experts from UMass Dartmouth, George Mason University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, MIT, and Stony Brook University. To prepare, students watched instructional videos created by faculty on topics such as hydrophone calibration and acoustic transducer design.

"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," said John Buck, the Chancellor Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. "Several of the students from the 2024 camp returned this year to help as teaching assistants this summer."

The week began in the lab, where students learned how to calibrate hydrophones and transducers, the underwater equivalent of microphones and speakers. Small teams rotated between calibration exercises and designing their own acoustic arrays, structures equipped with multiple hydrophones to help detect the direction and distance of sound sources such as whale calls.

In the following days, the experiments moved outdoors. Students first tested their devices in a large tank behind the station, then deployed them off the dock. By Thursday, they were out on boats in Shinnecock Bay, sending and receiving acoustic signals across more than a kilometer of water.

"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, exposure to field experiments is limited. Typically, they work with pre-collected datasets handed down by advisors. OASIS disrupts that model by letting students experience the entire research process, from design and calibration to deployment and data 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."

- Angelina Livigni