{"id":175280,"date":"2022-01-12T10:36:35","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T15:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/?p=175280"},"modified":"2022-06-30T10:56:35","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T14:56:35","slug":"oceanographer-adventurer-pioneer-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/publications\/aboard-gso\/oceanographer-adventurer-pioneer-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"Oceanographer, Adventurer, Pioneer."},"content":{"rendered":"

Oceanographer, Adventurer, Pioneer.<\/em><\/h1><\/div><\/div>
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Karen Wishner made a career of marine science, teaching and leadership.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

By Ellen Liberman<\/h4>\n
\n

In 1980, Karen Wishner rode into town on her Honda 400-4 Super Sport with a bedroll and her possessions bungeed on the back, like some outlaw biker science chick. Her new colleagues at the Graduate School of Oceanography were suitably impressed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\u201cI remember how very fascinated I was,\u201d recalls oceanography professor Candace Oviatt, who came to GSO in 1961 as one of the program\u2019s first graduate students. \u201cIt said that she was truly an individual and a sort of a pioneering person to have the gumption to come across the country on a motorcycle as a woman. Not many women did that\u2014not even now.\u201d<\/p>\n

This spring, she left. And after more than 40 years on the Bay Campus, Dr. Karen Wishner has kept her reputation for fearlessness and innovation\u2014but as a scientist, a teacher and a force for gender equality.<\/p>\n

\u201cGSO is bigger\u2014there\u2019s certainly more women and more sophisticated technology and programs, with remarkable facilities, but it still has the same spirit,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like Rhode Island\u2014the feel of a small town\u2014but with global reach and global expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her influence runs deep. Wishner\u2019s seminal work on ocean deoxygenation and zooplankton, begun in the 1980s, has taken on greater significance as climate change produces alarming drops in ocean oxygen levels. Her participation as co-principal investigator of a federal grant to hire more women faculty in engineering and the sciences paved the way for the current generation to advance along the tenure track in a different, more supportive culture. Karen Wishner\u2019s name is literally woven into deep sea taxonomy. Researchers who used her samples named two zoo-plankton species after her: Chaetognath Heterokrohnia wishnerae<\/em> and Copepod Parkius karenwishnerae.<\/em><\/p>\n

Blazing her own trail<\/h3>\n

Wishner is the daughter of a scientist. She grew up in Wynnewood, Penn., the oldest of two girls. Her father, Julius Wishner was a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in experimental psychopathology and schizophrenia. Her mother, Dorothy, was librarian at the Bryn Mawr Public library. The Wishners summered on the Jersey beaches and took family trips to Mexico and Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents were adventurous,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

(And so was Karen\u2014Wishner slept in the fields of Yasgur\u2019s farm during Woodstock in 1969; passed through Sturgis during the rally\u2014the nation\u2019s oldest and largest gathering of motorcyclists; and cracked up with other courtroom spectators as Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman described his plan to levitate the Pentagon.)<\/p>\n

A junior high school science teacher hooked her into biology, and in 1968, she matriculated at the University of Chicago for further study. In her sophomore year, her love of biology and adventure came together in one project that led to a lifelong investigation into lives of zooplankton. She joined marine biologist Franklin Barnwell\u2019s fiddler crab study in Costa Rica, collecting buckets of crabs from their tidal burrows to measure their activity cycles in the lab. Her appetite for marine invertebrate biology grew during summer classes at the University of Oregon at Coos Bay and at a summer job at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. After graduation in 1972, she intended to follow her then-boyfriend to California, where he was studying at Stanford. But she wound up about 500 miles to the south. Wishner had applied to the University of California\u2019s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and on a spring break, she checked it out.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time La Jolla was active with seagoing ships, and I became convinced that the ocean was an up-and-coming field. So, I decided to go to Scripps not knowing what I was going to do. I meandered into dealing with zooplankton.<\/p>\n

It was an era of paradigm-shifting discoveries in deep sea biology. By the time Wishner finished her Ph.D. on the biomass and ecology of the deep-sea benthopelagic plankton in 1979, she had developed and refined sampling techniques, becoming the first biologist to use a plankton net on the Deep Tow, an ocean geological survey system.<\/p>\n

A career and a life at GSO begins<\/h3>\n

As a newly minted Ph.D., Wishner interviewed for several open academic jobs that year and accepted an offer from GSO.<\/p>\n

\u201cURI seemed like the nicest\u2014an ideal place. I was excited when they offered the job. I was the first woman hired in an outside search for a tenure-track position. But I was really na\u00efve in those days. I didn\u2019t know how to order equipment or write a proposal. People were very helpful, but it was also very lonely. There was no cohort my own age, and a woman with a Ph.D. was an oddity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wishner focused on the work that had brought her to Rhode Island. Over the course of her career, she has spent 25 months at sea on 19 different ships, documenting the conditions that affect zooplankton in bodies of water off both coasts, from the Gulf of Maine to the Antarctic, from the top of the water column to its depths.<\/p>\n

\"\"These investigations have been documented and analyzed in more than five dozen papers, but Wishner has some favorites. In 1988, Wishner recalls observing the dramatic change and abundance in sea floor animals linked to ocean oxygen levels through the porthole of Alvin as she sampled different depths along the seamount Volcano 7, in the eastern tropical Pacific. She was an investigator on the SCOPEX project, a series of cruises in 1988 and 1989 off George\u2019s Bank, to study right whales feeding on dense swaths of copepods. And more recently, her 2017 expedition to the eastern tropical North Pacific Oxygen Minimum Zone, led to a paper, co-authored with GSO\u2019s Dawn Outram and Chris Roman, and Brad Siebel of the University of South Florida, on the effects of slight changes in ocean oxygen levels on zooplankton. It won the Deep Sea Biology Society\u2019s Paper of the Year award.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cIn all three of these cruises, we amplified each other\u2019s work, doing something that wasn\u2019t part of the proposal. We were always trying to go after other unique, unexpected things. Those were the fun cruises,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have other big expeditions, with 80 principal investigators gathering an incredible amount of data, but there is virtually no flexibility. You had your time slot and that\u2019s it. Those cruises are very intensive, but less serendipitous.\u201d<\/p>\n

A chief scientist or co-chief scientist on nine cruises, Wishner also inculcated her students in the rigors of shipboard science, the sampling protocols, and operating the equipment\u2014and found time for a little fun.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s got an adventurous part to her and it works with her science,\u201d says Outram, Wishner\u2019s long-time lab technician. \u201cSome of the things we tried nobody had ever tried before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of Wishner\u2019s fondest accomplishments were achieved on campus. She started an undergraduate course in deep-sea biology in 1994, at a time when the topic was considered only suitable for graduate work. In its 27th year, the course has attracted students with diverse academic interests, and inspired some to pursue marine-related careers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of those students will come up to me at some international meeting to tell me that they enjoyed my class,\u201d she says. \u201cI love that some went into deep-sea biology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assistant Professor Roxanne Beinart, who co-taught the course, says that the creative assignments that engage students in developing hypotheses and designing experiments under Wishner\u2019s personal guidance was one element of its success.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact it\u2019s at 8 a.m. and course enrollment fills up indicates how popular the class is. Karen is an excellent teacher and has put her heart into it,\u201d she says. \u201cCarrying it forward will be a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teacher, leader, mentor, friend<\/h3>\n

Carin Ashjian (Ph.D. 1991), a Woods Hole Oceanographic Senior Scientist and Biology Department Chair, says that Wishner was an inspiring advisor who taught her the ropes of science at sea.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was always there\u2014attentive without being overbearing, and it sets students up to be independent researchers. When I was at GSO, she assured me that you can do anything,\u201d says Ashjian, who now studies the distribution of zooplankton in polar regions. \u201cKaren was never afraid to say things. She was very strong, leading by example. Early in her career, there weren\u2019t very many women there, and they had to constantly prove themselves. It\u2019s a fascinating sea change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The university that Karen Wishner joined in 1980 had few women faculty, paid them significantly less than their male counterparts, and afforded them fewer resources. In the mid-1980s, she and other female faculty got a pay boost after the American Association of University Professors challenged inequities in URI\u2019s pay scale. In 2003, URI was chosen by the National Science Foundation\u2019s ADVANCE program to receive a $3.5 million grant to hire nine female science, engineering and math professors (four at GSO). All are now full professors.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a cohort with the same age and in the same situation\u2014that makes a big difference,\u201d Wishner, one of four co-principal investigators says. \u201cWe got the university to increase start-up funding for new faculty, which they used to pay almost nothing. The other thing that came from it was much more attention to work-life balance. We changed a lot of attitudes, and it was a major achievement besides my research.\u201d<\/p>\n

The science: first, last and always<\/h3>\n

\"\" And her research goes on. Even as she was busy cleaning out her office and her lab, Wishner was still trying to get one more big manuscript out about copepod distributions in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Oxygen Minimum Zone, and has several more in progress.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at the vertical distribution of zooplankton, they adjust based on the oxygen profile. They change their hibernation. There\u2019s a lot of species-specific response and that affects the ecosystem of the food web. There\u2019s a lot of complexity. It\u2019s not a simple story, but we think we can use it to predict the future consequences of ocean deoxygenation effects.\u201d<\/p>\n

In retirement, she\u2019ll be travelling to Long Island, where her husband, Tom Adams, works as an archivist for the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and perhaps head to some international destinations, when COVID is finally under control. She still wants to go back to sea. \u201cHopefully, I\u2019ll have a chance to participate on a modest scale. I know a lot about zooplankton.\u201d<\/p>\n

She laughs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m probably pretty helpful.\u201d
\n

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Karen Wishner made a career of marine science, teaching and leadership. By Ellen Liberman In 1980, Karen Wishner rode into town on her Honda 400-4 Super Sport with a bedroll and her possessions bungeed on the back, like some outlaw biker science chick. Her new colleagues at the Graduate School of Oceanography were suitably impressed. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,2956],"tags":[816,1480],"class_list":["post-175280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aboard-gso","category-fall-2021","tag-karen-wishner","tag-plankton"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175280"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175910,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175280\/revisions\/175910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}