Jan Newton

Senior Principal Oceanographer and Affiliate Professor, University of Washington

Dr. Jan Newton is a Senior Principal Oceanographer and Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. She is a biological oceanographer with research on coastal dynamics, including effects from climate and humans on water properties and plankton. She has focused on efforts to build ocean observing and connections to society. She is the Executive Director of NANOOS, the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems, part of the U.S. IOOS. She is also a co-director of the Washington Ocean Acidification Center and a co-chair of the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network, GOA-ON. 

Dr. Newton's expertise is in linking observations and needs across scales from local to regional to global for optimized science and in doing so, engaging with partners for effective outputs. In the Pacific Northwest US, her co-production efforts with partners, such as tribes, managers, and shellfish growers, have optimized NANOOS data products over the years. Recently she co-led an integrated social-ecological regional vulnerability assessment to ocean acidification along with four tribal co-PIs, funded by NOAA, that has yielded valuable knowledge for adaptation and planning.

As a GOA-ON leader, Dr. Newton helped define a programme, Ocean Acidification Research for Sustainability, OARS, now endorsed by the United Nations as part of the UN Ocean Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Currently Jan is the Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator project known as “Backyard Buoys,” working with Indigenous partners to collect, steward, and use wave data from affordable buoys to complement their existing knowledge and support their blue economy.