Okada, Marchetti, and Cho Elected Fellows of the Coastal Science Academy

The Coastal Science Academy elected three members of the AES faculty as fellows on January 22, 2026. The Academy is a working society of coastal researchers, founded in 1998, with about 240 fellows. Election is by the current fellows. It is not a government appointment and it does not come with a laboratory budget.

The three fellows

Dr. Naomi Okada, director of the Calder Bay Marine Laboratory, was elected for the kelp-transect series and for keeping the summer field term attached to a real survey rather than to a demonstration dive.

Prof. Elena Marchetti, director of the Institute for Coastal Resilience, was elected for the flood maps the county planning department has used since 2022. Those maps are released to the county. They are not held back as a consulting product.

Dr. Helen Cho, director of the Working Waterfront Policy Lab, was elected for the household interviews that became The Working Waterfront, published by AES Press in December 2025.

The citation for each of them mentions a record that someone outside the university is already using. That is the standard the Academy wrote down, and it happens to be the standard in our charter.

What the election changes

Almost nothing in the teaching load. Fellows keep their courses. The Academy meets once a year, this July in Newport, and AES will pay the travel from the provost’s external-service fund, which is capped at $1,200 a person. Dr. Cho will miss the meeting because of a previously scheduled field interview week and will send the paper instead.