The Ocean Futures Fellowship: Building Ocean Career Pathways

Fellowship Overview:

The Ocean Futures Fellow – AI will collaborate with OceanX team members across data, science, education, and communications to gain experience to learn how AI-enabled workflows are designed, built, and evaluated in an ocean science context that advances OceanX’s mission: bringing impactful ocean exploration, discovery, and conservation stories to the world, and accelerating the ability of ocean science to generate insight from complex data.

This Fellowship is intentionally designed to gain experience with Scientific AI R&D, with a focus on developing and/or applying models that can jointly reason across multiple modalities relevant to ocean science such as imagery, acoustics, 3D seafloor mapping/bathymetry, sequenced eDNA, and chemical and physical water property measurements, to support research, discovery, and scientific understanding.

Project Focus Areas:

• Multimodal Model Development: Collaborate to develop and/or apply models that jointly reason across multiple ocean-relevant modalities, including (but not limited to) visual data, acoustic data, 3D bathymetry/seafloor mapping, sequenced eDNA, and chemical/physical water properties.
• Model Training Experience: Gain design training approach experience by running experiments, including dataset preparation, training pipelines, and iterative model development.
• Data & Dataset Development: Learn dataset curation, cleaning, labeling, and design through guided exercises with domain experts; collaborate with domain experts to ensure scientific validity and utility.
• Experimentation & Validation: Gain experience to define evaluation protocols and benchmarks to assess model performance, generalization, and robustness; communicate results clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Cross-Functional Scientific Collaboration: Partner with scientists, engineers, and expedition teams to translate scientific needs into applied ML problems and to translate model outputs into actionable scientific insight.

Fellowship Overview:

The Ocean Futures Fellow – Digital Asset & Archives will collaborate with OceanX’s media, science, and production teams to organize, maintain, and enhance access to OceanX’s growing media archive. The Fellow will learn how media assets are cataloged, made searchable, and prepared for preservation.

Project Focus Areas:

• Digital Asset Management & Archiving: Gain skills in the ingestion, organization, cataloging, and maintenance of OceanX media assets, including video, stills, audio, and documentation.
• Metadata & Taxonomy Support: Learn metadata standards through hands-on exercises
• Media Operations Support: Gain exposure to how assets are tracked across projects.
• Archive Readiness & Preservation: Learn how archive readiness reviews identify documentation, rights, and technical gaps

Fellowship Overview:

The Ocean Futures Fellow – Immersive Media will collaborate with both the OceanX Education and OceanX Singapore teams to learn how innovative programming is designed to further the goals of OceanX to increase ocean literacy. The Fellow will draw on their passion, creativity and experience with ocean science and conservation and/or ocean literacy to develop prototype content as part of their learning and capstone work.

The Fellow will also explore and apply emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to enhance storytelling, learning design, audience engagement, and content development across OceanX platforms.

Project Focus Areas:

• Content Development: Utilize experience, creativity and passion for ocean conservation and literacy to engage with OceanX Education’s team, partners, and developers to create immersive media initiatives for a variety of external stakeholders. Gain skills to leverage AI-enabled tools (e.g., generative media, text, image, video, or audio tools) to support ideation, prototyping, content iteration, and learning asset development while adhering to OceanX ethical and brand standards.
• Design Process Experience: Focus on user interface and experience and experiment with AI-supported design workflows, such as rapid prototyping, audience testing, accessibility enhancements, and personalized learning experiences.
• Project Management: Learn program and content management practices; document AI use cases as part of reflective learning.
• Public Programming: Observe and learn how public programming is planned and delivered, and contribute ideas. Gain skills to support the integration of interactive and AI-enhanced elements into public programming, exhibitions, and live or hybrid experiences where appropriate.

Fellowship Overview:

The Ocean Futures Fellow – Marketing & Communications will collaborate with the OceanX’s MarComms team to gain skills to learn how strategic campaigns are planned, created, and executed that advance ocean science, exploration, and conservation. This Fellow will gain hands-on experience across multiple marketing functions including content creation, campaign coordination, digital communications, and cross-functional project support.

The fellowship provides exposure to strategic planning, storytelling, and audience engagement across diverse channels and stakeholders—from scientists and educators to partners and the public. The Fellow will gain exposure to how campaigns advance ocean science and conservation.

Project Focus Areas:

• Campaign & Content Support: Learn how integrated campaigns are developed and executed.
• Copywriting & Storytelling: Build copywriting skills through practice assignments and mentor feedback, and learn OceanX’s brand voice.

Fellowship Summary:

The Ocean Futures Fellow – Partnerships will collaborate with the OceanX’s Partnerships team across New York and Singapore to gain experience in the establishment and continuation of relationships with potential partners. The Fellow will gain understanding of the full lifecycle of partnerships and fundraising efforts, including prospect research, proposal and presentation development, CRM and pipeline management, and coordination of partner engagement activities and events. The Fellow will engage with senior leadership and external partners across OceanX, while offering the opportunity to learn OceanX’s approach to projects that have a tangible impact on our mission to shape a sustainable ocean.

Project Focus Areas:

• Fundraising Research and Development: Gain experience in developing an AI-supported workflow for identifying and researching prospective donors and grant opportunities. Gain experience in AI-supported donor research by developing a prototype workflow and design a prototype partner communications approach
• Targeted Partner Communications: Gain experience as the liaison between the Marketing and Partnerships team to design and launch a more targeted, AI-enabled partner communications system. Gain skills to segment partners by interests and program areas, develop tailored content and automated communication workflows, and pilot quarterly outreach to the organization’s partner ecosystem.
• Partnerships Team Process and Project Flow: Design a model process as a learning project that supports the tracking of team activities and the production of materials that showcase the team’s work to the broader organization.
• CRM & Pipeline Management: Learn CRM and pipeline management practices through guided, supervised exercises
• Event & Engagement Coordination: Learn how partner events are planned and run through observation and guided practice