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CMOP director António Baptista sees Oregon's coast as the ideal laboratory for studying the impact of climate change variability in coastal margins. He is no stranger to establishing collaborative programs.

Ten years ago, he began work on CORIE, the precursor to CMOP's SATURN seafloor observatory. In 2000, he was the founding member of OHSU's Department of Environmental and Biomolecular Systems, which merged environmental science and engineering with biochemistry and molecular biology. For Baptista, creating CMOP seemed to be a logical step forward in the evolution of team science.

With CMOP, "we are going to have to understand difficult systems across scales, and we are going to have to understand the biology of these systems in an ecosystem context,” says Baptista. "Because of its size and duration, the center provides a mechanism to achieve that and in the process make fundamental contributions to education, knowledge transfer, and workforce diversity.”

With the responsibility of coordinating more than 40 partners in research, industry, and education, Baptista is a busy man. He is convinced "the days have shrunk” and admits, "this does not compare with anything that I have done before.” Despite the seemingly shorter days, Baptista's belief in team science shines: CMOP "has to be a transformative agent for the field of ocean sciences and that's what we are trying to do.”

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CMOP director António Baptista. Photo: OHSU News and Publications