Who is Sarah Oktay?
‘The new head of the Center for Coastal Studies’ is only one answer
Sarah Oktay wanted to be an astronaut growing up in Oklahoma, but girls without perfect vision and military training didn’t get there. She fell in love with the ocean instead; “exploring it was the closest thing to being a spaceman.” Chemical oceanography became her specialty, her dad had done similar work on land as a chemical engineer.
Trace metals, radionuclides, iodine cycling (that can tell stuff like whether striped bass are feeding inshore or offshore) were specialties as she worked in Galveston, Texas. Undergrad 1996, PhD in 2000, off to the University of Massachusetts at Boston for post-doc work.
Then came the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (two weeks earlier she had been on the same scheduled flight that took down the tower). Her tracing expertise had taught her that cataclysmic events like volcanos and massive explosions “act as time markers.” She went searching for falling ash and sediment that had settled into the Hudson River estuary date-certain and found it, gamma fingerprints, modeling how contaminants spread, assessing long-term impacts. Her radionuclide work identified other things like radioactive hospital waste also leaching into the world.
But that’s not who Sarah Oktay was becoming.
In 2003 she moved to the island known as “the Gray Lady” to become head of the Nantucket Field Station, a UMass satellite:
“The turn I took was from peer-reviewed science to helping other scientists do their work. You become an enabler of others. I loved breaking down the mysticism of science, the tweed patches and all that. I wanted people to know that everyone can be a scientist.”
She stayed on Nantucket for 12 years, on the conservation commission, working with children, providing data for projects to reduce fertilizer runoff, protect eel grass, eliminate mosquito spraying -- “guerrilla science” she smiles, direct impacts felt much faster than peer-reviewed studies could publish.
She was then recruited to the prestigious Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a high-altitude field station in Colorado, her role evolving again:
“I was hired as the head fundraiser, institutional development,” she says, yet another step away from hard science (and the ocean). “Most scientists hate asking for money,” but she was willing.
Two years later she was headhunted again, and arrived on the West Coast at the University of California-Davis, broadening her focus into what they called “strategic engagement; that really means partnerships.”
From her earliest time in Boston, she had gotten to know a guy named Rich Delaney, head of the Urban Harbors Institute at UMass, previously in charge of Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management. There was great mutual respect and they stayed in touch as Oktay left Nantucket and Delaney, tapping Cape Cod roots, took over as head of the Center for Coastal Studies 14 years ago. Oktay knew the place well and had been a quiet advocate, writing about the Center’s work with sharks and whales, profiling people in articles and books. She also had credibility at places like the National Science Foundation, where six-figure grants emerge for projects like building a genetics lab in Provincetown.
For Delaney, her combination of science, contacts, and communication was unique. A strong scientist willing to fundraise? A good teacher and writer who can open doors for six-figure grants? Bring it on.
Oktay understood that Delaney had buttressed the Center not by publishing treatises but as a front man for world-class scientists, a guy who “could talk to people in Boston, provide political cover, engage business leaders,” fundraise, build a strong board of directors through personal contacts and persuasion, “savvy, articulate, respected.”
A long-distance professional friendship stayed on the back burner for years, until Delaney decided it was time to make his own transition. He recruited, even wooed Oktay, and they were “sympatico,” as she puts it. They explored what she refers to as “the sweet spot” for the Center, working to offer hard data and evidence while willing to engage in advocacy, careful not to undermine credibility while propelling public policy. That’s not easy, but each had been walking that walk for decades.
Many of the Center’s staff of about 45 already knew her, or of her. Delaney went to his board and offered to stay engaged as a senior adviser, supportive, do his quiet magic. Oktay in turn was willing to begin a transition, six months of informal time with Delaney and team. The pieces came together. She started full-time January 3.
As for vision, Oktay is taking it slowly.
“We all love Rich, we’re still a team,” she says. “I think people are excited to have a scientist in the seat, and I’m interested in having people understand that the Center is more than scientific studies, it’s an economic driver and community resource for jobs, information for planning. I want to continue to work with the National Park, the chamber of commerce, help figure out how fishermen and right whales can co-exist. We can do all that.”
This helps answer the question, who is Sarah Oktay?, and reveals why her multiple experiences seem to funnel toward her new role. But there is one more element, because Oktay is one more thing; a poet, a shared passion with her poet husband Len Germinara.
She describes her collection, “Sifting Light from the Darkness,” as examining “the interfaces between science and the sublime” – a description of her professional efforts as well. Here’s a sample, the last three of seven stanzas, from a poem “RV Pelican,” about work on a research vessel in Galveston Bay:
Steel box container lab on deck
Houses special experiments
Sequesters radioactive tracers
Zombie students and scientists
Hover over laptops in labs inside the main cabins
Bucks of saltines and ginger ale keep us going
Ice cream is pretty much the only treat
Giant sediment grabs
Benthic bear traps
Hurled to the seafloor
Snap shut upon impact
Somehow gently bite
Into the soft gray mud
And bring up its secrets
The entire ship will be coated with salt
When we return two weeks later
Satiated, ready to pour over our treasures
Find out what stories the sea has to tell
*****
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