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Science Partnerships Enabling Rapid Response (SPERR)

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Project Goals

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 required unprecedented engagement and collaboration with scientists from multiple disciplines across government, academia, and industry. Although this spurred the rapid advancement of valuable new scientific knowledge and tools, it also exposed weaknesses in the system of information dissemination and exchange among scientists from those three sectors. As oil demand pushes drilling into increasingly extreme environments, addressing the challenge of effective, science-based disaster response is imperative.

In collaboration with Stanford’s ChangeLabs, the project team used a user-centered design process to tackle this complex interdisciplinary problem. The project worked to understand the obstacles to and opportunities for effective scientific communication during oil spill crises, identify possible tools and strategies to enable rapid information exchange between federal responders and non-governmental scientists from multiple relevant disciplines, and build a network of key influencers to secure sufficient buy-in for large-scale implementation.

Project Outcomes

The SPERR project was completed in July 2015.  The SPERR team decided to implement Science Action Network.

The Science Action Network aims to:

  • Bridge cultural gaps between response agencies, industry, and academic scientists and create new norms for scientific collaboration.
  • Drive disaster-relevant and interdisciplinary scientific research through novel, academic-agency partnerships and funding opportunities.
  • Catalyze cross-disaster and cross-institutional scientific exchange.

Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, highlighted SPERR in an op-ed as a promising approach to create “a community for disaster science.”  The SPERR project was also highlighted on PBS NewshourGoMRI, and in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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