§3102 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Oceans and Human Health Initiative

Summary

Creates an Oceans and Human Health Initiative at NOAA to plan and run research on how the oceans, coasts, and the Great Lakes affect people’s health. NOAA must work with other federal science agencies, like the National Science Foundation. The initiative can support five things: central coordination, an advisory panel, NOAA centers of excellence, research grants, and scholar and traineeship programs. The advisory panel will include experts from marine and medical fields and will be chosen to give balanced, multi‑disciplinary advice; it will not follow the usual federal advisory committee rules. NOAA can competitively fund one or more centers that focus on topics like pollutants, marine toxins and pathogens, harmful algal blooms, low‑oxygen zones, seafood testing, marine organisms as environmental indicators, marine product discovery, and marine mammal health, using fields such as genomics and environmental microbiology. Grants to outside scientists will be peer‑reviewed and merit‑based, and NOAA may create traineeships for pre‑ and post‑doctoral and early‑career researchers.