Here we upload summaries of Challenger Society for Marine Science Council Meetings to allow members to stay up to date and aware of Council activities.
Summary of 144th MEETING OF THE CHALLENGER SOCIETY COUNCIL
Wednesday, November 26th 2025, 1-4pm
We welcomed a new member to the Challenger Society Council: Alex Poulton from Herriot Watt University, who will be taking over from Alessandro Tagliabue as UK SCOR Chair. The Council thanked Alessandro for his great dedication to the role and for all his hard work with establishing the new UK SCOR committee. The Council also thanked Cecilia Liszka who is standing down as Special Interest Group portfolio holder, for all her work over recent years in delivering one of the most important activities of CSMS. We will be announcing the new portfolio holder soon, to be formally voted upon at this year’s AGM.
Maeve Lohan (University of Southampton) gave her president’s update on the Marine Science UK initiative and the Future Marine Research Infrastructure (FMRI) project. Marine Science UK is an umbrella organisation aiming to be a collective voice for marine science across different sectors (universities, government, industry, general public). They have a new flyer that is being circulated to the community, and a website should be live in the near future. They are currently putting out a call for members, charging £5000 per institute per year. Marine Science UK appeared to have very similar goals to the Challenger Society, and we are still in discussion regarding our role in the organisation. Maeve will continue to represent the Challenger Society in discussion meetings, and advocate for the contributions we could make to supporting the goals of the organisation.
The Challenger Society president is no longer sitting on the FMRI board, after a big overhaul of the board membership. Whilst we have argued the case for continued involvement, given the ongoing support and the role as the voice of the community, it was decided that the structure of the board had to change to reflect the requirement for membership with a more technical background to deliver on the FMRI strategy. We will be following up on this news soon.
Alex Brearley (British Antarctic Survey) has recently undertaken a thorough assessment of the Challenger Society’s financial situation. Unfortunately, there is a mismatch between income and expenditure, with a number of actions proposed. We will be increasing membership fees soon (roughly in line with inflation, but with new categories of membership to support early career researchers and workers on fixed-term contracts. We will also be deferring non-critical expenditures until later in 2026.
Chelsey Baker and Anthony Lucio (National Oceanography Centre Southampton) gave an update on our website. As many of you will know, the old website was taken offline at the end of July due to hacking attempts. Data were protected but we have moved to WordPress for added security, using the same URL as before. Most material is populated but we’re still working on some backlog of older publications. We still have a need for a membership platform, and we are working on options for achieving this.
It was decided to update the outgoing presidential term, in light of the changes to the presidential term as outlined in the Society’s new Articles of Association. The outgoing president will remain in post for two years, and then rotate off council. We also approved some new policies required by the Charity Commission, relating to serious incident reporting and investing charity funds – so we’re very much doing everything we can to operate in a responsible and ethical way.
The History SIG website oceanswormley.org requested funds from Challenger Society Council to cover costs. It was decided that no decision on this would be made until March. There was general support for the website, with the suggestion that the group could use SIG costs for this after the spending freeze. It was discussed that there is a need to think about how this website fits into the CSMS website policy, for example risks associated with responsibility for content and the time required to work on this activity. It could be integrated in the longer term but would need to be revisited and guidelines put in place.