Marina Tomer: Scientist and Bridge Builder

With excitement, Marina Tomer, an undergraduate at College of the Atlantic (COA), traveled from Bar Harbor to attend the 2013 Mitchell Lecture on Sustainability by Jane Lubchenco, a world-renowned environmental scientist. The talk was titled “Science Serving Society: Achieving Real-World Solutions.”

“My first exposure to the Mitchell Center was getting to watch one of my personal heroes speak,” said Tomer.

It was also at COA that Tomer, who was majoring in human ecology with a concentration in marine science and conservation, attended a presentation by Heather Leslie. Afterwards, a professor introduced her to Leslie, who had recently become the director at the Darling Marine Center.

Talks like these, along with her classes and internships, were formative, marking the beginning of Tomer’s shift from a traditional emphasis on the natural sciences to interdisciplinary, solutions-based work. “My undergraduate years really opened up my horizons more to the human-environment challenges, not just the environmental-scientific side,” she said. 

The value and complexity of interdisciplinary work was further reinforced during two post-undergraduate jobs at aquariums. In one, she focused on fishing gear impacts on marine life, and in the other, on sea turtle stranding and recovery. Both roles brought her into conversation with recreational fishermen and community members, and for the first time, she felt she was truly talking with people about marine issues. 

When, after a few years in the workforce, Tomer decided to apply to graduate schools, she discovered that Leslie was now a professor at UMaine and a Mitchell Center faculty fellow. At the time, Leslie was recruiting a graduate research assistant for an interdisciplinary coastal resilience project funded by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grant. Tomer jumped at the opportunity to apply for the assistantship position.

Tomer enrolled at UMaine as a dual master’s student in marine biology and marine policy, a program that offered the integration of science and policy that she couldn’t find anywhere else. She was one of first joint graduate students of Leslie and Josh Stoll, also a Mitchell Center faculty fellow.

As part of the NOAA grant, she hopped into her car after classes and made the trek to Georgetown, Maine, a coastal town between the mouths of the Sheepscot and Kennebec Rivers. Here, she engaged with the community including municipal employees, fishermen, and recreationists, eventually using that work to help draft the marine resources chapter of Georgetown’s comprehensive plan. The grant also included a broader study of how communities were incorporating climate change into these comprehensive plans.

Tomer also worked with Leslie and Stoll on a Mitchell Center-funded project that explored how to conserve fishery stocks by studying an entire ecosystem rather than just one commercial fish species. They also focused on how to build relationships among government, scientists, and community members for the benefit of the fisheries. The project culminated in a workshop examining the connections and tensions between these two concepts. 

Because of these boots-on-the-ground experiences, Tomer not only completed her master’s degree but gained confidence in her ability to help address the complex problems that Maine communities often face.  

“The Mitchell Center for me was early exposure to sustainability work because I was already interested in those multifaceted challenges. Seeing the bigger picture — bringing multiple perspectives across science, policy, community — that early exposure in my graduate student career helped me see myself not just in that science role but as a bridge builder across these disciplines,” Tomer said. 

Tomer left Maine after graduate school and first worked for NOAA as a cooperative research biologist in Rhode Island, logging long days at sea on commercial fishing vessels. Tasks included tagging fish, recording their length and weight, collecting ear bone samples for age and growth studies, and documenting catch composition. The goal of having Tomer onboard was to help bridge the gap between fishermen and policy makers by ensuring that industry knowledge informed science, and that scientific findings could be translated into fair, practical management decisions.  

After her time at sea, Tomer received a prestigious Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship, also with NOAA. She traded her foul-weather gear for business casual and moved to Washington, D.C. where the fellowship was based. 

In that role, Tomer oversaw a massive project that evolved from an executive order issued by former President Joe Biden.  The order called for NOAA to ask the public what the agency could do to support fisheries and protected resources in the face of climate change. After a massive outreach effort to collect public comments from across the United States, Tomer put her research skills to work and generated a 90-page synthesis of the comments that were presented to the president’s staffers and across NOAA. 

Tomer’s fellowship experiences convinced her that work in the federal government can drive meaningful change. So following the fellowship, she accepted a position in Oklahoma with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center. 

The threats posed by climate change in Oklahoma and surrounding states were different than what she was used to, but she continued to draw on her early experiences with solutions-driven work at the Mitchell Center. For instance, she supported research that brought together scientists, managers, and Tribal and community partners to ensure that climate science led to meaningful, on-the-ground change.

Tomer was 3 ½ years into the USGS job when federal priorities began to change following the 2024 election. She thought it made sense to explore other professional opportunities. Browsing jobs one day, she saw a position at the newly created Maine Office of Community Affairs (MOCA) as the program manager for a group of regional coordinators with Maine’s Community Resilience Program (CRP). These 10 coordinator positions, dotted throughout Maine, are also new, and their goal is to help communities plan for climate change by engaging with the CRP.

Tomer loves problem solving: helping to free stranded turtles, pounding through rough waves with fishermen while trying to balance a clipboard filled with scientific data on her lap, sifting through thousands of public comments, or trying to understand how climate change will impact Oklahoma farmers. 

Her new position at MOCA will certainly come with its own set of challenges, but as long as she stays true to her roots of interdisciplinary collaboration focused on community priorities, she feels up to it. 

“Returning to Maine has really been a full circle moment for me. The values that I gained from my time at UMaine and the Mitchell Center are really what’s still guiding my work today,” she said.