Tara Clemente has recently joined NOAA/PMEL and the University of Washington Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) as the new Field Operations Manager for the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array (GTMBA) project. She brings extensive experience in marine operations and oceanographic field program planning. Tara holds an M.Sc. degree in Biological Oceanography from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UH). Prior to joining PMEL Tara lived and worked in Honolulu, Hawaii for 21 years. At UH, Tara worked as the Program Operations Manager for the Hawaii Ocean Time series (HOT) and The Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) programs, two collaborative oceanographic field programs investigating the temporal and spatial variability of the hydrography, chemistry and biology of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. She was also the Lab Manager for the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, C-MORE Hale, a state-of-the-art, LEED platinum facility that supports the comprehensive research of the biological and ecological diversity of marine micro-organisms. To date Tara has participated on over ninety research cruises with the HOT program and dozens of other research cruises between Hawaii, Alaska, California, American Samoa, Rapa Nui and Antarctica, totaling 1500+ days at sea.