Mission Statement
PRISM is a University of Washington campus wide initiative to revolutionize the integration of research and education on the environment of Puget Sound. Our focus is on approaching serious regional issues in a new and challenging way. PRISM will not take a path well traveled but purposely seeks innovation, challenges, and major accomplishments with respect to the disputes between resources of Puget Sound and expectations of our citizens.
As a research and education initiative PRISM's mission is to build capacity in the University of Washington to confront these issues today. From this perspective PRISM has avoided the boundaries of science disciplines, the limitations that might exist through organizational structures and roadblocks that come from distributed agendas.
As a collaborative partnership among state, federal, tribal, and University leaders, PRISM specifically chose a single unifying theme to integrate both cultural and physical systems that operate in Puget Sound. That theme is the processes and role that water plays in our natural and cultural environment. From precipitation and atmospheric interaction to utilization for species' consumption; from the environment of marine organisms and marine mammals, PRISM connects these ecosystems.
PRISM is organized through an executive committee whose members rotate on approximately a two year basis. To have a sustained message, a steering committee made up of University faculty work with the principal investigator and staff on approximate a three year basis. Now in its sixth year, PRISM has grown from collaboration among roughly fifteen original investigators to now over forty active members, yet its influence goes well beyond the numbers as its key contribution to the University of Washington is the support for data, collaboration and research agendas.