Jane Lubchenco was born in Denver (Colorado, United States) on December 4, 1947, the oldest of six sisters. Her parents were doctors and the young Jane got excellent grades throughout school. She studied biology at Colorado College then went on to take an MS in Zoology at the University of Washington. While researching her thesis there, on sea stars, she met a fellow student, Bruce Menge, who was working on the same species. They decided to help each other out and, not long afterwards, decided to get married. After she obtained her master’s, the couple moved to Massachusetts. Jane enrolled at Harvard, where she earned her PhD then stayed on for two years as assistant professor.
In 1977, Lubchenco and Menge moved to Oregon State University, where they would remain for the next thirty years. They struck a deal with the university that made them both part-time professors, allowing them to continue their research and teaching activities at the same time as raising two young children.
Lubchenco’s academic career, which took her to a full professorship in 1988, was punctuated by fieldwork research in the United States and such far-flung places as Jamaica, Panama, Chile, Qingdao (China) and New Zealand.
In 2009, Barack Obama put her in charge of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as part of his new “science team.” She thus became the first women, and the first marine ecologist, to head this organization, which she would eventually resign from on February 27, 2013. From 2014 to 2016 she served as Science Envoy for the Ocean with the U.S. State Department. In 2014, she took up an appointment as University Distinguished Professor and Advisor in Marine Studies at Oregon State University.
Lubchenco is an influential figure in the science community: eight of her papers have been recognized as “Science Citation Classics” and her projects are linked to no fewer than 150 papers published by other researchers.
Testimony to this leadership is the fact that she has served as president for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the International Council for Science, and the Ecological Society of America, as well as sitting for ten years on the National Science Board. She is also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the UK’s Royal Society, among other institutions.
Lubchenco’s lifelong concern that social and policy decisions should be properly informed by scientific knowledge led her to create the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program which trains environmental scientists to communicate in plain language with the media and opinion leaders, and the Communication Partnership for Science and Sea, an organization devoted to educating public and private policy-makers about issues in oceanic ecology. Jane Lubchenco holds honorary doctorates from 18 universities among numerous other distinctions, and was chosen by Nature as its “2010 Newsmaker of the Year.”
Speech
Ecology and Conservation Biology, 5th edition
In her recent position as head of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), Jane Lubchenco had to take decisions concerning climate research, national fisheries policy and how to cope with one of the worst oil spills in history: that of the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Lubchenco is a doubly influential scientist, because the marine ecologist – who spent years observing whelks and algae along the New England coast – combines this leadership facet with her fame as a researcher; the author of landmark contributions that have advanced our understanding of coastal ecosystem function and demonstrated the value of marine reserves. Jane Lubchenco is also the latest winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology.
As a “world leader in marine ecology and conservation,” in the words of the award citation, Lubchenco was able to show experimentally “that the structure and function of coastal ecosystems are controlled by the joint effects of nutrients, light, temperature and herbivores.” Moreover: “She has been a leader in establishing marine reserves based on solid principles of ecological science,” providing solid scientific arguments to decide the location of marine reserves and their optimal size and protection status.
Lubchenco did not grow up near the sea – she settled on her future career after a “magical” summer course in the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts – but her PhD thesis is a highly complex version of what all shore-dwelling children do: a patient, painstaking study of the behavior of snails in intertidal pools. Which algae do they most like to eat? How does their density affect the ecosystem of each pool? These experiments, a novelty in a science traditionally descriptive in its approach, have been written up in some of the most highly cited papers in the field. “My approach has been to test ideas with experiments so we can truly understand how marine ecosystems work, how they are changing, and how we can do a better job of managing our activities to help the oceans and coasts,” Lubchenco explains.
She realized, for instance, that herbivores have a structural importance for the ecosystem beyond what anyone suspected, to the extent that their preference for one alga over another determines the level of biodiversity in the intertidal community. On a larger scale, this finding means that bottom-of-the-food-chain species like herbivores and plankton are among the fundamental drivers of coastal ecosystem function.
It was this research, conducted in the 1970s, which overturned the then-prevalent idea that ecosystem dynamics were primarily dependent on predators – the carnivores. And it also shed new light on the biological phenomenon known as upwelling, whereby nutrients rise from the ocean depths to the surface waters, resulting in high levels of primary productivity. Many of the world’s richest fisheries are supported by upwelling, so it is important to know how it is driven and sustained. And on this point: “Professor Lubchenco’s insights on ecological processes have been fundamental to understanding that the links between upwelling systems, ocean climate, and ecological perturbation are critical for the long-term sustainability of fisheries,” the jury maintains.
Her work on marine reserves came at a later date, and sprang from the realization, Lubchenco says, that “the state of our oceans is truly grave.”
“The state of our oceans is truly grave.”
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Threats like overfishing, the degradation of coastal habitats and chemical pollution are being compounded by the effects of climate change, which are being felt “faster than anyone expected.” As the new laureate explains in her paper “Plugging a Hole in the Ocean: The Emerging Science of Marine Reserves” (
Ecological Applications, 2003), “rapid and radical degradation of the world’s oceans is triggering increasing calls for more effective approaches to protect, maintain, and restore marine ecosystems.” After sifting through a large body of evidence favoring a selective area-based approach to conservation over the traditional focus on single species conservation, she concludes that “the design and implementation of reserve networks is the next great challenge for marine policy and resource management.”
Lubchenco sees no contradiction in her dual role as scientist and administrator, but is convinced that “we have to use science to support our decisions.” It is for this reason, presumably, that the stewardship of fishery resources was among her chief concerns as head of the NOAA: “We have made great progress in halting overfishing in U.S. waters and have worked with colleagues in other countries and the European Union to make fishing a sustainable activity,” she relates. “If we want to eat fish, and want fishermen to have jobs, then we need to fish responsibly today.”
“If we want to eat fish, and want fishermen to have jobs, then we need to fish responsibly today.”
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If it is rare for scientists to abandon front-line research to join the Administration, it is probably rarer still for one to take the opposite path. But after four years at the NOAA, Lubchenco has decided to resume her professorship at Oregon State University, where she had taught since 1977. Of course this will not spell an end to her efforts to contribute her knowledge to society. Her vision of a science that is “useful, as well as exhilarating,” relies on effective communication between scientists and the broad public: “Scientists must learn to talk about their science in ways that are understandable and relevant to real-world issues. We have to share our excitement about science, and explain the importance of new knowledge and how it is relevant to solving tangible problems.”
