My Improbable Career

Compared with those of most scientists I have met, my journey was improbable. I grew up in Minnesota, about as far from an ocean as you can be in the United States, but I ended up a marine scientist. No one in my family — not my parents or three sisters — had shown any interest in science or engineering, and yet I earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a PhD in geophysics.

My mother graduated from college but did not work outside the home. My father began his freshman year at Harvard but lied about his age and waived a heart murmur to enlist in the infantry in the days following Pearl Harbor. He never returned to Harvard but instead helped his father with the family business post-war.

My parents made the consequential decision to send me to an all-girls school from second grade through high school graduation. For that reason, I never encountered some of the stereotypes that discourage young girls from developing their interests and skills in math and science. I graduated class valedictorian with a merit scholarship and had my choice of colleges.

The College Years

I decided to attend Colorado College (CC), which was within driving distance of home and had a good reputation. Despite much discouragement from my CC physics department advisor who warned, “I’ve seen girls come and go in this department, but never has one graduated,” I completed my physics degree in three years, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude.

As graduation approached, I had to come up with something to do next. A girlfriend and I decided that we would move to Sun Valley, Idaho, to ski during the day and be bartenders at night. But my college advisor, Professor Dick Hilt, stopped me in my tracks. He said that if I went off to a ski resort, I would end up marrying a ski patrolman named Sven, and a few years later, as I was pinning wet clothes on the line in some mountain village, I would wonder what my future in science might have been.

Therefore, on his advice, I applied to graduate schools in marine sciences to get in on the ground floor of the plate-tectonic paradigm shift in geosciences. I earned my PhD from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. It’s hard to know where I’d be now had I taken that gap year.

After four-and-a-half years at Scripps, I defended my thesis and again considered my next step. The years I was away for college and graduate school had made me homesick for my family and for a boyfriend in Minnesota. I asked the only scientist I knew in the area, Professor Clem Chase at the University of Minnesota, if he knew of any job openings for a newly minted PhD in marine geophysics. Clem responded, “You can have my job; I’m going on sabbatical.” Not even thinking much about the temporary nature of such a position, I moved back to Minnesota, got married, and started teaching at the university.

Midway through that year, I still had no longer-term plan but figured something would come up. At the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Menlo Park, California, office asked me if I would apply for an open position there. I got the job, started the following summer, and for the next three years built my publication record and worked on defining how tectonic plates deform in response to vertical and horizontal forces. I thought I’d be a USGS employee for the rest of my career.

MIT Years: Balancing Career and Life

Three years later, again at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Professor Sean Solomon from MIT asked me if I would be interested in applying for an open assistant professorship. I was intrigued by the idea of teaching again and having graduate students to help with my research program. I got the job and moved across the country to Massachusetts with my husband and newborn daughter.

At MIT, I was as happy as I thought I could ever be. My colleagues were wonderful; the students were stellar. My research in marine geophysics was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and NASA.

The MIT leadership looked out for me. In my third year at MIT, I was expecting twins. I had a rather heavy teaching load by MIT standards, and my department head worried that with three very young children, my prospects for tenure might be at risk. He told me about a fellowship opportunity for women at the Bunting Institute at Harvard/Radcliffe. Such a fellowship would buy out my teaching obligations for the months leading up to the birth of the twins without requiring my family to relocate.

I applied for and got the fellowship. During the six months preceding the birth of the twins, absent any teaching requirements, I wrote and published seven papers. It was one of the most creative and productive times in my career.

Many younger readers might be thinking that going on maternity leave with a buffer of seven papers sounds like a good situation. But this was 1986, and MIT had no maternity leave program, although women were free to take time off and stop the tenure clock. Mary Rowe, the MIT ombudsperson, cited horrible statistics; no junior faculty member who stopped the tenure clock had ever received tenure.

The twins were born on a Monday, one by Caesarean section. Soon after, my department head showed up in my hospital room to ask me how soon I could be back. By Thursday, I was back in the office with the twins. The situation caused such a stir at MIT that within a year, the institute developed a family leave policy.

I had one simple rule for balancing my career and family: I did not bring work home except for reviewing one proposal or manuscript each night after the children were in bed. Evenings and weekends were my time with them. As they grew older, on the rare occasions that I had to work on a weekend day, I brought them with me to MIT and let them rollerblade for hours through the steam tunnels beneath MIT. (Eventually, rollerblading in the tunnels was banned.)

Because I had to travel often, sometimes for a month or more, on research expeditions, we brought on board an au pair, Ann Barrie, to take care of the children while I was at work.

Barely two years after the twins were born, my husband suddenly and unexpectedly died. While dealing with the profound tragedy of losing him so young, I struggled with how I was going to raise three daughters, aged six and under. Fortunately, Ann agreed to stay on, and she provided important stability for the children. Although Ann was hired for two years, she became part of the family and still lives with us, working at the local preschool and helping with my eight grandchildren.

I had been considering some other university offers at the time, but a good friend advised that I change as little as possible in my life as I coped with the loss of my husband. MIT was very supportive of the sudden change in my situation, and staying there was definitely the right decision.

Sadly, the IRS was less supportive. The first year I filed income taxes with my name and social security number as the only income on the form, the IRS flagged the return, seemingly unable to find evidence that I had ever paid income taxes during the previous 10 years of my marriage. The problem seemed to be that I had kept my maiden name, even though that same name and correct social security number were on all of the previous married joint filings.

The IRS froze all of my bank accounts and garnished my wages, leaving me only $300 per month to support my family. After many months of me sending multiple copies of previous years’ tax returns, the IRS finally determined that they owed me $3,000 in the overpayment of taxes.

One day I was passing through Logan Airport in Boston when I received a message to call a Stanford professor who was chairing the search committee for the next director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. When I contacted him, he asked that I apply for the position. MBARI was founded by David Packard and funded by the Packard Foundation to be a research complement to the slightly older and well-known Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Packard, who had served as United States Undersecretary for Defense, developed the idea for this novel oceanographic research institution. His observation was that the technical capacity for exploring the oceans was woefully inadequate in comparison to that which was available for space exploration. MBARI was designed as a “NASA for the oceans,” where scientists and engineers work in partnership to create novel tools to explore the oceans in all dimensions, physically, biologically, chemically, and geologically.

Many colleagues were sure I would never resign a tenured position at MIT to lead a start-up marine lab. MIT had, indeed, been a wonderful place to work for 15 years. When asked once how I could manage to work “in a pressure-cooker place like MIT,” I responded that MIT was where I went to relax and unwind on Monday morning after taking care of the children all weekend. The dean of sciences at MIT had proposed that I be the next department head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, which would mark a milestone of sorts in that I would have been the first woman to lead a science department at MIT.

In the end, the decision was easier than I thought it would be. As department head at MIT, I would be leading about 200 faculty, graduate students, post-docs, lab technicians, and support personnel. The MBARI director leads an institute of about 200 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel; therefore, both positions had similar span and size. But I was intrigued by the young age of MBARI, still in its first decade. It was an opportunity to create a different type of marine research lab.

I accepted the new job. My daughters seemed delighted with the proposal to move to California. As a 15-year-old and two 11-year-olds, they envisioned that they’d be stepping into Beverly Hills 90210.

The MBARI Years

I became the fourth director to lead MBARI in its first 10 years. The reason for the rapid turnover in leadership was not that my predecessors lacked competence; they were each demonstrated leaders in marine science and engineering. The problem actually stemmed from MBARI’s unusual format, which included a partnership between scientists and engineers, and funding that was mostly internal. These were, in fact, MBARI’s greatest strengths, but, as my predecessors found, they also defied conventional approaches to running marine labs.

For example, at the major oceanographic labs, there was no professed partnership between engineers and scientists. Research engineers typically were siloed into their own departments working on projects of their own interest. Marine scientists, however, employed engineering technicians to create new tools to further their own research interests. Funding flows from external sponsors, and the “competition” consists of all other researchers in the United States working on similar projects.

In contrast, with the vast majority of the funding for MBARI stemming from one annual grant from the Packard Foundation, the “competition” consists of all of the other research groups within the institution. Thus, if one program wants to grow, it can only do so if another research group shrinks; however, engineers and scientists at MBARI were supposed to be peers with similar stature.

Packard’s ideal was quite different from its reality. Scientists at MBARI were assigned outside offices with views of the ocean. Engineers at MBARI were housed in internal offices with no view. Scientists were the PIs on all of the major projects. Engineers were assigned under a matrix method to work on the scientists’ projects. Structurally, there was one R&D department, and it was always led by a scientist. My task was to build a peer partnership between scientists and engineers with incentives that discouraged empire-building by growing capacity through collaboration, not competition.

I began by dissolving the R&D department and setting up parallel science and engineering departments. I hired a director of engineering to be responsible for the professional development of engineers. I moved the research engineers to outside offices with views and revamped the annual proposal process so that successful projects required partnerships and co-leadership between ocean scientists and engineers.

These changes enabled MBARI to fill a niche that was not occupied by other oceanographic institutions in its ability to develop new technology to explore the oceans in new dimensions. MBARI became known as an innovative institution that was delivering on David Packard’s vision to “send instruments into the deep sea, not people, and bring back data, not samples.”

Some of the “firsts” that occurred at MBARI during my tenure include:

• Detecting micro-organisms in the ocean by identifying their genetic fingerprints.

• Deploying laser Raman spectroscopy to provide the only point-and-shoot capability to probe the chemistry of the deep sea without sample preparation.

• Installing the first deep-sea observatory in U.S. waters.

• Operating autonomous underwater vehicles to execute complex missions through real-time AI decision making.

• Developing and commercializing in-situ nitrate monitors.

The science delivered from these new capabilities included an earlier and better understanding of harmful algal blooms, the first-phase diagram for CO2 under deep-sea pressures and temperatures, the processes that create marine canyons on the continental shelf (an unanswered puzzle for more than 100 years), characterization and tracking of internal boundary layers in the water column, the question of whether coastal estuaries are net consumers of nitrate from or exporters of nitrate to the open ocean, and many other discoveries that advanced the field.

My biggest challenge at MBARI was a result of the 2008 recession, which substantially reduced the Packard Foundation’s support of MBARI; its endowment dropped by nearly 50%. Much of the momentum that MBARI had been building was in jeopardy.

Institute teams I set up to look at where cost savings could be realized quickly concluded that the easiest cost savings to implement had a minor impact on the bottom line. After taking all of the budget cuts that didn’t jeopardize the mission, we believed that the only way to ensure the continued success of MBARI was to convince the Packard trustees that MBARI’s budget would need to take a larger share of the annual draw until the endowment recovered from the recession.

The difficulty with making this case was that since MBARI’s founding, insufficient attention had been paid to the priorities of the Packard trustees. MBARI scientists and engineers had been focusing on basic curiosity-driven research, while the Packard trustees were concerned with marine conservation, the role of the oceans in climate change, and marine pollution.

To align the institute with the foundation, we wrote the first-ever strategic plan for MBARI that articulated the important issues of interest to the Packard Foundation and a road map for addressing those issues. The plan prioritized MBARI’s efforts and connected the research to issues important to the Packard Foundation. The strategy worked. MBARI’s budget was protected, and no layoffs were necessary.

I also remember those MBARI years as being wonderful, both professionally and personally. With my new husband, Ian Young, a sea captain, we bought a house in the middle of nowhere and have part ownership in the 1,300-acre cattle ranch bordering our property. Soon my daughters and I had horses and were competing in local ranch competitions and rodeo events. I took up barrel racing on a young Arabian mare I had trained since she was a two-year-old.

I credit the children’s daily care of their horses, along with the “middle of nowhere” location, with discouraging casual suitors and contributing to the fact that my daughters became responsible, successful, independent, and hardworking young women. Once they managed to bend the control of a 1,000-lb. animal to their will, handling young men was not much of a challenge.

USGS Encore

In my twelfth year at the helm of MBARI, I received a call from the chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ ad hoc committee that was providing the new Obama administration with candidates to lead the USGS. The committee proposed that I speak to the leadership of the Department of the Interior about the position.

Although I could not imagine that I would want to leave MBARI, I agreed to speak to the Interior representative. My children had all graduated from college, so theoretically, I could accept a position on the other side of the country. I grossly underestimated Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s powers of persuasion; I agreed to take the position contingent on him also appointing me to be the science advisor to the Secretary of the Interior. Later, I would come to realize how important this additional title would prove to be.

To become director of the USGS, I had to be confirmed by the Senate. On the day I was scheduled to testify, I was paired with Arun Majumdar, President Obama’s choice to lead a new agency within the Department of Energy (DOE) called Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E.

Arun mentioned that colleagues at DOE were pleased that he was paired with me as an Interior nominee since I would get all of the tough questions from the senators while little attention would be paid to the ARPA-E candidate. That knowledge shook my confidence to some extent, but the hearing went smoothly, and I was ratified unanimously by the Senate. I moved east, leaving the ranch and family in California.

I joined Obama’s “Dream Team” of science leadership that included, in addition to Arun Majumdar, John Holdren as the president’s science advisor and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Steve Chu as Secretary of Energy; Jane Lubchenco as Administrator of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration); and Francis Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Although I officially reported to Anne Castle, the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, the fact that I was Salazar’s science advisor entitled me to stand in for the secretary on national matters that involved science.

Not long after I arrived at the USGS in the fall of 2009, a number of major disasters required the expertise of the USGS. The first was on January 12, 2010, when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed hundreds of thousands in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A month later, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile. A month after that disaster, a little-known Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, disrupted transatlantic air travel for a week. In late April of that same year, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig offshore of Louisiana triggered the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history.

Each event required mobilizing the USGS to capture ephemeral data and provide science-based advice to save lives and the environment. My colleagues at NOAA started calling me the Master of Disaster.

Of all of these disasters, the one that affected me the most was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Based on my experience with deep-sea intervention during my years at MBARI, the Secretary of the Interior asked me to lead Interior’s response from BP headquarters in Houston. I arrived in early May and was onsite at BP for the next three months, working 16-hour days seven days per week. The only times away from the site were quick trips to Washington, DC, to testify to Congress and one short trip to Berkeley to attend the graduation of my oldest daughter, Meredith, from business school.

In Houston, I worked with experts from the USGS and other government agencies to estimate the flow rate from the well and search for ways to contain the oil spill. The flow rate determined by the USGS team in mid-June was confirmed by DOE engineers once we successfully capped the well in mid-July. This estimate became the basis for the Clean Water Act penalties levied against BP for pollution by the spill.

I recall this time as being one of the most difficult and intense periods in my entire life, but it was also one that was rewarding because science made a difference to the people and the environment of the Gulf of Mexico. The story of how science came through to end this disaster is chronicled by Joel Achenbach in A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea.

By 2013, I felt that I had completed what I came to the USGS to accomplish. I had reorganized the USGS with a focus on better addressing the needs of the nation. We had rolled out an earthquake early warning system in California, led the DOI in setting up a scientific integrity office, modernized networks of both seismometers and stream gauges throughout the country, and successfully responded to a number of major disasters, saving lives and property. A strong leadership team was in place to take the USGS forward.

I was getting weary of the strenuous demands of running a federal agency and sometimes going months without seeing my family in California. With no idea what I might do next, I turned in my resignation.

Science Magazine

My period of unemployment did not last long. I was asked whether I would be willing to be considered for the position of editor-in-chief of Science, one of the most respected and highly cited journals in the world. Although this was yet another position located in Washington, DC, Science had editors all over the world; thus, spending a week or so each month at home in California would be easy. Accepting the position at Science gave me exposure to the most exciting developments in all disciplines of science, ranging from micro-organisms to the universe. My previous appointments had all been within the Earth and environmental sciences.

At Science, I was treated to a virtual banquet of the most exciting scientific discoveries from around the world. But this was also a time of great change in scientific publishing. Journals were proliferating, and some of them were being labeled as “predatory” because they extracted publishing fees from authors without providing essential services, such as peer review.

Science had been slow and reluctant to expand the number of titles published, allowing other brands to corral an even larger market share. Therefore, I launched two additional journals: Science Advances, a gold open-access journal, and Science Robotics. The former debuted with the highest impact factor of any new open-access journal and demonstrated that an open-access journal could be selective; the latter has become one of the most prestigious and cited journals in robotics.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

After I had been editor-in-chief of Science for about three years, the chair of the search committee tasked with finding a candidate to stand for election to the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences contacted me.

NAS was founded by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War as a government-chartered but independent source of scientific advice for the nation. It elects its own members and conducts a large number of studies each year to provide evidence-based findings and recommendations on topics of current concern.

I had been elected a member of the NAS a decade earlier, attended a number of the meetings, and served in many volunteer roles; however, I had no experience with NAS governance. Given my lack of experience and the fact that the NAS has many Nobel Laureates from which to choose for president, I was sure that I was a long shot for being selected. Nevertheless, I was selected by the search committee and voted in by the membership.

Thus began the final chapter in my career, a chapter that is still being written. I found NAS to be a storied and admired institution that was in danger of losing its influence. Many would-be sponsors for Academies work were lamenting that reports took too long to prepare and were too expensive.

I held a number of strategy sessions on how the Academies could take advantage of new ways of building consensus in order to provide more timely and affordable advice. These changes proved pivotal to the Academies’ success during the COVID-19 pandemic in providing urgent advice on topics ranging from vaccine allocation to crisis standards of care.

Neither the NAS nor the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) had a strategic plan when I arrived. Without a strategy, it was nearly impossible to prioritize what programs and studies we should undertake with our limited resources. I led a planning effort for the NAS, while my colleague Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine, led one for the NASEM. Our plans were complementary and put a new emphasis on better communication with stakeholders, including the public, and diversifying both the NAS membership and the voices of volunteers contributing to our studies.

The National Academies’ staff proved very resilient in fulfilling our mission during the pandemic. It was not pre-ordained that an organization whose primary function is convening experts would adapt seamlessly to the virtual world, and yet we did. By taking advantage of virtual meetings, we were able to reduce the cost and upgrade the timeliness of our advice to the nation.

The NASEM is now in the process of examining how we can permanently reduce the CO2 footprint from our activities. While I hesitate to find a silver lining in a disease that has killed more than one million Americans, I appreciated the opportunity to work remotely from my isolated home in California and spend time with my grandchildren.

The NAS recently formed a partnership with the Nobel Foundation, which makes sense because the majority of Nobel Laureates are either members or international members of the NAS. Together, the NAS and the Nobel Foundation held an event, “Our Planet, Our Future,” focused on climate change, sustainability, and equality. We are planning a second such conference in 2023 on mis- and disinformation entitled “Trust, Truth, and Hope.”

As I write this article, I have been elected to a second term in office and look forward to finding more ways to increase the impact of the combined expertise of the Academies.

Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Stories from Women Leaders in STEM edited by Deborah M. Shlian, MD, MBA.