Jane Lubchenco, one of the nation’s most prominent marine biologists, has devoted much of her career to encouraging scientists to become more engaged in public policy debates, and is a vocal proponent of curbing greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
Born on December 4, 1947, Lubchenco grew up in Denver with her five younger sisters. Her father was a surgeon and her mother a pediatrician. She attended a Catholic girls’ high school, St. Mary’s Academy, where, like so many Obama appointees, she played basketball. Lubchenco attended Colorado College, where she fell in love with the ocean during a summer course in invertebrate zoology at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. After earning her BA in biology in 1969, she received her MS in zoology from the University of Washington in 1971, and her PhD in ecology from Harvard University in 1975.
From 1975-1977, Lubchenco served as assistant professor at Harvard, sandwiched around a one-year visiting professorship in 1976 at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. She then moved on to Oregon State University, beginning her more than 30-year career there. She worked as an assistant professor (1977-1982) and then associate professor (1982-88). Concurrently, she was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution (1978-1984), spent time in 1986 at the Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile, and part of 1987 at the Institute of Oceanography, Academica Sinica, Qingdao, China.
In 1988, Lubchenco was made a full professor at Oregon State. She chaired the Department of Zoology from 1989 to 1992. In 1993, she was made a distinguished professor, and two years later, she was given the new title of Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology. Also in 1995, she began her teaching relationship at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand (1995-96, 1999-2000, 2002-2003).
Lubchenco’s expertise includes interactions between humans and the environment: biodiversity, climate change, sustainability science, ecosystem services, marine reserves, coastal marine ecosystems, the state of the oceans and of the planet. She has led an interdisciplinary team of scientists studying the marine ecosystem off the west coast of the United States.
Lubchenco is married to Bruce Menge, also a marine biologist, and the couple has two sons.