| LOUIS T. BENEZET AWARD RECIPIENT 2009 |
 Jane Lubchenco '69
When Jane Lubchenco was named head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by President Obama earlier this year, the science community was thrilled.
She is a world-renowned marine biologist, and the first woman to hold the scientific position. She has also made a name for herself for her belief that scientists should be engaged in public policy debate as well as research.
Before her appointment, Jane was a professor at Oregon State University. She arrived there in 1977, a time when female scientists had a rocky path ahead of them, especially if they wanted to have children. She and her husband split a full-time faculty appointment and salary, and eventually took on full-time positions when Jane became department chair.
Jane co-founded Climate Central and the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea to provide scientific information on climate and oceans to the public and policy-makers. She founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program to teach environmental scientists to be better communicators of their knowledge to the public.
Fellow scientists use superlatives to describe Jane, calling her a “sea champion” and “scientific rock star,” and calling her record “stunning.”
In a New York Times story about Jane’s appointment, marine biologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson said that when Jane was president of the Ecological Society of America, “she got them to recognize that there was a big bad world out there and that ecology has not contributed to the dialogue.”
Jane told the Times, “I remain passionately interested in the discovery part of science.” and she calls the database about Oregon’s coast built over 30 years by her and her colleagues – including her husband Bruce Menge, also a marine ecologist – “a gold mine.”
Jane and Bruce have a son, Duncan Lubchenco Menge, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Alumni Awards Main Page |