Rebuilding Democracy Lecture Series: Dr. Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences

Dr. McNutt will be discussing how disciplines can work together to advance solutions to global issues such as climate change, energy and public health with Dean Robert Brinkmann. A moderated question and answer session will follow.

From 2013 to 2016, McNutt served as editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals. Prior to joining Science, she was the first female director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 2009 to 2013. During her tenure, the USGS responded to a number of major disasters, including earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

During the Deepwater spill, she led a team of government scientists and engineers at BP headquarters in Houston to help contain the oil and cap the well. She also directed the flow rate technical group that estimated the rate of oil discharge during the spill’s active phase. For her contributions, she was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard’s Meritorious Service Medal.

Before joining the USGS, McNutt served as president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), in Moss Landing, Calif. During her tenure, MBARI became a leader in developing biological and chemical sensors for remote ocean deployment, installed the first deep-sea cabled observatory in U.S. waters and advanced the integration of artificial intelligence into autonomous underwater vehicles for complex undersea missions.

McNutt began her academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and directed the Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science & Engineering, jointly offered by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her research focus is the dynamics of the upper mantle and lithosphere on geologic time scales, which has taken her to distant continents and oceans for field observations. She is a veteran of more than a dozen deep-sea expeditions, on most of which she was chief or co-chief scientist.