How did you get interested in marine science?
I grew up by the ocean, so we did a lot of tide pooling, just going out for fun, when I was just a little kid. There were a couple of really distinctive things that I remember; one was finding an octopus, a little, small, octopus. I remember just being really curious about why that would happen, and another time we were walking on the beach after a storm and I found this beautiful purple little shell and it was not like any other shell I had ever seen. We'd been walking on the beaches for a while then and I was really excited about it and interested in finding out what it was. I went home and I looked in a book that my mom had and it was a book about the tides and the beaches, and it was called "Between the Pacific Tides." It's a classic text, but it also had a little section where you could key things out and I was able to successfully key out the genus and species of the little purple shell. And I was like "Wow, maybe this science really does have a purpose and a reason." It was really fun.
How old were you when you did that?
I was about eight; I was pretty young. So that got me excited about the ocean and just taking classes as I got older and learning more and more about it and finding it just more and more fascinating was really fun.
So how about junior high and high school, did you have favorite classes?
Yeah well they had a couple of marine science courses that they taught during the summer, and so I took a summer marine science course where we had to do a project and my project was to measure wave heights every day. And of course to do that used really simple technology, we'd have someone go out and stand in the surf zone and when they run all the way out to when the back wash is as far back as it can be, you plant the pole and then you measure the wave height against the horizon. So I got my brother to go run out into the waves and I would always wait and take the measurement right as the wave was crashing on his head. So it was a very successful project in a lot of ways. But I liked all my other classes too. I had a completely crazy chemistry and physics teacher in high school and he was really fun. He wanted us to understand that we were making assumptions and simplifying our experiments when we discounted friction and other small forces when we were doing our calculations. And he actually invented a company called "Jason and Jason" that made frictionless bearings, resisterless resisters and it was just really, really neat. And it was fun, he just made it a really fun class and he was really crazy and energetic, which was really neat. It wasn't that I was particularly great at those classes, but that I had a really good teacher and enjoyed it. The math classes I did good at and I liked them. They were very logical and made sense and you could kind of work your way through them without having to imagine too much. So that was pretty standard, go-through. I always had trouble with subjects like English where there were all these exceptions to the rules; I was always like "no, no exceptions. I don't want to learn all the exceptions."
Were there any counselors in high school that steered you to the college that you went to or did you choose on your own? How did it happen that you chose where you went to college?
Well I went to UCLA mostly because it was close to home. I was not living at home when I went to high school, but it was really close to where I was living and it was really easy. I didn't have to get a car, and I was able to use public transportation to get there. I had counselors, but they really were not very connected to listening to what the students want. I said, "Oh, I've heard of Scripps." And they would say "Oh, Scripps College for women." And I was like "No, the Institute of Oceanography." So they weren't really listening very well. I didn't get a lot of help from the counselors I had in high school.
Have you had any other challenges as sort of a minority woman scientist?
You know, I'm actually fairly socially oblivious, which is kind of embarrassing to admit, so there may have been problems, but I wasn't aware of them.
Have there been problems being in a male dominated kind of world, or has there been a lot of women in marine science?
I think that the generation before me did a lot of groundbreaking work and I know that my advisor, my PhD advisor, did a lot to make sure that women were well represented. She had a lab that was full of women, and it was really nurturing and so I try to pass that on. I provide a lab that's nurturing to both men and women and any student that comes in because I think science can be really competitive, and it can be a bit uncomfortable for a lot of people. But I think that there are a lot of people out there who would make great scientists, who just don't do well in that kind of a competitive environment, but they do really well in a nurturing environment. They're great scientists and so providing that is something that I can do.
And you do notice that there are remnant hold-overs of discrimination in some areas, for whatever reason. It doesn't have to be blatant, it can sometimes be very subtle and so you just kind of know that it's there and you try to avoid it or educate people against it if you can. It's normally those people, where their patterns are pretty well set, and they're not going to change, but you can give them one more reminder and then move on and not let them hurt you. That's the important thing, they're not doing it to you as an individual they're doing it to a certain class of people. Just say, "Okay, it's their loss, they don't see what they're missing out on." and you just move on. Because there are a lot of people who will learn from anyone or teach anyone, and you can just work with those people instead.
Describe the job you have right now, in case there are students that want to contact you with what your work is.
I am an agent professor at Moss Landing Marine Labs, which means that I am not in a salaried position; I'm entirely supported by the soft money that I get for grants and research projects. I advise and mentor students who are getting their master's degrees, but I do that in conjunction with a tenure track professor. So, I'm in a very informal, and some would consider it a tenuous position in that the funding is provided entirely by my own efforts, but on the other hand it allows me to go into the field for large chunks of time, like coming to Antarctica, doing deep sea research cruises that are a month at a time without the obligations of saying "Oh my gosh, I can't miss one or three months of classes while I'm down here." So that's a really nice situation for me. For some people, it's uncomfortable because there isn't a lot of security in it, but you know, I have confidence that you can always find a way if you keep trying and if you are flexible with what you do. So, the research that I do, aside from the Antarctic work, is a lot of human impact work as well as these engineering development things like the SCINI project. I also work in the deep sea, around hydrothermal vents, and the work I'm interested in there is reproduction and larval dispersal-so how the animals are getting in-between these isolated habitats which are kind of like islands in the deep sea. And I work in my own back yard, which is Elkhorn Slough, another habitat that is changing rabidly due to human impacts. Fifty years ago they opened a permanent harbor mouth to this slough area which has changed it from a slow backwater, minimally tidally impacted system, with a lot of brackish water protected nursery ground, into this wide open harbor with a lot of marine influence. So, it's really changing fast even though it was 50 years ago when they made the initial modifications to that area, so that's kind of in my backyard.
So you are doing population studies there to see how the communities are changing?
Yes, yes, community change.
So what drew you to Antarctica in the first place? After 11 seasons here, what it is that keeps you coming back?
Well who wouldn't want to go to Antarctica, I mean, isn't it an exciting thing? If someone came up to you and said, "Do you want to go to Antarctica?" what would your response be? My response was "Well, Yeah!" And we got a very last minute invitation to come down here because of some environmental impacts that were happening and some requirements that something be done about it. So, we actually only had about two weeks of notice that we were coming down here when I came down for the first time, it was really rapid, but it was really exciting! I mean I would never give up an opportunity like that, just the chance to do something like that! And then coming down here, it's an incredibly beautiful place.
And not only is it beautiful on land, but the beauty on land is really stark. It's the blacks and the whites, the volcanic rock and the snow and the ice is all very stark and contrasty, and then when you jump in the water you encounter another contrast because it's such a rich, vibrant community that's down there, and there's lots of colors, and there's lots of sponges, and there's lots of marine life, and so if it wasn't so cold, you could think that you were on a tropical reef. It's just really beautiful. And I like the contrasts; I think that's really neat. As a scientist, the system is pretty simple, so I think that there is a small chance of maybe understanding the ecology of this system, relative to say understanding Monterey bay ecology which is very complicated and very impacted by human activities. This system is minimally impacted by human activities, and I feel like there is a better chance of trying to understand how the whole system works and that is what I am really interested in.
I just keep coming back here because there are always more questions, everything that you learn, and everything that you do just keeps generating more and more questions and you want to understand it better and better. There is something appealing about gaining an initial understanding of a system and then you start to work in it, and you get to know it more and more and you just get really intimate with the understanding of it. It becomes a part of how you think and who you are. So I keep coming back because I want to understand it better and better, and with SCINI, the ROV, we can access new areas that we haven't been able to get into before and some of those questions that have been long-standing but we haven't had a way to get a handle on them... now we can get a handle on them. There's always something new to learn.