Jane Lubchenco (born December 4, 1947) is a decorated American environmental scientist and marine ecologist.
From 2009 to 2013, she served as Administrator of NOAA and Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. In February 2021, she was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve as deputy director for Climate and Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She currently teaches and conducts research at Oregon State University. Her research includes interactions between the environment and human well-being, biodiversity, climate change, and sustainable use of oceans and the planet.
During her time at NOAA, she was the Mimi and Peter Haas Distinguished Visitor in Public Service at Stanford University (March–June 2013). In June 2013, she returned to Oregon State University where she was on the faculty prior to being invited by President-Elect Obama to serve on his 'science team.' Her many awards include the MacArthur 'genius' award in 1993 and more than 20 Honorary Degrees. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized Lubchenco as one of the 50 most important women in science. In 2010, she was named as the scientific journal Nature's first Newsmaker of the Year.
Early life and education Lubchenco was born on December 4, 1947, and grew up in Denver, Colorado, the oldest of six sisters. Her father, Michael Lubchenco, a surgeon from South Carolina, was of Ukrainian, French, English, Scottish and Irish descent and her mother, LaMeta Dahl Lubchenco, a pediatrician from North Dakota and Minnesota, had Norwegian, French and English ancestry. Lubchenco attended St. Mary's Academy, a Catholic girls high school. She studied as a Ford Independent Studies scholar at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, graduating with a B.A. in biology in 1969. During college, a summer class in invertebrate zoology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, sparked her interest in marine biology and research. She attended graduate school at the University of Washington where she combined experimental and evolutionary approaches to marine ecology for her thesis on competition between sea stars. Lubchenco graduated with an M.S. in zoology in 1971 and then a Ph.D. in 1975 in marine ecology from Harvard University. Her dissertation dealt with the population and community ecology of rocky sea shores in New England, in particular the role of herbivores, competition among seaweeds, and seaweed defenses against grazers.
Academic career After obtaining her Ph.D. in 1975, Lubchenco was hired as an assistant professor at Harvard University. In 1977, she and her husband moved to Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, Oregon, where she was assistant professor (1977–1982), associate professor (1982–1988) and full professor (1988–2009, 2013–present), with a hiatus for government service. Lubchenco served as chair of the Department of Zoology from 1989 to 1992 and in 1993 was named Distinguished Professor of Zoology. In 1995, she and her husband, Bruce A. Menge, were both named Wayne and Gladys Valley Professors of Marine Biology, endowed chair positions in the Department of Zoology. A unique aspect of Lubchenco's position at Oregon State University was the pioneering appointment she and her husband negotiated with the university. They split a single assistant professor position into two, separate, half-time but tenure-track positions. At a time when good day care was not available, this novel arrangement allowed each to spend considerable time with their family while also teaching and doing research. This two half-time, tenure-track arrangement for a couple seems to have been the first in the U.S., although thousands of couples have since negotiated similar positions. Each worked half-time for ten years, then three-quarters-time for two years before returning to full-time in 1989, all at OSU. During their time at OSU, Lubchenco and Menge have jointly advised and awarded degrees to 30 Ph.D. and 10 M.S. candidates.
Lubchenco took a leave of absence from Oregon State University to serve as NOAA Administrator (2009–2013). After spending three months as Haas Distinguished Visitor in Public Service at Stanford University in the spring of 2013, she returned to OSU. Lubchenco has also been a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution (1978–1984) while she conducted research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She has also taught courses or conducted extended research at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica (1976); Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile (1986); Institute of Oceanography, Academia Sinica, Qingdao, China (1987); and University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (1994–95, 1999–2000, 2002–03).
Controversy In 2021, the editors of the Proceedings of the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) retracted an article for which Lubchenco served as editor. According to PNAS editors, the reason for the retraction was that Lubchenco had "recently published a related paper with the article's authors and has a personal relationship with one of the authors, both of which are disallowed by PNAS editorial policies". In response to the retraction, Lubchenco said, "I greatly regret the poor decision I made quite some time ago in agreeing to edit this paper." In response to allegations of technical and analytical flaws in the research, the authors of the retracted paper acknowledged that, ". . . changes to our results arising from the data error have cast doubt over the outcome of the peer review process, ultimately leading to the retraction of this paper." Since 2021, Lubchenco has served as co-chair of the White House's Scientific Integrity Task Force. In response to the decision by the editors to retract the paper and the conflict of interest charges against Lubchenco, an official of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy agreed that the paper should be retracted, but ". . . there's no evidence that Jane's [Lubchenco's] work with the task force resulted in any pulled punch on the topic." On February 10, 2022, three senior Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space, and Technology sent a letter to the President of the United States asking for an investigation of Lubchenco's professional behavior and encouraging "... you to consider if Dr. Lubchenco should continue to be involved in developing a framework for the improvement of agency scientific integrity policies and practices when she has violated the very policies she is tasked with imposing on Federal agencies."
In August 2022, the National Academy of Sciences stated, "[e]ffective August 8, for a five-year period, the NAS Council has barred Jane Lubchenco from being involved in NAS publications; serving on or participating in NAS and NRC program activities; and receiving NAS honors or awards." The publication Axios noted, the ban "stems from section 3 of its code of conduct. It states that members "shall avoid those detrimental research practices that are clear violations of the fundamental tenets of research."
Science communication Throughout her career, Lubchenco has emphasized the responsibilities scientists have to society and the importance of effective communication between scientists and society. In her 1997 address as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she focused on scientists' "social contract" with society, i.e. their obligation to not only create new knowledge that is helpful to society but also to share that knowledge widely, not just with other scientists. She created three organizations devoted to helping scientists become better communicators. In 1998 and 1999, respectively, she founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program (now the Earth Leadership Program) and COMPASS that train scientists to communicate their research more effectively to citizens, the media, policymakers and business leaders. In 2007, Lubchenco co-founded Climate Central, a not-for-profit, non-advocacy organization whose mission is to communicate the science of climate change to U.S. audiences in a manner that is understandable, relevant, credible and useful.
Lubchenco builds bridges between the scientific community and the general public through her public lectures (e.g. National Academy of Science Public Welfare Medal lecture), writing (e.g. Frontiers in Ecology editorial), and service to various scientific, non-governmental and governmental organizations. She has been a member of the Pew Oceans Commission, the Joint Oceans Commission Initiative, the Aspen Institute Arctic Commission, and the Council of Advisors for Google Ocean.
Scientific leadership
Lubchenco has served the scientific community through leadership in numerous professional societies. She was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 1997–8), the International Council for Science (ICSU; 2002–5), and the Ecological Society of America (1992–93). She served two terms as a Presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed Member of the National Science Board (1996–2006) and was elected to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences and appointed to its executive committee. She has been on the editorial boards of many of the major journals in her field.
Sustainability science Lubchenco led the effort of the Ecological Society of America to identify scientific research priorities (biodiversity, climate change and sustainability science); this effort, called the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative (SBI), charted a new course for the professional scientific society toward more use-inspired science. The SBI connected the dots between seemingly esoteric research topics and real-world environmental problems, demonstrating the relevance and importance of ecological science.
Lubchenco co-founded a research/monitoring/communications collaboration that sought to understand how the near-shore portion of the large marine ecosystem off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California works and is changing, with an eye to improving management and policy. This collaboration across four universities (Oregon State University, University of California, Santa Cruz, Stanford University, University of California, Santa Barbara), called the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) provided a new model for conducting ecosystem-wide research in which each university would conduct the same basic monitoring and research for its portion of the shoreline, allowing greater comparability and power across the entire system. Findings from the PISCO team have been used by managers and policy makers, to understand the emergence of new "dead zones," and the impacts of climate change, ocean acidification, and sea star wasting disease off Washington and Oregon. Further, the findings have been used to inform selection criteria for networks of marine reserves and Marine Protected Areas in California, Washington, and Oregon.
Marine reserves and marine protected areas