The White House today announced the President's intent to nominate Marcia McNutt to be Director of the USGS and to become the first geologist to serve as Science Advisor to the Secretary of the Interior. [photo credit, MBARI]
The White House posted this bio of Dr. McNutt:
Dr. Marcia McNutt studied geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California and earned her PhD there in Earth Sciences in 1978. She spent 3 years with the USGS in California working on earthquake prediction. She joined the faculty at MIT in 1982 where she was appointed the Griswold Professor of Geophysics and served as Director of the Joint Program in Oceanography & Applied Ocean Science & Engineering, a joint program offered by both MIT & the Woods Hole Oceanography Institution. Marcia has participated in 15 major oceanographic expeditions and served as chief scientist on more than half of those voyages. She has published 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles and also chaired the President's Panel on Ocean Exploration convened by President Clinton to examine the possibility of initiating a major US program in exploring the oceans. She is a fellow for the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Association of Geodesy. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and serves on numerous evaluation and advisory boards for institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford University, Harvard University and Science Magazine.