UC San Diego is losing a scientist who greatly enriched the school’s efforts to divine the nature of Earth’s oceans and climate and to apply those findings to protecting the planet.
Margaret Leinen says she will retire as director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography next June, ending one of the most prosperous periods in the center’s more than 120-year history.
Research funding has doubled to $307 million since Leinen, a paleo-climatologist, took office in late 2013. Private donations have also doubled, suring $30 million in the past year.
That and other money has enabled Leinen, 77, to do many things — including modernize Scripps’ small fleet of research ships.
In 2016, the center added the 238-foot Sally Ride, a newly-built global research vessel named for the first American woman to travel in space. Ride later served on the UCSD faculty for many years.
The ship has played a major role in climate change research as well as the exploration of undersea tectonic plates capable of producing catastrophic earthquakes.
In 2019, Scripps added the research vessel Bob and Betty Beyster, a 42-foot boat that scientists use to explore near-shore waters to study everything from coastal erosion to weather.
Leinen also has focused on diversity on the institution’s faculty. Half of the more than 50 hired since she took office have been women.
Last year, she also played a central role in a task force study that revealed that female scientists at Scripps have, over the years, been systematically given much less research and office space than their male peers.
“Margaret Leinen’s leadership and transformation of Scripps have been nothing short of remarkable, and will go down in history as one of the most consequential for the institution, if not for all of science,” Dawn Wright, a member of the Scripps Director’s Council, an advisory group, said in a statement.
