Lisa Levin

Lisa A. Levin
Alma mater	Radcliffe College Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Scientific career
Institutions	North Carolina State University(1983-1992) Scripps Institution of Oceanography(1992-Present)
Doctoral advisor	Paul K. Dayton
Website	levin.ucsd.edu

Lisa A. Levinis a Distinguished Professor of biological oceanography and marine ecology at theScripps Institution of Oceanography.She holds the Elizabeth Hamman and Morgan Dene Oliver Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Science. She studies coastal and deep-sea ecosystems and is a Fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early life and education

Levin grew up inLos Angeles.She went on to complete her B.A. degreesumma cum laudein Biology atRadcliffe Collegein 1975.She joined theScripps Institution of Oceanographyfor her graduate studies, earning a PhD in Oceanography from theUniversity of California, San Diegoin 1982.Her PhD advisor wasPaul K. Dayton.Her dissertation was on tidal flat ecology and deep-sea sediments.Her postdoctoral advisors were Rudolph Scheltema andHal Caswellat theWoods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Research

She joinedNorth Carolina State Universityas an assistant professor in 1983. Levin then moved to theScripps Institution of Oceanographyin 1992 as an associate professor. In the mid-1990s she became interested in deep-sea environments, including methane seeps and oxygen minimum zones.These are the regions of ocean that were deprived of oxygen – between 200 and 1,000 metres deep with less than 90% of the surface oxygen.Her work also considers the structure of vulnerable ecosystems, wetland biotic interactions and larval ecology of coastal marine populations.She has worked extensively in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans using a range of deep-sea equipment including submersibles, remotely operated underwater vehicles.She has participated in over 40 oceanographic expeditions. She monitoredcold seepsediments, checking the interaction of fauna with flow and reporting the first review of the different size groups of organisms.

Together with her students, Levin has worked with a broad range of taxa, from microbes andmicroalgaeto invertebrates, fishes and whales. Her recent research has emphasized 3 major themes:

• the structure, function and vulnerability of continental margin ecosystems, particularly those subject to oxygen and sulphide stress,ocean acidificationandocean deoxygenation
• wetland biotic interactions as they mediate marsh function, invasion and restoration
• larval ecology of coastal marine populations with emphasis on connectivity.

She served on theSan DiegoWetlands Advisory Board.She was an editor of the journalMarine Ecologyand founding editorial board member of theAnnual Review of Marine Science.She joined theUNESCOIntergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 2000.She reported massive single-cellxenophyophoresin theMariana Trenchin 2011.

In 2011 she was made the director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, which she led for six years.She was made theIntergovernmental Oceanographic CommissionAnton Bruun Memorial Lecturer.She gave the Sverdrup Lecture at the 2012American Geophysical UnionMeeting.She was made a Fellow of theAmerican Geophysical Unionin 2013.She co-founded the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI), a group that seeks to integrate science, technology, policy, law and economics to advise on the management of resource use in the deep ocean in order to maintain the integrity of deep-ocean ecosystems.In 2017 she founded the Deep Ocean Observing Strategy (DOOS), which outlines the requirements for future deep ocean observations.

In 2016 she spoke at the2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference.She is interested in the ethical challenges of mining the deep sea for metals.She was part of the 2018World Economic Forum,speaking about the dangers of mining the deep sea bed.She was awarded theAssociation for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography(ASLO)A.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Awardin 2018.and the Prince Albert 1 Grand Medal in Science in 2019. She has published over 280 papers that have been cited more than 30,000 times.In 2024 Levin was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences.