Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences Tony Haymet, a highly distinguished chemist, is the director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Before moving to La Jolla last fall, he served as Chief of Marine and Atmospheric Research, then Director of Science and Policy, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world. A native Australian now leading Scripps, he has again taken the helm of one of the world’s most important research centers for ocean and earth science. Here, he talks about Scripps’s enduring vitality and the future of global science research.

Haymet: Throughout my scientific research career and most recently as Chief of Australia’s equivalent of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I have always held Scripps in the highest esteem as the best in its field.  Also, I’ve had a strong connection to Scripps over the years. My predecessor at CSIRO, Dr. Nan Bray, came from Scripps, and the scientific diving program at McMurdo Sound that provided such wonderful support to our CSIRO research was run by Scripps staff.  

To have the opportunity to lead this institution now as its faculty, staff, and students embark on a second century of exploration and discovery is truly the high point in my career.  In fact, I am not new to the UC system, since I started my career as an assistant professor at Berkeley in 1983.  I’m very pleased to be back at this prestigious academic university. UC San Diego has a rapidly growing reputation as one of the nation’s top research universities and I can’t imagine a better time to be part of its leadership team.

Haymet: Now in its second century, Scripps Oceanography’s scientific scope has grown to include major studies of the entire earth as a system, including biology and the atmosphere.  I’m quite seriously focused on creating a stable financial course for Scripps, including strategic planning for research and teaching endeavors.  

One of my top priorities is students.  I want to ensure that Scripps recruits the best and brightest graduate students and postdocs, and make certain that their time at Scripps is rewarding and prepares them well for a meaningful career.  I am also continuing the legacy begun so successfully by my predecessor, Charlie Kennel, to build strong undergraduate programs that capitalize on the best teaching Scripps has to offer.  Providing undergraduates with access to Scripps’s brilliant minds and to our state-of-the-art laboratories and resources will help ensure continuing, strong undergraduate programs in earth and marine sciences for UC San Diego.  

It’s also inevitable that developing strong and vital external partnerships will be crucial to Scripps for building large, interdisciplinary research projects that provide a wide range of benefits to society and the environment.

Haymet: Scripps has among its most valuable resources the largest and most complete university–based oceanographic collection in the world.  Students and scientists from around the world utilize these extensive resources - invertebrates, fish, core sediments and fossils, and dredged rocks - for their research in marine biology, fisheries, Earth’s history, climate science, and ocean pollution.  The collections form a foundation for understanding present and predicting the future oceans and their inhabitants.  They are irreplaceable because they record the state of the ocean environment at specific points in time over the past century.  This collection, also vital for teaching, is threatened by budget cuts, but, with luck, our friends and donors will quickly come to our aid to help save these crucial resources.

Funding for our research ships, the very heart of sea-going science, is also threatened by lack of funding.  The national oceanographic fleet serves as no other resource can for providing direct access to the sea for teaching and research, and it needs to be refreshed over the next 8-10 years.

From a more global perspective, the financial model (on which all the great U.S. oceanographic institutions are based) is changing, and we will have to broaden our sources of income greatly in order to survive.  I have the sense that we are off to a good start.

Haymet: I’ve been impressed greatly by the level of commitment and dedication of the faculty and staff here at Scripps, and throughout UC San Diego.  It’s this level of devotion that inspires me and it’s what makes a good university great.  UC San Diego promotes an intellectual spirit of innovation that encourages growth and excellence.  And the entrepreneurial environment at Scripps serves us well in recruiting creative thinkers who bring new and intriguing ideas to ocean and earth science.  Scripps was built on a legacy of entrepreneurial spirit and it’s refreshing to see that contagious spirit alive and prospering at Scripps and UC San Diego today.

On the downside, there are a lot fewer uncommitted resources than I had envisioned from the other side of the Pacific!  We operate a very large “soft money” institution here on a razor-thin budget, thanks in greatest measure to the extraordinary success of our scientists in raising federal grant support.  From that success flows everything at Scripps, in research, teaching, and outreach.

Haymet:Global warming response is probably the most obvious arena in which we have a clear sense of mission.  We do have a responsibility to help industry respond to the need for alternative sources of energy, and to help legislators and agencies at the local, state, federal, and international levels to make the best, most prudent decisions concerning adaptation to and mitigation of climate change effects.  

In the past few decades, a picture has been emerging of a world changed by climate in the 21st Century.  It's our job to improve that picture continually, to give it sharpness and dimension so that we can better know what we're facing.  It's also our job not just to monitor the known harbingers of climate change, but to look for more subtle effects.  Ocean acidification, for instance, is one of the less publicized consequences of climate change but we're finding that this heretofore underappreciated phenomenon could have a drastic effect on ocean ecosystems.  For all these reasons, Scripps is pursuing endowments to create new faculty positions in various areas of climate change research and to vigorously support research endeavors already underway.

We should emphasize that even if the climate were not changing, there are many pressures on our oceans, especially on its biological systems.  Pollution and overfishing are threatening marine biodiversity throughout the oceans.  Coral reefs and other ecosystems that once thrived are facing uncertain futures.

Haymet: Our interdisciplinary nature is the cornerstone of what make Scripps unique and such a vital contributor to global ocean and earth science. The cross-cutting nature of our research attracts the most promising students and most enterprising researchers, and creates a workplace that inspires original ideas that have the capacity to make the world a better place for people and other organisms. Scientists here can easily walk down the hall to collaborate with colleagues in different disciplines to discuss some of the most pressing and complex issues facing us today. Scripps’s mission is to teach and conduct research at the highest level for the benefit of society and the environment, and through our inventive, cutting-edge, cross-cutting research, we can achieve our goals much more quickly.

Haymet: Our scientific achievements in 2006-07, our new postdoc program, our vigor in thinking about graduate and undergraduate teaching, and our outreach, exemplified by the new climate exhibit at Birch Aquarium – and almost balancing the budget in 2006-07.

Haymet: As a youngster in Australia, my family took holidays at the seaside and very early on I was drawn to the sea.  I was and still am happiest when in salt water!

Haymet: We are facing a rapidly changing climate that has the potential to change the very face of the planet.  The threats we see range from acidification of the oceans impacting the base of the marine food web, to currently grounded glaciers slipping into the oceans, to drastic catastrophic weather conditions, to raging fires and the loss of plentiful drinking water right here in Southern California.

At Scripps, we are conducting the critical scientific research that will enable citizens and decision makers to take steps necessary to curb the threats that face us today.  By listening to scientists, such as those at Scripps who devote their careers to understanding our planet, we offer hope for generations to come.