Nancy Rabalais

Nancy N. Rabalais is an American marine ecologist. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, she is the daughter of Kathryn Charlotte Preusch and Stephen Anthony Nash, a mechanical engineer, and the second of four children.^[1] She researches dead zones in the marine environment and is an expert in eutrophication and nutrient pollution.

Rabalais earned her B.S. in 1972 and her M.S. in 1975 from Texas A&M University–Kingsville. After failing to publish a portion of her successful master’s thesis, Rabalais took a 3-year break from research, giving nature tours on Padre Island. She would later go back to graduate studies, working towards her Ph.D., where she studied fiddler crabs endemic to South Texas. She received her Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.^[2]

Since 1985, Rabalais has studied the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone off the coast of Louisiana, the largest hypoxic zone in the United States. Along with two other researchers, she linked hypoxic zones in the Gulf with Mississippi River estuaries in 1985 through ocean mapping oxygen levels. This work was highlighted on the covers of BioScience in 1991 and Nature in 1994.^[3]

She joined the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) and, with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), identified a substantial hypoxic zone that had been affecting shrimpers.^[4]

Rabalais has testified to Congress on the problem of nutrient pollution from agricultural and storm water runoff.

She was the president of the private and nonprofit Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation from 1997 to 1999.^[5]

She referred to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill as an "oilmageddon".^[6]

She is the executive director of LUMCON, where she is also a professor. She leads annual research surveys to determine the size of the dead zone. She is also director of the Coastal Waters Consortium. She has chaired the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council.^[7]

Rabalais was the recipient of an NOAA Environmental Hero Award^[8] and Aldo Leopold Leadership Program Fellowship in 1999,^[9] a Heinz Award in 2011^[10][11] and MacArthur Fellowship in 2012.^[12]

In 2012 she started the Coastal Waters Consortium, which focused on the effects of the BP oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystems and food webs within.^[13]

Rabalais has been published in the journals Biogeosciences, BioScience, Nature, and Science.

She is married to R. Eugene Turner, a colleague whom she has published work with before, including their book Coastal Hypoxia: Consequences for Living Resources and Ecosystems.^[14] His work focuses inshore, while hers is in the waters of the Gulf. They have a 16-year-old daughter, Emily.^[15]

References

External links

• Hypoxia in the Northern Gulf of Mexico