Marcia K. McNutt

Dr. McNutt served as the director of USGS and science advisor to the Secretary of the Interior concurrently. As Director, she reorganized scientific disciplines as collaborative mission areas.  She also led the bureau responses to several environmental disasters including earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, Hurricane Sandy, and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, for which the U.S. Coast Guard awarded her the Meritorious Service Medal. 

As a scientist, Dr. McNutt participated in 15 major oceanographic expeditions and served as chief scientist on more than half of those voyages. She also published 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Her research ranged from studies of ocean island volcanism in French Polynesia to continental breakup in the Western United States to uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. 

Dr. McNutt received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. As a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, she studied geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where she earned a Doctorate in Earth Sciences. Dr. McNutt then spent three years with the USGS in Menlo Park, CA, working on earthquake prediction. 

Dr. McNutt served as President of the American Geophysical Union from 2000 to 2002. She was Chair of the Board of Governors for Joint Oceanographic Institutions, helping to bring about its merger with the Consortium for Ocean Research and Education to become the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, for which she served as Trustee. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Association of Geodesy. 

Dr. McNutt’s honors and awards included membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota and from Colorado College. Dr. McNutt was awarded the Macelwane Medal in 1988 by the American Geophysical Union for research accomplishments by a young scientist and the Maurice Ewing Medal in 2007 for her significant contributions to deep-sea exploration. She has served on numerous evaluation and advisory boards for institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford University, Harvard University, Science Magazine, and Schlumberger. 

McNutt is a native of Minneapolis, MN, where she graduated as class valedictorian from Northrop Collegiate School in 1970.