Dr Marcia McNutt

Career Advice I Would Give my Younger Self (Video Presentation)

The benefit of reaching the waning years of one’s career is that it is easier to assess which actions and decisions were important and which were not in the arc of one’s professional development. Taking into account that the world of science today is not the same one that I entered, there are clearly some choices that I would make differently, but others that are enduring. In this brief presentation, I will review what counted and what didn’t in terms of future success, with some examples.

Biography

Dr Marcia McNutt (B.A. in physics, Colorado College; Ph.D. in Earth sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography) is a geophysicist and the 22nd president of the National Academy of Sciences. From 2013 to 2016, she was editor-in-chief of Science journals. McNutt was director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 2009 to 2013, during which time USGS responded to a number of major disasters, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. For her work to help contain that spill, McNutt was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard’s Meritorious Service Medal. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Association of Geodesy. McNutt is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, UK, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1998, McNutt was awarded the AGU’s Macelwane Medal for research accomplishments by a young scientist, and she received the Maurice Ewing Medal in 2007 for her contributions to deep-sea exploration.