Scripps Says Farewell to a Stabilizing, Transformative Force

Margaret Leinen inherited a research center facing severe budget problems, a perception that it was not doing enough to integrate with UC San Diego and a somewhat resistant old guard when she became the eleventh director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2013.

Colleagues say that as Leinen steps down this week, she is leaving Scripps in a far better position on all fronts, even as the whole of the American research community confronts an uncertain future. Hers might never have been called a campaign to win hearts and minds, but that was the effect she had, according to several in the Scripps community. 

“Margaret’s constant focus on ensuring that leadership serves the faculty, students and staff at Scripps has created one of the most robust, functional and supportive facilities and administrative units on campus,” said Scripps Deputy Director Jack Gilbert, a microbiologist recruited to UC San Diego in 2019. 

David Victor, a distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, credits Leinen with creating “a welcome, inviting force at Scripps,” one open to new kinds of interdisciplinary research. 

“A lot of us who do research that isn’t traditional have flourished at Scripps with Margaret’s welcome,” said Victor, who also has an appointment at Scripps, “ and that has helped, in my case, connect with the Scripps research community and do new things — for example, our first-of-a-kind studies that look at how carbon removal technologies can scale. Margaret helped put that research together and also helped us work with philanthropists to fund them.”

The first line of the entry about Leinen in the history books will likely point out that she was the first woman to helm Scripps as an appointed director. Leinen herself said she never felt like that gender made much of a difference in how she did her job. By the time she took on the role, the novelty had worn off in the world of academia with several women in chief posts around the country. At Scripps, geophysicist Cathy Constable had already been serving as interim director for over a year before Leinen arrived.

“If there was anything about that that was important, it's that female students and faculty could see that a woman could be a director at Scripps,” Leinen said. “By the time I got here, there was a feeling that it was going to happen eventually and it happened.”

Leinen has been acclimating her successor, Meenakshi Wadhwa, to life at Scripps in recent months in preparation for Wadhwa’s assumption of the role on Oct. 1. With cuts taking place in most American science arenas and the University of California under scrutiny by the federal government, Leinen could have been forgiven for choosing now to head for the exit. Instead she is wistful about how she is leaving the institution for Wadhwa, a feeling she believes is common among people who have held leadership positions for long periods of time. 

“When somebody has served a long time in a place and they decide to step down then some big bad thing happens like the current uncertainty about science funding in the U.S., there’s a feeling of not wanting to leave it vulnerable,” she said. “It’s not that I think Scripps is vulnerable — I think Scripps has great resilience — but you feel like ‘I wish I could have left everything just so for the next person.’”

Yet, Leinen’s record suggests the biggest challenge will be in maintaining the trajectory she has set. In her tenure, Scripps’ funded research rose from $150 million to $300 million. A half dozen new research centers such as the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology and the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation now exist on campus, as do the one-of-a-kind ocean simulator SOARS and the Ted and Jean Scripps Marine Conservation and Technology Facility, which comes complete with a restaurant featuring stunning coastline views. 

In 2013, there were 2,872 students in UC San Diego undergraduate courses taught by Scripps professors. By 2024, the number had grown to 7,196, a reflection of Leinen’s expectation that researchers make teaching a bigger part of their job. To aid the cause, Leinen hired five teaching professors to support undergraduate programs.

“She’s completed the evolution of Scripps’ perspective to see itself as a full part of the educational program at UC San Diego,” Constable said.

New, or at least reinvigorated during Leinen’s tenure, was the institution’s focus on what she has called solution-based science. This kind of research is a form of basic science that addresses societal needs. Across the Scripps campus, that research has resulted in pathogen forecast tools the public can use to gauge pollution in ocean water and a network of cameras that allow fire agencies to track blazes almost from the moment of their inception. Data from Scripps scientists is helping hospitals be ready for heavy ER caseloads when wildfires and heat waves converge. Coral and algae researchers are developing products including cattle feed supplements to mitigate methane and gels that encourage corals to build reefs. Scripps forecasts for water managers means more water availability in the West with improved flood risk mitigation.

“I was continually struck by her ability to frame ocean and earth science as more than science,” said Scripps marine geochemist Amina Schartup. “She spoke not only about discovery and research, but also about how our work connects to people’s everyday questions and needs.”

The emphasis on solution science that results in products of use and benefit to the taxpayer makes good political sense as public trust in institutions such as academia slips, said colleagues and friends of Leinen. The path she set for scientists to nurture their entrepreneurial spirit has served as another practical improvement bringing Scripps to new audiences, said Mary Ann Beyster, who has been a member of the Scripps Director’s Council since 2017 and whose family’s largesse has graced the Scripps campus with a new research vessel and an exhibit of little blue penguins at Birch Aquarium, among other support. 

“I’ve been impressed by Margaret’s scientific acumen, leadership within UC San Diego and globally, and her inspirational support to people advancing bold innovations through research, education and entrepreneurship,” Beyster said. “Her encouragement to launch and scale Scripps’ StartBlue Ocean Enterprise Accelerator program has been instrumental in the growth of this critical regional and now national blue technology program.”  

Colleagues give Leinen credit for being able to hire any new faculty at all when she arrived at Scripps with a tight budget facing the institution. Leinen and UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla agreed, though, that with an aging faculty with few women and even fewer people of color, Scripps was due for a face lift. 

“She opened opportunities for a new generation of faculty in subject areas that we haven’t been in before,” said Constable. “The broad range of people we were able to recruit were very much a result of her efforts.”

“By bringing in diverse faculty — both scientifically and culturally — whose work extends beyond traditional oceanography, she enabled me and many others working at disciplinary intersections to build coalitions and pursue ambitious projects that transcend boundaries to tackle the difficult questions of our era,” added Schartup, who joined Scripps in 2019. 

On a more global stage, Leinen is credited by several in the Scripps community and beyond for not only bringing the institution’s name to an international audience but also in advancing the cause of the ocean as a subject in need of governmental attention in negotiations such as the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) hosted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In the fraught talks, she and others managed to do something that had seemed impossible. In 2015, ocean research organizations successfully got the ocean recognized in negotiation text after more than 20 years of exclusion.

Erica Ferrer attended several of the climate conferences as a Scripps student and took in Leinen’s leadership of the University of California delegation.

“Margaret's vision for what Scripps' role at COP could or should be has been critical in advancing ocean conservation efforts,” said Ferrer, now a postdoctoral scholar at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. “Margaret served as an important role model for me as someone interested in connecting my science to policy, and as a young woman in science operating in a diplomatic capacity. She demonstrated how to join that space with grace and tact — ready to be a voice for the ocean and to listen.”

Leinen also spearheaded the creation of the Ocean Pavilion, now a regular exhibit in the trade show-like arenas that surround UN negotiation rooms at COPs. The force of the united ocean research community channeled through the pavilion appears to have increased the profile of the ocean further in negotiations. 

Colleagues aren’t surprised by this. It is a consequence of Leinen’s putting larger interests first over her own.

“Scripps is radically more visible at major international institutions, including the COP, thanks to her leadership — and to Margaret, personally, showing up everywhere,” said Victor. “She doesn’t just wave our flag, but she also shows the rest of the world how cutting-edge ocean and climate science is important to the policy agenda.”