Projects and Leadership

Current and Recent Projects and Leadership Activities

Activities:
Discovering, sharing and using new knowledge. Inspiring and empowering scientists and non-scientists. Partnering with leaders across private and public sectors. Championing science, the ocean, nature, and sustainability. These activities provide valuable opportunities for OSU students to engage, participate and contribute.

Current Leadership Roles:

Reframing our understanding of the importance of the ocean.
As Dr. Lubchenco noted in an editorial in Science, the ocean is not too big to fail, nor is it too big to fix. But it is so central to our future, it is too big to ignore. The ocean holds keys to mitigating and adapting to climate change, achieving food security, stemming loss of biodiversity, addressing equity, and powering local and national economies. This new narrative for the ocean provides hope and practical solutions.

Mainstreaming Nature In Policy and Action. Co-founder, 2025. This effort consists of two components:
1. The Nature Record. Co-founder, member of the Secretariat (governing body). The Nature Record will be the first knowledge assessment of nature in the U.S. Scheduled for release in Q4 of 2026, it will (a) take stock of what is known in the published scientific literature and accepted traditional knowledge about the state of wildlife, lands, freshwater and the ocean in the U.S.; (b) why it matters to our health, security and safety, culture, economy, and climate solutions; and (c) what options exist to help ensure a vibrant future for people and nature.
2. Mainstreaming Nature in Public Policy. Co-founder (with Dr. Heather Tallis). Building on the multiple successes from our work at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, we seek to develop more effective strategies to incorporate nature into key decisions across sectors and governmental agencies – from transportation to defense, from housing to energy to health.

MPA Science and Accountability. Co-Founder and Co-Project Leader, 2017-2021; Senior Advisor, 2025-present. Drs. Kristen Grorud-Colvert and Jenna Sullivan-Stack are the current leaders. This effort has two projects.

The MPA Guide: A global collaboration of Marine Protected Area experts from the social and natural sciences convened by governmental, non-governmental, and academic leaders (Oregon State University, IUCN, UNEP, National Geographic Society, Marine Conservation Institute and others), to bring science-based clarity and transparency to Marine Protected Area (MPA) decisions.

The foundational paper, The MPA Guide: A framework to achieve global goals for the ocean (published in Science), clarified the features that make an MPA effective in protecting biodiversity and delivering ecological and social benefits. It concluded that (a) MPAs differ significantly from one another, depending on the level of protection they provide (protection from abatable threats such as fishing, mining, oil and gas exploration and extraction, dumping, etc.); (b) the enabling conditions under which an MPA is established and implemented are key to its effectiveness; and (c) simply creating an MPA on paper or in law does little to protect biodiversity; it is only when that MPA is implemented, enforced, well-resourced, and actively managed that biodiversity benefits happen.

The MPA Guide is accompanied by practical tools (available in multiple languages) to make the scientific information accessible and useable. Since publication in 2021, the MPA Guide has proven popular and useful. The paper has been downloaded from the Science website over 45,000 times and has been used in at least 19 countries to guide their MPA assessments. The Marine Conservation Institute uses the MPA Guide as the definitive tool to assess over 90% of global MPA area (see MPAtlas). The Protected Planet 2024 report of the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre uses The MPA Guide findings as the only existing dataset showing how much of the ocean is likely to be effectively conserved.
The MPA Accountability Project: with Dr. Kirsten Grorud-Colvert and collaborators to analyze progress on completing MPA commitments made at the Our Ocean Conferences.

Drs. Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, J. Lubchenco and Jenna Sullivan-Stack celebrating the High Seas Treaty and the role the MPA Guide played, 2026

Recent Leadership Roles:

High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. Science Advisor, 2017-2021; Co-chair of Expert Group, 2018-2021; U.S. Sherpa (special presidential envoy) to the Ocean Panel, 2021-2025.

The Ocean Panel is a collaboration of now 19 sitting heads of state or government in which sustainable production, effective protection and equitable prosperity go hand-in hand. As co-chair of the over 400-member Expert Group from over 60 countries, Dr. Lubchenco oversaw commissioning and production of 16 scientific syntheses that assessed the state of knowledge of topics of interest to the Ocean Panel and informed the policies agreed upon by the Presidents and Prime Ministers. For a summary, see Five Priorities for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Nature 2020); for the final scientific report, see Ocean Solutions that Benefit People, Nature and the Economy; and for the Ocean Panel's commitments to action, see Transformations for a Sustainable Ocean Economy.

Team-based, Rapid Assessment of Community-level coronavirus Epidemics (TRACE), Co-Founder, co-PI, member Board of Advisors, Feb 2020-2021; public-health surveillance project at OSU to determine the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in individuals and the wastewater of communities around Oregon and at OSU, and determine genetic sequences of positive samples.

SARS-CoV-2 Illustration Credit: CDC

TRACE OSU campus testing Credit: Oregon State University

National Ocean Protection Coalition. Co-founder and chair. 2014-2021. A coalition of over fifty U.S. not-for-profit organizations to promote the use of effective Marine Protected Areas in U.S. federal waters.
Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS), Scientific Advisor and member of the Foundation Board, 2016-2021. Organized by the Stockholm Resilience Center, a collaboration between scientists and the CEOs of many of the largest seafood companies in the world, SeBOS is committed to improving ocean stewardship.
OSU’s Marine Studies Initiative. Advisor to OSU's President and Provost, 2014-2021; Work with MSI and Hatfield Marine Science Center leadership to guide development of the initiative to integrate ocean research, teaching, and outreach across OSU’s 11 colleges.

PISCO: Harnessing Science to Deliver Knowledge in a Large Marine Ecosystem. The Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO), established in 1999, provided a new opportunity for academic scientists across disciplines and partner institutions to collaborate to understand how the nearshore coastal ecosystem along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California works and is changing. Lubchenco co-founded and then led PISCO for 10 years until she became Administrator of NOAA.

PISCO recently celebrated 20 years of delivering innovative science that is key to informing management and policy.

Lubchenco was also involved in the activities of several not-for-profit organizations or philanthropic foundations on whose boards she served.