Sharon L. Smith

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Sharon Louise Smith is an American marine ecologist who studies zooplankton and how they respond to climate change. She is Professor Emeritus at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami. She earned a BA in biology from Colorado College in 1967, an MS in zoology from the University of Auckland in 1969, and a PhD in zoology from Duke University in 1975.

Her interest in ocean science began in childhood during family sailing trips. She planned to be a doctor but switched to zoology in college. After Duke, she did postdoctoral work at Dalhousie University and spent more than ten years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she studied the Somali Current during the monsoon season through several cruises in the 1970s.

In 1993 she joined the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, where she later became the dean of the undergraduate marine science program. Her PhD work showed that zooplankton release ammonia and urea in coastal estuaries but are not the main source of regenerated nitrogen. She also studied nutrient cycles in the Greenland Sea and how copepods and their prey affect egg production.

Smith led NSF-funded projects in the Arabian Sea as part of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study, starting in 1994, and later reflected on carbon cycling, natural iron enrichment, and what ancient ocean data can tell us about how ecosystems respond to climate change. In 2006 she received a Fulbright Scholar Award to research in Oman and teach at Sultan Qaboos University, where she studied how copepod communities adapt to monsoon-driven upwelling and co-authored two taxonomic books on Arabian Sea copepods.

Her Arctic research focuses on how warming and melting sea ice change food for small marine organisms. In 2004 she helped document walrus pups left behind when mothers followed retreating ice, a story covered by the press. She serves on ARCUS’s Bering Ecosystem Science committee. In 2008 she became the sponsor of the Celebrity Solstice cruise ship, the first ocean scientist to hold that role, and she used the moment to encourage people to get regular cancer screenings as she is a two-time cancer survivor.