About me
Peter B. de Menocal is the president and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the world’s largest independent organization dedicated to ocean research, engineering, and education. He joined WHOI in 2020 to lead the institution to advance breakthrough ocean science and technology to protect ocean ecosystems, improve human lives and livelihoods, and find solutions to global challenges. He is leading the most successful and ambitious capital campaign in WHOI’s nearly century-long history. Prior to assuming leadership of WHOI, de Menocal was the Thomas Alva Edison/Con Edison Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
He was Columbia’s Dean of Science for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and founded Columbia’s Center for Climate & Life, a climate solutions research accelerator. A marine geologist and paleoclimatologist, de Menocal’s research uses deep-sea ocean sediments as archives of how and why Earth’s ocean and climate have changed in the past, with a focus on how major events in human evolution may have been shaped by changes in African climate and vegetation. He has published more than 150 scientific papers over his decades-long career in oceanography. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as AGU Emiliani lecturer, a Lenfest Columbia Distinguished Faculty award, and a Distinguished Brooksian award. He earned a doctorate in geology from Columbia University and a master's degree in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University.
