Climate & Sustainability
Charting coastal futures
Alumnus William “Monty” Graham, the new director of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center—one of the nation’s leading hubs for environmental science—brings deep expertise in coastal ecological oceanography and a foundation shaped by UC Santa Cruz values.
William "Monty" Graham (M.S. ’89, marine sciences; Ph.D. ’94, biology)
Every surfer, fisher, and waterperson in Santa Cruz knows this situation well: When strong winds blow across the ocean, the water quickly turns icy for a few days.
But something peculiar happens in the northern reaches of Monterey Bay when those wind-whipped cold, deep waters well up to meet warmer coastal currents.
Here, instead of flowing offshore, cooler, nutrient-rich water gets trapped and mixes with the warmer, more protected waters in the bay—creating warmer surface temperatures and more phytoplankton than typical upwelling zones. This retention effect helps support a rich marine ecosystem.
The anomaly was first described in the early ’90s as an “upwelling shadow” by marine scientist William “Monty” Graham (M.S. ’89, marine sciences; Ph.D. ’94, biology).
This productive zone, long favored by fishermen for its abundant marine life, illustrates a profound ecological principle: healthy ecosystems thrive not despite their complexity, but because of it.
“Healthy ecosystems have high diversity, high species richness, and multiple pathways that energy flows through,” Graham reflects.
It’s a lesson he learned during his transformative years at UC Santa Cruz and one that now guides his vision as the newly appointed director of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).
A journey from Kentucky to the redwoods
Graham’s path to UC Santa Cruz began in an unlikely place—a summer internship at the University of North Carolina’s Marine Lab in Morehead City, where he worked with visiting scientist Alan Shanks (Rachel Carson ’77, biology). Shanks, a former undergraduate student of UC Santa Cruz’s Mary Silver, had helped discover marine snow in Monterey Bay and noticed something curious about local jellyfish behavior.
“He said, ‘Hey, let’s go out and look at this one species of jellyfish. They’re kind of cool because they’re all pointing in the same direction,’” Graham recalls.
That single observation sparked two publications and set the trajectory for Graham’s career. When Shanks encouraged him to work with Silver at UC Santa Cruz, the young scientist originally from Kentucky found himself on a campus unlike any he’d ever imagined.
“I thought I was in heaven,” Graham says of his first impressions. “I would just walk around the redwoods and go over the bridges and inside the redwoods, and everything was just about discovery. You’d find a little path, get off the path, and go tromping through the forest. It’s still the most beautiful campus anywhere.”
An unconventional education
Graham arrived at UC Santa Cruz without research funding, supporting himself as a teaching assistant throughout his graduate studies—an experience that proved formative.
“My mother was a high school teacher, so I enjoyed it [being a TA],” Graham said. “It gave me a much broader sense of scientific disciplines and opportunities, and I met a lot of students and was part of a lot of students’ journeys through the university.”
The marine sciences program at UCSC in the late ’80s and early ’90s fostered an interdisciplinary approach through peer mentoring.
“The mentoring we got was very much a peer mentoring setup,” he said. “Students themselves progressed because we had each other. It allowed for a lot of interdisciplinary exchange between different disciplines within the marine sciences.”
Graham found himself working at the intersection of oceanography and ecology under the guidance of Mary Silver, an oceanographer, and Don Potts, a marine ecologist. In the academic world, these were typically separate disciplines with what Graham describes as “a bright line between those two fields,” but his unique position allowed him to bridge both worlds.
“Looking back, that was really the formative thing for my entire career—marrying oceanography and ecology.”
Defining the upwelling shadow
A highlight of Graham’s doctoral research was identifying and naming the upwelling shadow in Monterey Bay. Using early, low-resolution satellite imagery that many dismissed as unreliable, Graham persisted in documenting a warm water feature that appeared consistently in the northern bay.
“When I finally saw one glorious, clear picture at higher resolution of Monterey Bay, that was my ‘aha’ moment,” said Graham. “I ran down to [biology professor] Todd Newberry‘s office, so excited about this thing that made sense. I was like, ‘It’s not upwelling. It’s the shadow of an upwelling.’”
The discovery explained why the northern bay was the most productive area—a fact salmon fishermen had long known but science had never fully understood. The upwelling shadow made the bay function more like an estuary than a typical upwelling system, with profound implications for larval dispersal and jellyfish swarm formation.
“There have been entire books written on upwelling shadows now,” he said. “Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute [MBARI] scientists have been doing 20 years of studies around it. It’s become quite a famous feature.”
Decoding the mysteries of ancient mariners
Graham’s jellyfish research exemplified the interdisciplinary approach he learned at UC Santa Cruz, tackling organisms that had confounded scientists for centuries. These ancient creatures, unchanged for over 500 million years and organized only at the tissue level without true organs or brains, displayed behaviors that challenged conventional understanding.
The puzzle began with Alan Shanks’s simple observation: Pacific sea nettles in Monterey Bay all pointing in exactly the same direction. Graham was hooked on putting the pieces together. Despite early warnings that studying jellyfish was “esoteric” and wouldn’t sustain a career, Graham developed a strategy of pairing jellyfish research with other fields.
“I always worked with jellyfish and something else,” he said. “Work on jellies and reproduction, jellies and physics, or jellies and fisheries.”
Years later, working with a student studying moon jellies in the Gulf of Mexico, Graham made a crucial discovery about how these seemingly simple animals navigate their world. The breakthrough came through studying the jellies’ statoliths—small sensory organs previously thought to detect only gravity.
“What we showed was, experimentally, they’re not just sensing gravity, they’re sensing acceleration,” said Graham. “So the animals could get into flows of water that are moving differently, and they can sense where the flow differences are, and then reorient themselves by pulsing faster or slower on one side of the body to the other.”
This ability allows jellyfish to position themselves in specific layers of the water column—like different layers of icing on a cake—where they can release their reproductive cells and keep them concentrated for successful fertilization. The discovery revealed sophisticated behavioral ecology in creatures once dismissed as simple drifters.
But Graham’s research went deeper, connecting individual jellyfish behavior to entire ecosystem dynamics. The same moon jellies were overlapping with populations of menhaden, a crucial forage fish in the gulf.
“These animals were not competing with the fish,” he said. “The fish were highly superior at feeding in the same areas. But if you take the fish out, the jellies all of a sudden take off and do really well.”
The jellyfish swarms became living indicators of fishing pressure and ecosystem health—spanning scales from microscopic physics to regional fisheries management.
In 2022, Graham received the ultimate scientific honor when the moon jellies he’d studied for decades were recognized as a distinct species and named Aurelia montyi in his honor.
“It was a tremendous honor. The people I worked with thought highly of the overall impact I had on the field—not because I published the flashiest papers, but because the body of work created a whole new environment for students and young faculty to explore.”
A vision rooted in Santa Cruz values
Now, as Graham steps into his role at SERC, he brings the interdisciplinary perspective and collaborative approach he honed at UC Santa Cruz to one of the nation’s premier environmental research centers. SERC studies the critical continuum “from upland to the ocean,” maintaining multidecade, multigenerational datasets that span forest to farmland to wetlands to bay to ocean.
“We are the caretakers of these magnificent datasets that are critical to understanding things that exist way beyond the timescale of little three-year to five-year chunks of the way science is normally done,” Graham said.
His vision for SERC is to embed research in the real world, work at the edges where disciplines meet, and build diverse, resilient systems.
“We’ve got to embed the research we’re doing with fishers and farmers and foresters,” he said. “Those elements have to be there because they’re part of the world we’re trying to understand over the long term, and we can learn something from them as well.”
Advice: Learn to swim where the waters mix
Graham’s advice to current UC Santa Cruz students echoes the principles that shaped his own education: embrace interdisciplinary thinking, work at the boundaries between fields, and bring real-world perspectives into academic pursuits. He advocates for students to be “as diverse as you can in your training” and to “work at the edges where they touch other disciplines.”
Drawing parallels between ecological and economic systems, Graham sees environmental scientists as uniquely positioned to understand complex, interconnected challenges.
“We can understand the complexities of the natural world,” he said, “that are very much in parallel with the complexities of the human-built world.”