Nancy Knowlton
Nancy Knowlton at World Oceans Day in 2015
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley Harvard University
Spouse	Jeremy Jackson (m. 1983)
Children	2
Awards	Leopold Leadership Fellow (1999); Benchley Award for Science (2009); Heinz Award with special focus on the environment (2011)
Scientific career
Fields	Coral reef biologist
Institutions	University of California, San Diego Smithsonian Institution

Nancy Knowlton is a coral reef biologist and a former Sant Chair for Marine Science^[1] at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Life

She graduated from Harvard University, and from the University of California, Berkeley, with a PhD. She was a professor at Yale University, then joined the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.^[2]

She is an adjunct professor of marine biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.^[3] While at Scripps, Knowlton also founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. She was named an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 1999 ^[2] and was elected to the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2008. She also serves as one of three co-chairs for the coral reef Census of Marine Life.

She is the author of the book Citizens of the Sea which was published by National Geographic in 2010^[4] to celebrate the end of the Census of Marine Life. In 2011, Knowlton received the 17th Annual Heinz Award with special focus on the environment.^[5] Knowlton was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013.^[6]

Select publications

• Knowlton, N. 2008. "Coral reefs". Current Biology 18: R18-R21.
• Knowlton, N. and J. B. C. Jackson. 2008. "Shifting baselines, local impacts, and global change on coral reefs". PLoS Biology 6: e54, 6 pp.
• Hoegh-Guldberg, O., P. J. Mumby, A. J. Hooten, R. S. Steneck, P. Greenfield, E. Gomez, C. D. Harvell, P. F. Sale, A. J. Edwards, K. Caldeira, N. Knowlton, C. M. Eakin, R. Iglesias-Prieto, N. Muthiga, R. H. Bradbury, A. Dubi, and M. E. Hatziolos. 2007. "Coral reefs under rapid climate change and ocean acidification". Science 318: 1737-1742.
• Knowlton, N. 2004. "Multiple “stable” states and the conservation of marine ecosystems". Progress in Oceanography. 60: 387-396.
• Fukami, H., A. F. Budd, G. Paulay, A. Solé-Cava, C. A. Chen, K. Iwao, and N. Knowlton. 2004. "Conventional taxonomy obscures deep divergence between Pacific and Atlantic corals". Nature 427: 832-835.
• Rohwer, F., V. Seguritan, F. Azam, and N. Knowlton 2002. "High diversity and species-specific distribution of coral-associated bacteria". Marine Ecology Progress Series 243: 1-10.
• Knowlton, N. 2001. "The future of coral reefs." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98:5419-5425.
• Williams, S. T. and N. Knowlton. 2001. "Mitochondrial pseudogenes are pervasive and often insidious in the snapping shrimp genus Alpheus". Molecular Biology and Evolution 18:1484-1493.
• Knowlton, N. 2000. "Molecular genetics analyses of species boundaries in the sea". Hydrobiologia 420:73-90.
• Herre, A., N. Knowlton, U. Mueller and S. Rehner. 1999. "The evolution of mutualisms: Exploring the paths between conflict and cooperation". Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14:49-53.