Water has always been a big part of Marilou Simonsen Seiff's life. As a teenager, she drove a ski boat to and from high school in the Sacramento Delta. After graduating from Stanford, she worked at Marineland in Southern California, swimming with dolphins and feeding moray eels.
More than 30 years later, Seiff is executive director of Redwood City's Marine Science Institute. She might spend her day driving the institute's 90-foot research vessel around the bay, wrangling an errant ray for an audience of awed schoolchildren, or trying to negotiate a deal to buy land for the institute.
MSI, founded in 1970, offers a link between environmental concern and Bay Area education. Its programs for schoolchildren—who now travel from as far as Idaho and Washington state—enable kids to be oceanographers for a day. Seiff and her mostly part-time staff of 22 work out of a ramshackle metal building once owned by SLAC.
Seiff “fell in love with what is under the water” at Stanford in lecturer Chuck Baxter's ecology course. During her senior year, she did a stint at Hopkins Marine Station and met her future husband, Stuart, '76, now an ophthalmologist in San Francisco. Seiff completed a master's at the University of the Pacific and, while raising three children, volunteered by teaching marine biology in local schools. In 1996, she joined MSI. She became director in 2003.
Seiff, always with a smile, seems unfazed by the dirty parts of the job. When her black suede jacket is doused with seawater by a fish flopping around in an on-boat pool, she digs right back in. “When I am teaching, it reminds me why I do this,” Seiff says aboard MSI's ship as a group of Los Altos sixth graders chant “man overboard, man overboard” for a safety drill. “I keep in touch with what's working and what's not.”
Her next challenge is to increase the visibility of the institute, secure the land MSI stands on (now owned by Abbott Laboratories), and raise $5 million to $6 million for a new facility that can accommodate the program's growth. When Seiff became director, the institute ran 320 boat outings a year. Now it runs more than 400. Students trawl for fish and track what they find—data that help track the impact of environmental change on the bay. They also touch sharks pulled off the bay floor and comb through mud to find invertebrates. Seiff says that hands-on connection gives kids—half a million of them since 1970—a real appreciation for the environment.
