Jim Harvey, PhD
JIM HARVEY is the Director of Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML), which administers the Master of Science in marine science program for the California State Universities in northern and central California. Jim joined the faculty in 1989 where he taught for 23 years. He then became Chair of the Department for 4 years, responsible for the academic program, before being appointed as Director in 2013.
Jim was born in San Diego and lived there for just one year, before his father, who was getting his masters at San Diego State, moved to Berkeley to do his PhD in botany. Jim was raised in the Santa Clara Valley, now known as Silicon Valley, where he went to San Jose State for his undergraduate work.
Jim always had an interest in marine biology, but the path to his current career wasn’t foreordained. His father taught at San Jose State University (SJSU) as a botanist, with a strong geology background and extensive knowledge of birds. According to Jim, his dad seemed to know everything, and he knew he could never compete with his dad. While out surfing one day Jim had an epiphany: ‘marine science’! His dad didn’t know anything about marine science.
After getting his Bachelor’s Degree at SJSU, Jim attended MLML where he completed a Masters Degree studying the feeding, reproduction and aging of blue sharks. He got his PhD from Oregon State University completing his Doctoral Thesis on harbor seals. Jim continued his studies spending two years at the NOAA facility in Seattle as a Post Doc student.
During those two years, he was considered a jack-of-all-trades, as he already had tagging experience, aerial survey experience, and had handled animals before. NOAA always sent Jim when something needed to be done in Alaska. When gray whales got caught in ice and they wanted to tag them, they sent Jim as he had previous experience tagging gray whales. When the Exxon Valdez spill occurred in Prince Williams Sound, they sent Jim to do aerial surveys for oil and its impact on wildlife. He recollects that they sent him to every natural and man-made disaster in Alaska for those two years.
Just when Jim finished his PostDoc, a position opened up at MLML. What incredible luck! As a student at MLML, Jim had decided the kind of job he’d really like was an MLML job. It was a small marine lab with lots of good graduate students, a very dynamic place. So he geared his work experience towards the skills he’d need, purposely taking jobs and training that would enable him to get the kind of position he wanted. Little did he know that even his ‘natural disaster’ experiences would come in handy.
Jim became a professor at San Jose State in 1989, stationed at MLML. He arrived 2 months before the 1989 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the lab. Jim was in the lab at the time, as the foundation moved 3’ towards the ocean. The whole lab didn’t fall down, but ended up severely tilted. He recalls it was pretty exciting. A geological oceanographer was helping teach the class, and the two of them had just finished and walked out the classroom door as the quake started. Jim yelled back into the room to get the students out, and they were already running as he yelled ‘Earth…….!’.
Jim and his colleague ran into the atrium as students tried to run out the main door. A 2-story seawater tank outside was swaying from side to side with about five feet of water sloshing out the top. Students were going to run right beneath it, and Jim yelled, “NO, NO, come back!” So they all stood there trying to keep their feet under them. Cracks were forming in the ground at least a foot wide and three feet deep. According to Jim, you were just kind of dancing around trying to stay upright. The shaking only lasted 14 seconds, but it seemed like 2 minutes. Built on sand, the whole area liquefied causing great damage to the structures. The building was red-tagged and knocked down with everything in it, including Masters theses.
Jim and others convinced the county to put in structural supports, and for 2 days, staff and students passed stuff out the door through a human chain. Everything was stored in Salinas. And for the next ten years classes were held in trailers in Salinas, nearly 60 miles from Monterey Bay.
