Greg Hirth

Greg Hirth spent much of his youth enthusiastically running around the woods of Ohio and the mountains of Colorado. He went to Indiana University to study political science with an idealistic goal of changing the role of politics in environmental affairs. But he quickly changed his major to geology, motivated partly by opportunities to work in the field. In his geology textbooks, Hirth read about the research of his father John, a material scientist. That spurred his pursuit of a Ph.D. degree in rock deformation at Brown University, where he met his wife, Ann Mulligan (now an Assistant Scientist in the Marine Policy Center at WHOI). Hirth came to WHOI in 1993, where he has pursued a myriad of research opportunities in the lab (particularly with colleagues at MIT), ocean, and field. He is particularly grateful for his colleagues’ encouragement to go back to his roots and study geology in the field. Ann and Greg now enjoy gardening, following the fortunes of the Patriots and Red Sox, and the wilds of Cape Cod, through which Hirth also leads trips for the Cape Cod Bird Club.