Dr. Richard Murray

Rick Murray is the Deputy Director and Vice President for Science and Engineering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He was a Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University (BU) from 1992 - 2019. He served as Director, Division of Ocean Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2015-2018. In addition to his NSF duties, he served as a Co-chair for the Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology, as part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President, during both the Obama and Trump administrations. While at BU, Murray was the Director of the BU Marine Program from 2006-2009, and Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences from 2000-2005. He received his undergraduate degree at Hamilton College (1985), and also graduated from the Sea Education Association’s (SEA’s) program in Woods Hole (Class W-71). After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1991), he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island.

Murray’s research interests are in marine geochemistry, with an emphasis on sedimentary chemical records of climate change, volcanism, and tropical oceanographic processes, and in the chemistry of the subseafloor biosphere. A seagoing oceanographer, he has participated on many research cruises in various capacities around the globe. He has authored or co-authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed research papers, is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, a former Trustee of SEA, and helped initiate and manage the Link Foundation’s Ph.D. Fellowship Program in “Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation”. Murray is a former Councilor of The Oceanography Society, and is currently on the Board of Directors of the American Geophysical Union. He was an elected Selectmen in Scituate, MA, from 2006 to 2014, and has been active in town governance for many years.