Nancy Rabalais
American marine ecologist
Nancy Nash Rabalais is an American marine ecologist, and Professor and Shell Endowed Chair in Oceanography and Wetland Studies at Louisiana State University. She researches dead zones in the marine environment and is an expert in eutrophication and nutrient pollution.
Biography
Nancy Rabalais was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, the second of four children of Kathryn Charlotte Preusch and Stephen Anthony Nash, a mechanical engineer. Rabalais earned her B.S. in 1972 and her M.S. in 1975 from Texas A&M University–Kingsville. Rabalais worked at Padre Island National Seashore in 1975 and began as a research assistant at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas Marine Laboratory for 4 years. She began further graduate studies in 1979, working towards her Ph.D., where she studied fiddler crabs endemic to South Texas. She received her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.
Since 1985, Rabalais has studied the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone off the coast of Louisiana, the largest hypoxic zone in the United States. Along with two other researchers, she linked hypoxic zones in the Gulf with Mississippi River estuaries in 1985 through ocean mapping oxygen levels. This work was highlighted on the covers of BioScience in 1991 and Nature in 1994.
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