ON A BLUE-BIRD MORNING, Julie Packard sits at a table in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s dining hall, surrounded by the quiet that settles over the building before it opens to visitors. She takes a booth adjacent to a large window overlooking the bay – the natural environment part of an institution that has become a national model and success story – and reflects on past, present and future.
Packard, who is 72, is retiring this year after 41 years as the executive director of the aquarium, and has grave concerns about the state of science communication today.
“The questioning of science at the level that’s happening is new; the constant undermining of credibility of the science community,” she says. “It’s appalling, it’s disturbing, and it’s taking up space in the media that could be focused on providing accurate information for the public to inform their decision making.”
At the start of 2025, Packard announced she would step down from her role. As the aquarium’s first and only executive director to date, she has spent the entirety of her adult life understanding the state of our oceans, establishing strong ocean ethics through education, and centering these stories at all levels of governance.
Her work in science conservation and leadership has earned her accolades which place her alongside some of the greats like Jane Goodall, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson and David Attenborough. A painting of her hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., a gallery which showcases portraits of America’s most influential people who have shaped history and culture. A deep-sea coral has been named in her honor, the Gersemia juliepackardae.
The reputation more importantly reflects her ability to use the aquarium – located in a coastal region home to some of the most groundbreaking science in the world – to tell stories often buried beneath scientific jargon, or deep under the sea, in order to create meaningful change.
That change has inspired movements and big policy decisions across the last four decades, and laid a formidable foundation as the next executive director steps in at a critical time for science and conservation. The future, she has reiterated in the past, will be answered in how we evolve.
Though, the biggest impact, she believes, starts at home. “When people fall in love with the ocean, they are moved to protect it,” says Packard, keeping to the aquarium’s mission, “and that is where real change begins.”
IT WAS THE SANTA BARBARA OIL SPILL that stood out in Packard’s memory, the environmental disaster of 1969 that resulted in over 3 million gallons of oil spread across 35 miles of California’s coastline. It was an oil spill of devastating proportions, coating kelp forests, eradicating thousands of seabirds, poisoning marine life and ecosystems without the technology to do much about it.
At the time, Packard was a teenager.
The event was a part of the machinations of the modern environmental movement and a turning point for her personally. Her conviction in the importance of protecting the environment was cemented in that moment, catalyzing a path which would lead her to becoming a critical voice for science, specifically for the ocean.
Packard grew up in Los Altos Hills, the youngest of four children and daughter of Lucile and David Packard. Her father was the co-founder of the multibillion-dollar Hewlett-Packard Company, whose business famously began in a one-car garage – the symbolic birthplace of Silicon Valley.
But Julie Packard remembers the region as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” a name colloquially used to describe its unique, fruit-growing climate. For her, it doubled as the place where she learned to be curious, to care about nature and develop the values she would devote her life to.
“Science always played a huge part in our family conversations, family values,” she says. “Learning about the plants and exploring nature together and things, was a value that we all absorbed.”
Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Packard developed a deep appreciation for California’s ecological diversity, from oak woodlands and wildflowers to coastal habitats, a love that was later challenged by witnessing the rapid pace of development and land transformation in the Santa Clara Valley as a young adult. “That had a very foundational influence,” she adds.
By the time the Santa Barbara oil spill occurred, Packard was about 16 years old, a teenager in an era already awakening to environmentalism. The disaster helped inspire her decision to attend UC Santa Cruz, one of the first universities in the state founded with an explicit environmental focus. There, an interdisciplinary study could bridge people, ecology, biology and policy work.
Perhaps surprisingly, Packard has always had a deeper, more innate love of the mountains than the coast (she underscores the mountains first when describing where she’ll be spending her retirement). The leap from mountains to coastline, she says, came through her love of plants.
An intertidal biology class sparked her interest in aquatic environments, bringing her to the tide pools and studying seaweeds. “I love to go out looking at spring wildflowers as much as tide pools at a spring low tide,” she says.
During her undergraduate years, a Sea Grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration helped fund her work, which had the aim of supporting viable ways to commercially harvest seaweed. She studied under adviser William Doyle, one of UC Santa Cruz’s founding faculty members, whose research focused on liverworts and mosses – a group of plants that represent an evolutionary step from aquatic life to life on land. “Primitive plants, I would call them,” she says, “including algae.” She went on to teach classes as a student, laying the foundation for a master’s degree focused on the ecology of marine algae, and ultimately, for her work at the aquarium.
In 1978 – the year Packard completed her formal education at UCSC – the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation was created and the Cannery Row property was purchased. It took six years of planning, fundraising and building until the aquarium was open to the public. Packard has always made the point that it was not her creation alone, but a collaborative effort among many. Still, she played a central role, helping draw early sketches of what it would look like, and rising from project director to executive director, a role she’s held ever since.
Alongside her sister Nancy Burnett, Burnett’s husband, several colleagues (including Chuck Baxter and Steve Webster, who later became the first official employee), and with a $55 million gift from David and Lucile Packard, Packard helped bring the Monterey Bay Aquarium into existence. When it opened on Oct. 20, 1984, projections estimated 350,000 visitors in its first year. Instead, nearly 2.4 million people walked through its doors.
From the very beginning, the Aquarium was rooted in science. Its origins were inspired in part by researchers affiliated with Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, and by the reuse of an old cannery purchased by Stanford and then the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation.
Webster, one of the Aquarium’s founding members who still leads tours today, points to a piece of literature that became a guiding force for both him and the group during the Aquarium’s early days: Between Pacific Tides by marine biologist Ed Ricketts and naturalist Jack Calvin.
“That book is owned and digested by anybody who studies marine biology in this area, and the book is arranged by habitat,” Webster says, explaining that it inspired the idea of permanent exhibits showcasing the habitats of Monterey Bay – places many of them had spent years diving and conducting research in. “From day one, the aquarium was going to be about the habitats of Monterey Bay, and I think that concept was kind of part of our constitution for all four of us, and it came from Ed Ricketts’ book.”
At that time, aquariums were typically smaller, organized around individual species. The Monterey Bay Aquarium would go on to flip that model, recreating entire marine ecosystems and radically immersing visitors within them. It was a bold and technically challenging approach, but it was a move that would set the tone for the Aquarium’s influence in the years to come.
MOST EXPERTS BELIEVED kelp couldn’t be kept alive indoors for long periods of time, let alone sustained in a tank nearly three stories tall, alongside invertebrates and other local species.
“There wasn’t much known about that. It was one of my assignments to talk to the scientists who had been studying and/or working on growing giant kelp,” Packard says. “It was a very rarefied topic; the only people working on it were working on commercial use for the foam in your beer or your toothpaste.”
So the team got creative. To replicate the water movement necessary for kelp to grow and thrive, a team of engineers – including David Packard – designed a giant plunger to simulate a standing wave in the tank. The water, unfiltered seawater from the Monterey Bay, had to match the temperature of the local waters. The angle of the tank had to maximize sunlight for the kelp, yet minimize glare for the visitors.
And they had to overcome initial skepticism, convincing focus groups that a kelp forest was a habitat rich enough in life, and interesting enough to look at, to warrant an exhibit.
“I remember when we ran this plan by John McCosker who, at the time, was the director at Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco,” Webster recalls, “and we mentioned the kelp forest exhibit. His reaction was, who wants to come see a bunch of brown seaweeds?”
All the while, they faced a persistent technical challenge: preventing marine organisms from colonizing in the aquarium’s pipes – their biggest problem at the time, says Packard, that applied to their entire seawater system. “We honestly didn’t know if it would survive,” she says.
The gamble paid off. The tank’s massive acrylic windows and unprecedented scale enveloped visitors in an experience previously reserved for scuba divers. The exhibit quickly landed on the cover of Sunset Magazine, then a force in the travel and tourism space.
The emphasis on grandiose and immersive setting aesthetics became the throughline for how they’d pursue future projects, many of which broke ground in aquarium design and animal husbandry. And the use of unfiltered local seawater was something that enabled them to craft ecosystems truly reflective of the local environments.
“Most aquariums around the world can’t do that because they’re on heavily polluted harbors,” Webster says. “We’re in this unique position of being able to pump raw seawater when we want it, and that helps support the kelp forest and all of the smaller exhibits that aren’t just fishes, but have invertebrates and seaweeds in them and look a whole lot like they do out there in the real world.”
The jellyfish exhibit was another risk, presenting an animal that was rarely exhibited due to how fragile they are to keep in captivity. Focused on fluid dynamics, the aquarium adapted and installed kreisel tanks, circular systems which rotated the water with such precision that kept delicate animals suspended without pulling them into filtration systems. The exhibits were then turned into works of art, lighting was creatively calibrated to illuminate the translucent jellies as they drifted.
In 2004, the Aquarium made headlines by keeping a great white shark in an exhibit for 198 days – the only aquarium to ever keep young white sharks on exhibit, get them to feed, and return them to the wild. The idea to bring a great white shark had been floated for some time, but the goal was always to have a legitimate science outcome.
Aquarium staff began working with gillnet fishers down in Southern California who had been catching juvenile white sharks as bycatch. Researchers began tagging the sharks, ultimately introducing one juvenile into the Open Sea exhibit, a tank holding more than a million gallons of water – nearly two Olympic swimming pools – designed to evoke the seemingly infinite abyss of the open ocean.
“The message was that sharks have more to fear from humans than the other way around,” Packard says. “We wanted to show that it’s not a giant, terrifying behemoth – it’s just another fish trying to make its way in the ocean.”
Public attention surged. Additional revenue generated by the exhibit was reinvested into the research, and visitors were brought along through transparent storytelling about the science underway. The tagging program identified a distinct population of white sharks in the eastern Pacific, data that later contributed to proposals for increased protections. Advocacy tied to this research eventually helped spur legislation banning the sale and possession of shark fins in California – then one of the largest importers of shark fins outside of Asia.
“It had this full-circle effect,” Packard says. “Which was really great.”
Science, public awareness and policy change. It was a model that was trialed and tested. And it worked.
IN THE 1990S, a global fisheries crisis was emerging. Fishing fleets were growing and key fisheries, such as the Atlantic northwest cod and the West Coast groundfish fisheries, were collapsing. The Packard Foundation was expanding its environmental grant program’s focus to centering the ocean, or, the 70 percent of the planet “no one was paying attention to,” says Packard.
The idea that fish stocks could be limited, even in an environment as vast as the ocean, was simply not in the public consciousness at that time, Webster emphasizes. Understanding the consequences of overfishing – food insecurity, environmental degradation and economic loss – was even more out of reach, and a complex problem that required multi-pronged, long-term management reform.
But Packard saw an opportunity to integrate that story and messaging into the aquarium.
Fishing for Solutions was the exhibit to deliver that message, launched in 1997. In the tank were familiar fish swimming around that one would typically find on a dinner menu, paired with advocacy around overfishing, and a commitment to only sell seafood in their cafeteria that met specific environmental criteria.
From there, Seafood Watch was born, one of the aquarium’s great success stories. “That was Julie who was the force behind that, and always has been,” Webster says.
The full-scale program brought to life the stories of conservationists with hard data, fishing fleets and fish farmers, and brought that information directly to consumers. Using a pocket guide that ranked seafood choices as green, yellow or red, consumers were empowered to ask better questions about their purchases, while fishing enterprises could see what changes were needed to operate more sustainability.
“It’s really an amazing program that’s having global impact,” Packard says. “We’re working on the ground to bring farmed shrimp in Vietnam up to a Seafood Watch green, and we’re working with salmon farmers in Chile to reduce antibiotic use.”
The science-first approach connecting each of the aquarium’s projects from the start was a commitment to a very curated type of storytelling – one which showed a holistic picture in which all parts of the ecosystem are acknowledged, with the goal of building public understanding and generating momentum for policy change.
Packard went on to become a member of the Pew Oceans Commission, which developed recommendations for sustainable fisheries and marine protected areas and would later shape national ocean policy reforms. One outcome was the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, established in 2005 as a bipartisan collaboration between leaders from the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.
The initiative focused on identifying steps Congress could take to create more structured governance through science-informed policy, regional approaches to ecosystem management, and funding strategies.
On Sept. 17, 2009, Packard, then a member of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative and former Pew Oceans Commission member, spoke at an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force West Coast regional public meeting at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. Established by former President Barack Obama just three months earlier, the task force was charged with drafting proposals to advance national ocean policy.
In her remarks, Packard emphasized that science and governance cannot exist in a vacuum, ocean education and literacy must also be prioritized:
“I’ve dedicated myself to ocean education and conservation for 25 years now, and along with my aquarium colleagues, across the nation I’ve had the opportunity to reach literally tens of millions of people and expose them to ocean life,” she said to a room of about 500, members of the public, politicians, scientists and other stakeholders. “Sadly though, over the last 25 years, this last quarter-century, the health of our oceans has been on a slow and steady decline.
“Why? Because the public does not see oceans as central to their lives – to their livelihoods, their national economy, their health, their very well-being.”
JULIE PACKARD ANNOUNCED she would be stepping down nearly one year ago, on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, with plans to find her replacement in the near future. However, no exact date to appoint her successor has yet been released.
From the sea otter surrogate program, to being the only accredited institution in North America featuring a Laysan albatross, to partaking in Global Plastic Treaty discussions, the aquarium continues to evolve as concern about the ocean continues to grow.
And there is a lot to do.
“The impacts of climate change are so real and demonstrated practically every day,” Packard says. “Those impacts, unfortunately, are going to continue to get worse before they get better. And so I believe that the science behind all of that – things will turn around. It’s just unfortunate that we’re losing time.”
Her retirement is shaping up to be a busy and active one. Packard is still chair of the board for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which has always existed as a separate institution from the aquarium but continues to contribute to exhibits. She will remain on the board of the Packard Foundation, which has expanded its work areas of interest to include women’s health and elective rights, and democracy alongside ocean science work. And she’ll still be on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s board to oversee and assist with fundraising efforts.
“Julie morphed ocean conservation to be a major mission and topic at the aquarium, and of course, she has taken it nationally and internationally,” Webster says. “She isn’t as much focused as media appearances like a Jacques Cousteau, but she is nevertheless working quietly on ocean conservation, and has done a lot for ocean conservation, including having folks at the aquarium who are focused just on that.”