Craig McClain is a deep-sea biologist, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and, as this Ocean People Profile from Ocean Decoded Live makes clear, one of the more colorful figures in ocean science communication. Host Andrew Lewin has known him since meeting at Oceans Online in the early 2010s, and this profile traces McClain's path from six years as Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), where he secured $10 million in grants, a $110 million regional-class research vessel, and more than $30 million for a new joint maritime campus, to his current work cataloging one of Earth's least-explored ecosystems before it's lost.

McClain is also the founder and chief editor of Deep Sea News, a blog he ran alongside fellow scientists that, at its peak, drew a massive following writing about everything from giant squid and hydrothermal vents to the Deepwater Horizon spill. Deep Sea News became known for taking on the widely covered Ocean Cleanup project, repeatedly and publicly questioning its science, and for McClain's own memorably titled post, "10 Reasons Why Dolphins Are A$$holes." His writing has appeared in Wired, Cosmos, and Mental Floss, and his work has been recognized with an EcoDaredevil Award, a Thinking Blogger Award, and repeated Open Laboratory honors for best science writing on the web.

Today, McClain co-leads a nearly $2 million, multi-year National Science Foundation project using DNA sequencing alongside traditional taxonomy to catalog biodiversity across thousands of deep-sea sediment samples, driven by a philosophy he sums up simply: the deep sea isn't empty, it's just unread. He's also the co-founder and first president of the Deep-Sea Biology Society and the creator of OCEANDOTCOMM, an unconference where science communicators show up not knowing the topic and leave having produced entire storytelling projects together. Catch Ocean Decoded Live for daily ocean news breakdowns and Ocean People Profiles like this one. Subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss it.

Chapters:
0:00 – Meet Dr. Craig McClain: Deep-Sea Biologist and Ocean Decoded Friend
2:24 – Founding Deep Sea News: The Blog That Took On the Ocean Cleanup
4:40 – Six Years Running LUMCON (2016–2022) and Its Record Funding
6:06 – Current Work: The $2 Million NSF Deep-Sea DNA Project
8:06 – Inside OCEANDOTCOMM, Craig's Science-Communication Experiment

Takeaways:

Craig McClain is a deep-sea biologist and professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and a personal friend of host Andrew Lewin since they met at Oceans Online in the early 2010s.

He served as Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) from 2016 to 2022, securing $10 million in grants, a $110 million regional-class research vessel, and more than $30 million for a new maritime campus.

He founded and edited Deep Sea News, a widely read ocean-science blog known for its public criticism of the Ocean Cleanup project and for the post "10 Reasons Why Dolphins Are A$$holes."

His writing has appeared in Wired, Cosmos, and Mental Floss, and his honors include an EcoDaredevil Award, a Thinking Blogger Award, and repeated Open Laboratory recognition for science writing.

He currently co-leads a nearly $2 million multi-year NSF project using DNA sequencing to catalog deep-sea sediment biodiversity, guided by his own line: "the deep sea isn't empty, it's just unread."

He's the co-founder and first president of the Deep-Sea Biology Society and created OCEANDOTCOMM, an unconference for ocean science communicators.
His PhD is from the University of Massachusetts Boston, with postdoctoral work at the

University of New Mexico and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and prior roles at Duke University.

#OceanConservation #MarineBiology #SaveOurOceans #ProtectTheOcean #OceanAwareness #BluePlanet #ConservationMatters #ScienceForChange #SustainableOceans
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