www.montereycountynow.com JANUARY 8-14, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 15 mation 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 In 2009, marine biologists named a deep-water coral after Julie Packard— Gersemia juliepackardae— citing her dedication to the ocean and science communication. Packard looks at an illuminated tub of plankton, mostly microscopic organisms that are big contributors to the ocean’s ecosystems. It is estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the total ocean biomass is plankton. DANIEL DREIFUSS © 2015 MBARI
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==