J. Emmett Duffy

Emmett Duffy is a marine biologist and Director of the Smithsonian’s MarineGEO network of coastal marine life observatories. His book Ocean Ecology: Marine Life in the Age of Humans (2021) is the first text focused on marine ecosystems in the Anthropocene era. He travels widely, researching how small creatures play big roles in marine ecosystems. His discovery of shrimp living in social colonies is still the only example of complex social life in the sea, which featured on the front page of the Washington Post. He now focuses on coordinating people worldwide to understand how changing biodiversity alters how coastal ecosystems work. He is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, and recipient of Japan’s inaugural Kobe Prize in Marine Biology. But his biggest honor is Synalpheus duffyi, a tiny social shrimp that inhabits Caribbean reef sponges, named for him in 1998. He holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.