Marine Science Career Profiles

Dr. Carlos Robles is a marine ecologist and professor at California State University at Los Angeles. He is also the Director of a newly-formed environmental research institute at his home university. OceanLink spoke with Dr. Robles at the Bamfield Marine Station in Bamfield, BC, where he conducts field work every summer.

Could you give me some background about the type of work that you do?

I'm a benthic community ecologist, which means that I look at organisms like mussels, spiny lobsters, crabs and barnacles. I examine how their populations interact and how those interactions determine the success of some species and not others. I also test contemporary theory about how those interactions unfold. For example, there's something called the keystone predator hypothesis, which talks about how a dominant predator may come in and limit the numbers of a really competitive, vigorous prey species, and keep that prey species from dominating all the competitively subordinate species. I've demonstrated that that mechanism takes place in southern California, and that it isn't just restricted to the area it was first proposed for, the Pacific Northwest.

You're based out of a university?

I'm a full professor at California State University at Los Angeles. Its a comprehensive university, which means we do teaching and trade school type training, but we also do basic research.

Can you tell me about some of the education you've done over the years?

I guess I started learning about the ocean from my Mom. I think that's what really got me hooked on the whole thing, just tide pooling when I was a kid. Seeing things like a sea anemone disgorge the shell of a crab after it has digested all of the sort parts! It just seemed like something out of "Little Shop of Horrors", it was so exotic and exciting that even from a young age I was really interested in the ocean.

But then late in high school there was a period when I was almost going to be a classical musician. I studied French horn really seriously and I almost went that way. However, because my dad didn't want to pay for kids in two separate locations at two separate universities, I enrolled as a freshman at the University of California at Santa Barbara where my sister was already enrolled. Within a few months of being there, I encountered some of the professional ecologists/marine biologists and just really became captivated with their personalities, with their lifestyle, with the quests for knowledge that they had. In some sense they became role models and mentors. So I very soon decided that I could be a biologist and work in the ocean, and by the end of my freshman year I was basically hooked. I loved the ocean, so it seemed like a really good thing to do, and it turned out it was.

Where did you do your graduate work?

Santa Barbara was kind of a sleepy town, and I got to know the professors and their particular philosophy really well and I wanted to go someplace different. In fact they recommended that to me. So I decided I wanted to go to the University of California at Berkley, and through some fluke I was accepted. In fact, I didn't apply to any other graduate schools, and just happened to get accepted there. I studied with a tropical ecologist, so that was really a big switch. Different community, different philosophy about ecology, different set of organisms they were working with.

How long did it take you to do your Ph.D.?

I think altogether it took me about five and a half years. I became pretty fed up with the way academia had so many little divisions and how graduate students were kept like ladies-in-waiting for an interminable period of time. I also knew the economy was deteriorating rapidly, and that jobs for Ph.D.'s were going to be scarcer than hens teeth. So I decided that I'd go ahead and just look for a job and not do the traditional search for post-docs and try to get into a really prestigious school. I would interview at some of these state colleges which were essentially comprehensive schools and get there and see what I could make of it. And if not that maybe I would work for the California Department of Fish and Game, or an agency. I left it pretty much completely open as to what I would do, but I wanted to get somewhere, to do something and be somebody, rather than take the traditional path.

A traditional path for a graduate student in a prestigious place like UC Berkley would be to go for the post-docs, then go for the major job and then fall back into a government position or a small college if you didn't get that. I just wanted to go right for it, and I figured if I didn't get in somewhere I could always fall back into a post-doc position! Now I imagine a number of people have adopted this strategy, but at the time it was a radical strategy.

So then I decided I'd look for a job, and California State University at Los Angeles had a job opening for a tenure-track position as an invertebrate zoologist and population biologist, which was what I knew. So I applied for it, and I think a week after I sent the letter they called and invited me for an interview. I went down for an interview and two weeks after that they offered me a job, so I think the whole process of deciding to look for a job and getting one was about a month's time. And I wasn't really ready for it, but I did it and it was really the school of hard knocks. Coming directly out of graduate school at UC Berkley I wasn't prepared to do a lot of teaching and lecturing. Not having had a post-doc there was a lot of intellectual finishing that I needed. I guess over about a five year period I leaned everything the hard way. I learned how to write, how to publish, and how to teach. I'm not sure I could recommend my career path to everyone, but I did get established and I did get funded by our main agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF).

I've been continuously funded by them for about fifteen years, and most recently its developed into a very large base of support from them because there's a division within the NSF that's interested in this problem of equal opportunity and human resource development. Our core group of young environmental biologists, chemists and geographers got together and approached NSF and said we would do first rate environmental science, and when we did that we would incorporate into our research group students from diverse backgrounds, ages and ethnicity's. They funded us to put together an institute that deals with the environment and environmental problems, and does it with a fully-integrated multicultural, nonsexist, nonagist constituency.

After being at the same place, having a very hard apprenticeship there and learning how to do things without some of the nice inputs one gets as a post-doc, I find myself on the verge of being the director of a newly-formed institute that's really the first of its kind in the comprehensive university system within Los Angeles and southern California.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Its all really good! I guess what I really enjoy about it is the diversity. Its a good mix, I get to teach and work with students, but I don't have to do that to such a degree that its wearing and I get stale. I'm doing original research which I can bring back to the classes, but I'm teaching and that's a way to have interactions with people and see them develop and feel like you're making a contribution that's not merely intellectual.

And what do you dislike the most about your job?

There are some conflicts built into the system that make it a very rough job and occasionally quite stressful. I mean, on the one hand you can get a lot of satisfaction when you help a student basically go from one social class to another. And on the other hand you can wind up having a student who's not ready to be in college, does not want to take your instructions and can really be quite upset with the whole system of which you're just one representative. So, on the one hand we're trying to open the doors to everyone, and on the other hand we're being exclusive. On the one hand we're trying to aid and support, both emotionally and financially. On the other hand we're evaluating and culling. And I just never get used to those built in structural conflicts that I'm always presented with.

Do you have any advice that you would give to students interested in becoming marine ecologists?

Yes, learn a trade. And I say that only part jokingly. What I mean is, there's a lot of students that get involved for the same reason I got involved. They love nature and they want to learn about the animals, and so maybe they'll know the natural history and the names of the organisms and stuff. And that's wonderful, that's the starting place. But in addition now to do contemporary science, one must have a very good grasp of scientific method and how principles of statistical and experimental design have been forged to meet the demands of the scientific method. And how those in turn are wedded with the other sciences, like physics and chemistry.

You either have to decide - I'm going to become a good mathematician/statistician and work with computers, or I'm going to be a really good chemist as well as a biologist, and maybe I'll work with molecular genetics or some kind of analytical chemistry. Or maybe I'll learn physics, so I know about hydrodynamics and physical processes and biophysics. But for modern biology now you need to have some very sophisticated interdisciplinary science training, wedded with an understanding of experimental design and an ability to write.

Its a lot more competitive out there, I guess.

Its not merely competitive, its that they're asking for a kind of training that hasn't been asked for before. And if you do that and do that well your perception is that its not competitive, because people are always saying yes to you. So that would be the advice I would give students. And the other thing is I haven't the least regret having done this, I can't believe that I actually get paid to do what I do a lot of times. I didn't want to fight my way up the corporate ladder, I didn't want to work in an office building all day, and this has worked out good.

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