Biography

As a young student, Dr. Lewis M. Rothstein was fascinated by fluid dynamics and today he still enjoys research studying what he calls the largest fluid of them all—the ocean.

Rothstein started out as a mechanical engineering undergraduate at the University of Bridgeport and upon graduation worked for a year at Electric Boat in Groton, CT, builder of nuclear-powered submarines.

“But that was fluids in pipes. I wanted to study the largest fluid on the planet” and so he entered the ocean engineering program at the University of Massachusetts.

“It was the physics that got me,” recalls Rothstein and he wanted to continue, “hedging my bets” he says, by applying to GSO to pursue a doctorate in ocean engineering and to the University of Hawaii for the a doctorate in oceanography. He was declined at GSO and so he went to Hawaii.

While in Hawaii his mentor was immersed in the then-new phenomenon called El Nino. That research has profound effects on weather patterns now, especially in the era of climate change. “Observing the ocean on a large scale supported me for five years,” he says.

After Hawaii, Rothstein did some post doc work at the University of Washington, landing soft money for his research. He garnered enough grants that when he applied to GSO he was accepted this time as a faculty member.

“It’s interesting that I came back here—like it or not, here I am.”

Up until this point, he notes, NSF funding was largely focused on pure research with little recognition of the importance of societal impacts. The El Nino research helped change all that as the public became aware that their very own weather patterns are determined by a phenomenon far out in the Pacific.

Gradually NSF funding required researchers to pay more attention to society and community education.

And then something unusual happened to Rothstein that developed another passion in his career.

He was invited to give a talk on hurricanes along with Gary Ley, a popular TV meteorologist, at the Naval War College in Newport. The audience was huge and Ley, a colorful communicator had it laughing and applauding with jokes and anecdotes. The applause died down, Ley pointed to Rothstein and said “Here is the real star of tonight’s show.” Rothstein says he felt like sinking down into his chair, wondering to himself “Are you kidding me?”

“I think I did a reasonably good job,” says Rothstein referring to his part of the program, “but it was then that I started to realize there is a lot more to communicating science than just talking about science. You have to be really careful about what you say and how you say it.”

The framework of presentation of science is important, he says—how people report things, report the science, how they cover it and especially “what their knowledge of science should be as they do those jobs.”

At about that time GSO was given the gift of the Metcalf Institute of Marine and Environmental Reporting via a big grant from the Providence Journal Company. GSO formed a faculty committee to help steer the new creation and Rothstein was on that committee. The mission of Metcalf is to help journalists communicate science effectively and today it runs a variety of programs nationally and locally toward that end.

Rothstein was so engrossed in the concept that when he was asked to be science co-director to the Metcalf advisory board he jumped at the chance and stayed for eight years.

“It was a struggle at times but we knew we were doing the right thing. It was a wonderful idea and I am very proud to have been a part of it.”

Another challenge was the makeup of the GSO population—in the late 1990s and early 2000s GSO started getting a considerable number of female graduate students and yet the faculty was mostly all male. He decided that he would try to do his part to help the situation down the line–the next five PhD candidates he took under his wing were women.

Rothstein has plenty of things to do on his plate. Climate change and its impact on the coastal zones will keep him and colleagues busy and he is encouraged by the state’s efforts to engage all of its agencies and educational institutions in something called the Ocean State Climate Observatory.

It is important, he says, that all constituencies get involved—scientists, social scientists, economists and political scientists. “Our behavior is driving the climate and so we better involve the social scientists on how we can motivate people to behave differently as a function of accomplishing a goal of saving our environment from what I think will be a disastrous climate change.”

Rothstein is critical of the public’s denial of science in this country—not just climate issues—but science in general. “You cannot get them to acknowledge there is even an issue, much less try to understand how to behave differently.

“It’s a nightmare for all of us. This is an issue that Metcalf is trying to address—get the story out—that science is not a ‘he said’—‘she said’ but is a factually based conveyer.”