Douglas McCauley

McCauley is a professor at University of California Santa Barbara (Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology & Marine Science Institute). In 2016 he founded the Benioff Ocean Initiative at UC Santa Barbara with a gift from Marc Benioff and Lynne Benioff - founder and CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce. The mission of the Benioff Ocean Initiative is to leverage the power of science to solve pressing threats challenging ocean health and inspire the replication of these successes. To date, the organization has taken on a variety of initiatives, including trying to slow the flow of plastic pollution to oceans through the Clean Currents Coalition, using technology to prevent collisions between ships and endangered whales through project Whale Safe, employing artificial intelligence to help spot white sharks at beaches through project SharkEye, creating programs for community scientists to aid in the conservation of endangered ocean species through the Spotting Giant Sea Bass project, and creating transparency tools to track the start of ocean mining.

In 2015, McCauley was named an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow. In 2018, he was named an Early Career Fellow by Ecological Society of America. In 2019, he was awarded UC Santa Barbara's Plous award. He was also named a “Human of the Year” by Vice (magazine) Media.

McCauley received a B.A in Integrative Biology and a B.A. in Political Science, both from University of California, Berkeley in 2001. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University in 2010. He conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Princeton University, and University of California, Berkeley.

Douglas J. McCauley (born January 31, 1979 Los Angeles, CA) is a professor of ocean science at the University of California Santa Barbara, and serves as the Director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative - an applied ocean research center based at UC Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute. His research focuses on using tools from ecology, data science, and marine policy for ocean conservation.