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Marcia was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she graduated class valedictorian from Northrop Collegiate School (now The Blake Schools) in 1970. In 1973, she received a BA degree in Physics, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. With the help of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, she next studied geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where she earned a PhD in Earth Sciences in 1978.
After a brief appointment as a sabbatical replacement at the University of Minnesota, she spent the next three years working on the problem of earthquake prediction at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, before joining the faculty at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1982. Marcia spent the next 15 years at MIT, where she was appointed the Griswold Professor of Geophysics. While at MIT, she also served as Director of the Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, a cooperative graduate educational program between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 1988, she won the Macelwane Award from the American Geophysical Union, presented for outstanding research by a young scientist. Marcia's principal research involves the use of marine geophysical data to study the physical properties of the Earth beneath the oceans. Recent projects include the history of volcanism in French Polynesia and how it relates to broad-scale convection in the Earth's mantle, continental break-up in the western U.S., and the uplift of the Tibet plateau. Her research is both theoretical and field-based, using data she has collected on nearly two dozen oceanographic expeditions. Marcia lives in Salinas, California with her three daughters and her husband, Ian Young, a sea captain.
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Marcia McNutt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. MBARI is a research laboratory funded by the Packard Foundation to develop and exploit new technology for the exploration of the oceans. The institute's main focus is on designing and building new tethered and autonomous underwater vehicles and in situ sensor packages for increasing the spatial and temporal sampling of the ocean and its inhabitants. 