Kimberly Selkoe, cofounder of the Santa Barbara Sustainable Seafood Program and Community Seafood and now founding director of FishSB, used to hate the very thought of eating a fish.
But she loved the sea. At the age of 13, she paid her own way through scuba training, which took place in a pond in the dead of a Bostonian winter, and studied biology in college. Selkoe’s dream was to become a scientific diver at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, but her dream died quickly when she was told they didn’t hire women.
Instead, she joined a lab studying lobster behavior and then attended the University of California, Santa Barbara to pursue a PhD in marine biology. She was intrigued by the idea that populations of marine creatures could mix across vast spans of ocean and wanted to see if this was happening with the kelp bass population in Baja California. Scientists suspected that Baja kelp bass were largely immigrants, riding in from Mexico as larva during El Niño years when the California current flows north instead of south.