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Head, Department of Marine Biology
Texas A&M University at Galveston
Gilbert T. Rowe’s biology teacher in Kerrville, TX, told him that the only place to study oceanography in Texas was at Texas A&M University, and so, in 1960, that is where he went. to complete a Bachelor of Science and a master’s in zoology and oceanography in the next six years.
After completing his PhD (1968) at Duke in Zoology, he took positions in the northeast, first at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (1968-79), followed by Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island (1979-87). In 1987, he returned to Texas A&M, where he became head of the Department of Oceanography (1987-93) and Professor of Oceanography (1987-present). Early in 2003 Rowe moved to the Galveston branch campus where he is now Head of the Marine Biology Department.
Rowe’s work has focused in its entirety on organisms that live in communities on the sea floor (benthic ecology), extending from stressed environments on the continental shelf offshore into the greatest of ocean depths. Participating in large interdisciplinary projects mostly, he has had the opportunity to investigate life in habitats as remote as the Caspian Sea, Greenland, the Peru-Chile Trench and NW Africa. Since 1999, he has been the Program Manager of a broadly based, multi-national investigation of the structure and function of deep-ocean communities in the northern Gulf of Mexico (“Deep Gulf of Mexico Benthos” or DGoMB), with support from the Minerals Management Service of the US Department of the Interior. The results of his work have been published in more than 100 peer-refereed articles, in addition to his editing or co-authoring several monographs on the distribution and diversity of sea-floor biota and the community-level processes that contribute to oceanic biogeochemical characteristics. His present interest relates food web relationships to community structure, using the data gleaned by DGoMB in the deep Gulf of Mexico.