At the intertidal zone, Cal State Monterey Bay Professor Alison Haupt asks her students about their future plans. She finds that this rocky landscape full of sea stars, anemones and abalones is a great place to break down barriers and have casual conversations with her students.

When “we’re all hunched over a transect trying to measure all the abalone, I’m doing the same work the students are doing,” she says. “And I think that’s really valuable.”

Haupt, who grew up locally and attended Monterey High, values mentorship like this because her own mentors made her feel at home in marine biology.

Last month, Haupt received the Naturalist of the Year award from the Western Society of Naturalists. The title has been given out since 1999 to recognize one individual on the West Coast who does an outstanding job of inspiring young people to appreciate the marine world.

One way Haupt cultivates her students’ interest in marine biology is giving them control over their own education. Paige Siegel, one of her former students, is now in graduate school studying marine biology after designing her own research project as an undergraduate in Haupt’s lab.“You’d hear her squeal from across the intertidal and everybody would want to know what she found,” Haupt says. She noticed Siegel becoming curious as to why some areas had lots of sea stars and others had very few, so she encouraged her to study them.

It was a very unique experience, says Siegel. “I feel like a lot of undergraduates are just given research projects and told what to do.”

Siegel adds that Haupt is an incredible role model. She remembers watching Haupt bring her young son to Elkhorn Slough on a class field trip.

“We were trekking through this mud and she was telling us all about these marsh species and the diversity that exists in these estuarine environments,” Siegel recalls. “And the whole time she had her son on her back and was walking through the mud.”

Siegel says that she will remember that field trip forever. “As a woman, that is very empowering and inspiring to see that I don’t just have to be a scientist or just have to be a mother,” she says. “I can have both of those things one day in my life.”

Haupt also goes above and beyond to make her students feel welcome.

Things like cold weather, rough terrain, and lack of bathrooms can ruin one’s first time in the field, so she created a list of the conditions at each site so her students always arrive prepared. She also is vigilant about preventing discrimination and harassment, which can run rampant in remote field environments.

“I’ve had my own experiences where things happened in the field that shouldn’t have happened,” she says. “And I think a lot about how if those had been my first field experiences, maybe they would have been my last ones.”

Haupt had her first experiences in fieldwork as a student at Monterey High School, when NOAA selected Mike Guardino, a teacher at Carmel High School, to teach a class about the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Guardino wanted to make his class as inclusive as possible, so he opened it to high schools in the county.

Haupt applied at the urging of a teacher and was accepted.

Guardino worked hard to immerse his students in the marine preserve.

“Most schools that participated in this program did a literature review or read about their sanctuary,” Haupt says. “But Mike was a scuba instructor. He decided: ‘that seems really boring. I’m gonna certify a bunch of high school students and we’re gonna go research diving.’”

This set Haupt on the course to become a marine biologist.

After high school, she studied at UC Santa Barbara, where she was a self-proclaimed “field tech extraordinaire.” She started by studying a sea snail under then-graduate student Danielle Zacherl, who is now a professor at CSU Fullerton.

“She was an amazing mentor,” Haupt says. “I was really lucky to have a wealth of female mentors at that time when there weren’t as many.”

Haupt periodically left school to work on field projects. The first was at the University of Maine, where she studied lobsters and oysters. Then she spent 10 months in the Galapagos working under Ben Ruttenberg, a graduate student who is now a professor at Cal Poly.

“I always joke that when I met (Ben), I did a Jedi mind trick,” she recalls. “I said: ‘I will work for you and you will take me to Galapagos.’”

After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Haupt did further field work in the Caribbean, Antarctica and Chile. She did her Ph.D. at Hopkins Marine Station where she studied the relationship between humans and the marine ecosystem of Baja California.

After Hopkins, she did a brief stint working on policy in Sacramento. She returned to the coast for jobs in Boston and Seattle before moving back to Monterey to work at CSUMB.

“I didn’t necessarily intend to come back to where I started,” Haupt says. But “now that we are here, it’s hard to imagine being somewhere else.”

One of her favorite parts of living here is the few barriers that lie between her and the ocean.

“A 15-minute drive from CSUMB, we can be at a rocky intertidal site,” she says.

But Haupt is now focused on a very different barrier between her students and the water: money. She says that while the UC system has been making strides to finance graduate student research, the CSU system still struggles.

She asks: “who can participate in science if there’s no funding?”

Removing those barriers will help other students feel as comfortable in the field as she does. She estimates she has logged over 2,000 SCUBA dives and feels most at home by the water.

“I was voted class klutz my senior year at Monterey High,” Haupt says. “But when I’m underwater or I’m in the intertidal, I’m not as klutzy.”