Ruth Deborah Gates (March 28, 1962 – October 25, 2018) was the Director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and the first woman to be President of the International Society for Reef Studies. Her research was dedicated to understanding coral reef ecosystems, specifically coral-algal symbiosis and the capacity for corals to acclimatize under future climate change conditions. Doctor Gates is most accredited with looking at coral biology and human-assisted coral evolution, known as super corals, as notably seen in the documentary Chasing Coral, available on Netflix.
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Education
Gates was inspired by the documentary The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. She studied biology at Newcastle University where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1984. She fell in love with corals during a diving trip to the West Indies. In 1985 she moved to the West Indies to study corals. She completed her PhD at Newcastle University in 1989 on seawater temperature and algal-cnidarian symbiosis. During her postgraduate work in Jamaica, she was exposed to the bleaching response of coral resulting from rising temperatures.