William “Monty” Graham

William “Monty” Graham joined the Smithsonian in June 2025 as the director of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). Located on the Chesapeake Bay near Edgewater, Maryland, SERC leads the nation in discovering the links between land and water ecosystems in the coastal zone. Researchers, educators and communicators at SERC investigate and inform across a range of questions related to coastal environments and the human experience.

Graham came to the Smithsonian after nearly 30 years in higher education and research, spending much of his career working at, and then leading, remote teaching and research facilities in coastal environments. Most recently, he was the director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography at the University of South Florida from 2021 to 2025. Before that, he moved to academic leadership as professor and chair of marine science, and subsequently director of the School of Ocean Science and Engineering and associate vice president for research, at the University of Southern Mississippi from 2011 to 2020. Graham started his career as a marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama from 1995 to 2011.

In his education and leadership roles, Graham has focused on capacity building around infrastructure, including research vessels, marine laboratories and private–public partnerships. He has also been instrumental in establishing large research, educational and workforce development programming, including leading cooperative multi-institutional research efforts following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, establishing new academic programs in ocean engineering, working with the Port of Gulfport in Mississippi to create the Roger F. Wicker Center for Ocean Enterprise, and spearheading a novel cohort-based workforce program for students and early career scientists. 

Graham has served on a number of professional boards and advisory committees, including an appointment by the governor of Mississippi to chair the Ocean Task Force, serving two terms on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Gulf Research Program advisory board, the board of the Ocean Exploration Trust and the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System’s federal advisory committee. 

Graham received his bachelor’s degree in marine biology from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and his master’s degree in marine science and doctorate in biology are both from the University of California Santa Cruz. His research interests are generally in the area of coastal ecological oceanography where he has focused much of his career on understanding causes and ecological consequences of large blooms of coastal jellyfish. His more than 90 publications span research efforts around the planet, and he continues to collaborate with scientists from over 30 countries to understand global patterns of jellyfish blooms. In 2022, Graham was honored by colleagues with the naming of a species of moon jellyfish, Aurelia montyi.

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SI-112-2025