Judith Weis

Judith Shulman Weis (born May 29, 1941) is an American marine biologist. Her research and writing focuses on estuarine ecology and ecotoxicology, including the responses of salt marsh and brackish marsh organisms, populations and communities to stresses, particularly heavy metal contaminants, invasive species and parasites. She is also working to reduce the spread of microplastics in the environment and find solutions to protecting coastal marshes from sea level rise.

Weis is professor emerita of marine biology at Rutgers University, where she taught for five decades. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and chairs the Science Advisory Board of the NJ DEP, among other bodies.

Early life and education Weis was born and raised in New York City in a secular Jewish family.

Career Weis had a summer internship in 1960, while in Cornell, at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Immediately after receiving her Ph.D., Weis joined the faculty of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, where she was promoted to Professor in 1976. In addition to teaching, she has conducted research on the threats faced by organisms in shallow coastal estuary environments, such as contamination from pollution, especially heavy metals, and invasive species. Much of her research has been with marine life in the New York–New Jersey Harbor area and the New Jersey Meadowlands, but she has also done research in Indonesia and Madagascar. In the 1970s, Weis and her children starred in a Tang orange drink commercial because General Foods was promoting the product with ads featuring female scientists with cute kids. During a sabbatical in 1983–1984, she received a Congressional Science Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) where she worked for the Environment and Public Works Committee of the US Senate.

Weis later served on advisory committees for the US EPA, National Sea Grant College Program of NOAA, and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, where she chairs the Science Advisory Board. She co-chairs the Science and Technical Advisory Committee for the NY/NJ Harbor Estuary.

Weis is Professor Emerita of Biological Sciences at Rutgers where she taught for over five decades. She has published over 250 scientific papers and written several books about marine biology. She has been married to Peddrick "Pete" Weis since 1962. He is also an academic, and the couple have two children, Jennifer and Eric, and three grandchildren. This research was the first finding of pollution tolerance in estuarine fish. Tolerance to mercury was also seen in adult grass shrimp and fiddler crabs in the creek. In the 1980s, Weis and her team found that, like the embryos, some sperm and eggs were also tolerant to mercury. Juvenile and adult mummichogs, however, were not mercury-tolerant, and furthermore they did not grow as big or live as long as fish from clean environments. They matures faster and produced (tolerant) embryos sooner. Other species from polluted estuaries (fiddler crabs, juvenile bluefish and blue crabs) also had altered behavior. Weis's later research in the New Jersey Meadowlands has shown, for example, that levels of mercury and other contaminants in sediment along the Hackensack River are so high that blue crabs, like the mummichogs, are slow at capturing live food (even though they are particularly aggressive), and eat a great deal of detritus, which is abnormal for a carnivorous crab. Juvenile bluefish ("snappers") there exhibit slower swimming speed and reduced prey capture, and grow more slowly than their counterparts in a clean environment. Fish captured in the Hackensack frequently have empty stomachs, which is highly unusual for this voracious species. and with salt marsh plants, comparing the native Spartina with the invasive reed Phragmites, showing that the invasive plant sequesters more metal pollutants than the native plant, without releasing them back into the environment. This invasive species (which is being removed in restoration projects) performs some services for the environment and should be managed more sensitively.

Weis led a study of the status of New Jersey coastal marshes with respect to sea level rise. It found that most coastal marshes, which protect local communities from flooding and storm surge, are not elevating as rapidly as the sea level is rising and are also losing acreage. The study, published in 2021, discussed four possible remedies: allowing marshes to migrate inland through pathways created by removing developments and structures, changing the management (removal) of the reed Phragmites, adding sediments on top of marshes to increase elevation, and building "living shorelines" that incorporate harder materials, like oyster reefs, at the marsh edge to reduce erosion.