Lucinda Southworth is a Stanford-trained scientist who set up and pays for one of the biggest private backers of ocean research in the world. The organisation is Oceankind. She started it in 2018, and for its first four years its website said nothing about who was behind it. One of the scientists it funded was not allowed to name it either.
Most people arrive at her through her husband. She married the Google co-founder Larry Page on Richard Branson’s Necker Island in December 2007, and a good deal of what has been written about her since reads like a caption under his photograph. The record of her own work is easier to check than the gossip, and it starts in a library at Stanford.
| Full name | Lucinda Kay Southworth, known as Lucy |
| Runs | Oceankind, a marine grantmaking company she founded in 2018 |
| Doctorate | Biomedical informatics, Stanford, thesis submitted December 2008 |
| Before that | University of Pennsylvania, 2001, then a master’s at Oxford |
| Married | Larry Page, December 2007 |
| Children | Two, born 2009 and 2011 |
| Home | Palo Alto, California |
Table of Contents
Ageing mice, and then the ocean
Southworth graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and took a master’s degree at Oxford before moving to California. Her doctoral thesis went to Stanford’s Program in Biomedical Informatics in December 2008. It runs to 127 pages, sets out methods for comparing gene activity data across separate studies, and applies them to ageing in mice. Her supervisor was Stuart Kim, whose laboratory worked on the genetics of ageing. The deposited copy sits off site at Stanford’s Lane Medical Library and has to be requested.
That catalogue entry gives her full name as Lucinda Kay Southworth and her year of birth as 1979, with no date attached. The 24 May 1979 birthday repeated across hundreds of websites would have made her 28 on her wedding day. ABC News, reporting two days beforehand, said she was 27.
Her biography at Edge.org describes the research as comparative analysis of expression data in eukaryotic organisms, and mentions medical social work in South Africa. Page, giving the commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2009, called her Lucy and described a trip the two of them made to a village in India, where they met a boy whose leg had been paralysed by polio. Page’s own father caught polio as a child and lived with the damage for the rest of his life.
What Oceankind pays for
Oceankind funds work on the health of the sea and on the people who make a living from it. Its site sorts the grants into conservation, ocean-climate and a set of crosscutting priorities, and splits the method in two: ordinary grants that push for policy change, and a Labs Initiative backing conservation technology at an early stage.
Partners named on the site include Global Fishing Watch, the High Seas Alliance, Oceana, SECORE International, Australia’s CSIRO, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide. No amounts appear next to any of them.
Numbers exist only where reporters have gone looking. TechCrunch established in May 2022 that Oceankind had given away more than $121 million by that point, including:
- about $2 million for coral-reseeding robotics at Queensland University of Technology
- $18.2 million to ClimateWorks, covering shipping emissions and carbon dioxide removal
- $1 million to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation
- $100,000 to SkyTruth, whose Cerulean system traced 187 ships responsible for deliberate oil slicks in its first year of operation
Those 2022 figures were enough to put Oceankind second among marine funders worldwide, behind only the Packard Foundation, in sector research later reported by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The same research counted 38 organisations giving at least $5 million a year to ocean work in 2022, against 11 in 2010.
The professor who could not name his funder
Matthew Dunbabin spent three years unable to say where his money came from.
A robotics professor at Queensland University of Technology, Dunbabin had built underwater machines that reseed dying reefs with coral larvae. University funding moved in three-year cycles and reef collapse did not. In 2019 an organisation he had never heard of got in touch and asked what he needed in order to scale up, and how quickly.
The grants followed, and his robots went to work in Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam and the Maldives. The Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which had paid for an early version of the machine, took the public credit for that research. Dunbabin could not name Oceankind as the funder behind the later work until 2022, and he has since told TechCrunch that it understood what technology projects genuinely cost.
Oceankind still publishes communications guidance for the people it funds. It refers to “the Advisors’ wish for anonymous grants” and asks recipients to keep the amount, the names of those advisers and the name of the account out of anything public.
Why the numbers stop in 2022
An American charitable foundation has to file an annual return that anybody can go and read. Oceankind is not a foundation. It is registered in California as a limited liability company, which carries no equivalent public disclosure, and TechCrunch’s reading of state records found it managed by the family office that looks after Larry Page’s properties and businesses. Oceankind has confirmed that Southworth resources it.
So the $121 million everyone quotes, this article included, describes where things stood four years ago. It could be a little more by now. It could be several times more.
Some of what the money reaches is contested. In September 2019 Oceankind brought researchers together to examine ocean alkalinity enhancement, a geoengineering method that involves grinding alkaline rock into seawater so it absorbs carbon dioxide. The report from that meeting put the volumes needed at billions of tonnes of rock a year, roughly twice what the world’s cement industry gets through, and raised the possibility of very wealthy donors paying for demonstrations at scale.
Stephen Gardiner, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who writes on climate ethics, questioned whether research of that kind belongs in private hands and asked what holds it to account. Oceankind’s line on press attention has not shifted since. A spokeswoman told TechCrunch in 2022: “Oceankind is not seeking visibility nor conducting media interviews at this time.”
One question that gets asked constantly has no answer at all. Nobody has published a credible figure for Southworth’s own wealth, and no filing exists that would produce one. Her husband’s fortune is tracked by Forbes and Bloomberg and runs into the hundreds of billions.
Away from the work
How the two of them met has never been reported. The Guardian noted that Southworth was identified as Page’s girlfriend in early 2006, and by November 2007 Forbes described them as having been together for more than a year. They married on Necker Island that December, Branson acting as best man, in front of a guest list of around 600. Their children were born in 2009 and 2011 and have never been named publicly.
She surfaces in state records now and then. In 2010 she gave $100,000 to the campaign against California’s Proposition 23, which would have suspended the state’s global warming law, a donation picked up by Grist from Secretary of State filings. She and Page are both directors of the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, named after his father, which put $15 million towards the West Africa Ebola response in 2014.
The family spent long stretches of the pandemic in Fiji. In January 2021 Page applied for a medical exemption to New Zealand’s closed border so that one of the children could be flown to Auckland for treatment, which set off a short political row in Wellington. Her father’s obituary, published in 2019, gave her address as Palo Alto.
The major picture agencies hold nothing on her after December 2016, when she and Page attended the Breakthrough Prize ceremony at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Getty’s captions from those years style her Dr Lucinda Southworth. An absence from the wires is not the same as an absence from public life, but it has now run for the best part of a decade.
Oceankind’s staff page lists five people. Southworth is not among them, though the same page says she established the organisation.
