From 1985 to 1996, he worked in the Department of Zoology at the
University of Hawaii, winning the Matsuda Fellowship Award for Faculty Research in 1991 and a University of Hawaii Regents Medal for Excellence in Research in 1996. He was promoted to
full professor in 1994 and appointed the director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory in 1995. Palumbi moved to a professorship at
Harvard University in 1996 and on to
Stanford University in August 2002. In 2007, he was appointed the Harold A. Miller Director of the
Hopkins Marine Station, and was appointed to the Jane and Marshall Steel Chair of Biology in 2009. In 1996, Palumbi was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, which he used "to develop more rapid, cost-efficient, nonradioactive genetic test procedures to identify threatened species of cetaceans found in products taken from whale meat markets ... allow[ing] the focus of management efforts to be the individual, rather than the species or stock, and enables the tracing of particular whales from fishery to market." In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the
California Academy of Sciences and was awarded the
Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in Science in 2011.
Research interests Palumbi's research interests include studying evolution and change using
molecular genetics techniques, marine
population biology and
conservation, and the effects of human activity on ocean systems. Some of his well known work includes research on using genomic methods to identify species resilient to climate change, and using genetic approaches to identify species of conservation concern in wildlife markets. == Public engagement ==