Jillian Ooi

About Jillian Ooi

Marine geographer Jillian Ooi is passionate about seagrass – the overlooked underwater plants that sustain marine ecosystems. Seagrass is an important livelihood for coastal communities around the world, and especially in Malaysia, where Jillian collaborates with communities in Sungai Johor and Sungai Pulai to study them. As both a 2015 Komai Fellow and the 2022 Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, she has also worked to protect their vanishing habitats in areas like Pulau Lima, Tioman, and the Mersing Islands, while exploring ways to restore seagrass from the roots up.

Jillian's passion extends to teaching those who learn about them. Though she nurtures students' critical thinking in her day job at Universiti Malaya, her secret weapon is the gamelan. As music director of the Rhythm in Bronze orchestra, she uses traditional gamelan music to convey the urgency of ocean conservation, invoking the sound of the sea and stimulating the public to action through their ears as well as their minds.