Ann Budd has seen the world through her research involving the evolution of coral reefs.

The 59-year-old U. Iowa geoscience professor has always been an adventure seeker. But it wasn’t until her sophomore year studying abroad — she lived next to London’s British Museum of Natural History — that she took an interest in geology.

“That’s how I got into marine ecology and stuff like that, just going to visit the British Museum and seeing all of its weird fossils and collections,” she said.

After finishing her undergraduate work at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., the Richmond, Va., native attended Johns Hopkins University for graduate school, where she got into scuba diving.

“There weren’t many rules like there are today back when I got into diving,” she said. “We used to dive down to 100 feet and do all kinds of crazy things that would be completely illegal today.”

Because of her diving experience, Budd was asked to travel with her professor to Jamaica and help with an experiment.

This is when she began to focus her studies on corals.

“At that time, I was interested in their sizes and shapes and how they changed with the environment,” she said.

Her Ph.D. thesis involved transporting corals, watching them grow, and then collecting and quantifying them by size and shape.

Budd didn’t get into paleontology studies on coral reefs until she finished her Ph.D. and came to Iowa in 1978. Paleontology is the study of life in its prehistoric forms.

One specific project she worked on in the 1990s sticks out in her mind.

“We hopped all over the Caribbean and made large collections of corals,” she said. “We brought them back here and identified them, then tried to figure out when certain corals went extinct and what types of environmental factors were associated with the extinction events.”

This particular trip saw Budd travel to Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Trinidad, among other places.

“She is better traveled than most,” said sister Emilie Budd, 56, who described Ann Budd as vehemently independent and a cultured person.

Her fluency in German as well as her knowledge of many other languages has helped Ann Budd throughout a career that deals with science on an international level.

“A lot of people change their research as they go through their career,” she said. “But mine has always been devoted to corals, probably because there is not very much known about them, and there are a lot of very interesting places to go, different people to meet.”

Jim Klaus, a former student of hers who is now an assistant professor at the University of Miami, remembers how she exposed him to new opportunities.

“What I found most enjoyable is that she gives her students a chance to explore what interests them while also introducing them to new ideas that they normally wouldn’t have the chance to experience,” he said.

It is obvious to students, colleagues, and family that Budd has a sincere wish to better our oceans through concentrated research.

“Her career is who she is,” said her proud younger sister. “She is not pretentious about any of it. It has never been about making money. Everything she does is about improving her research or making a better experience for her students. She is one of the lucky souls who loves what she does.”