Romberg Tiburon Campus

SF State’s Romberg Tiburon Campus is located in Central SF Bay, along a naturally deep water channel that hugs the shoreline, just inside the Golden Gate, an ideal location for a science center focused on coastal and marine ecosystems. The Romberg Tiburon Campus, an extraordinary 53 acre bayside campus on the Tiburon Peninsula in Marin County, California, is an ideal setting for realizing the synergistic and creative potential of these outstanding programs for the region. Access to the water through a deep water port is critical for marine science and education, and a rare asset in SF Bay.  Surprisingly, no other institution of higher education has a marine science laboratory located on SF Bay; SF State’s is the only one.

Very few marine science laboratories are in a location more suited to addressing issues of environmental justice confronting urban coastal regions today (and into the foreseeable future). We are also in an ideal location and affiliated with the ideal university, for a marine laboratory, to engage with communities that are underrepresented in the earth, ocean and environmental sciences. It is part of our vision to provide leadership in developing effective career pathways to build a diverse workforce in these critically important disciplines. 

The close proximity of SF State’s main campus, just 20 miles from the Romberg Tiburon Campus, enables one of the most diverse student populations in the nation remarkably close and easy access, at least by field station and marine laboratory standards, to the EOS Center's specialized research and educational facilities.

The Romberg Tiburon Campus has supported maritime commerce, naval defense and training, and marine science and education for over a century, and is especially well suited to support the interdisciplinary mission of the EOS Center. The changes to the campus landscape and uses over time reflect the rich pre-historic, historic and contemporary environmental legacies of the SF Bay region. Historic artifacts remaining on the Romberg Tiburon Campus are our link to the past, and in telling the stories of those artifacts the EOS Center will document the concomitant changes in society and the environment in a meaningful way, cultivating public interest in our current activities and the campus. Place-based research, interpretation and educational outreach are core practices for marine laboratories and field stations.

The Romberg Tiburon Campus is an ideal location for local and regional community engagement on coastal and maritime environmental science, history, and policy. The EOS Center values and appreciates the many different ways that people communicate about these important topics, including through artistic expression, and will invite collaborative proposals and opportunities to support projects with artists, writers and storytellers interested in community engagement on themes related to our place-based legacies or current research projects.

view of the campus from the air
Romberg Tiburon campus in 1908