She was also a “restless academic,” Weis says. She did the conventional work of publishing papers, but only later in her career did she find a more fulfilling pursuit: public speaking. She excelled at it, holding forth about her work at the United Nations, as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival, in the Emmy-winning documentary Chasing Coral, and in many public lectures. She jokingly attributed her success to her English accent.

Shayle Matsuda, one of her students, sees it differently. He first saw her speak about corals at a high-school chapel in Honolulu with both urgency and positivity. “You could have heard a pin drop in there,” he says. “It felt like she was taking everyone by the hand and talking only to them. It was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had, and it convinced me that we really can change the narrative around climate change. It’s not just going to be research that saves reefs. It’s also about reaching people, and moving them out of the paralysis that comes from our situation.”

He, and others I spoke with, were struck by how often Gates admitted that she could be wrong, that her approach might fail, and that there was so much she did not know. In this, too, she was iconoclastic. “She wasn’t ego-driven; she was mission-driven,” says Hollie Putnam of the University of Rhode Island, who was one of Gates’s students. “That’s so rare for people at the top of their field. She wanted what was good for corals, people, and science. She didn’t want to build a kingdom.”

The kingdom sprang up around her nonetheless. Her work turned her into a rock star of coral science—a role that she publicly embraced, but that wore on her privately. Weis describes her as “a classic introvert on a stage”—someone who seemed to embody extroversion, but who secretly longed for quieter company. Such moments became rarer as her career took off. “She’d shake her head and wonder: How did this happen?” says Edmunds, who recalls freer days of sitting on a dock in a bay in Jamaica, watching passing comets. “In many ways, she still felt like just a grad student. Most people didn’t see that, but it colored so much of what Ruth did.”

For example, she always made time for people, even when it became hard to pin her down. “She’s here, there, everywhere, until she’s with you—and then she’s really with you. Her support was complete and concrete,” says Kim Cobb of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “There was an endless amount of her, and everyone felt like they had their own piece,” adds Weis.

Gates especially advocated for people who, like her, faced extra challenges in science because of their gender or sexuality. When she took over the presidency of the International Society for Reef Studies, she intentionally diversified its largely white, male staff. “Ruth was the first person I had a candid conversation with about what it meant to be a woman in science,” says Beth Lenz, who was one of her students. And Matsuda, who is transgender, adds: “She helped me grow into my scientific identity wholly, and pushed me to be my authentic self unapologetically.”