UCSB Geography PhD graduate Dawn Wright visited March 1 and gave two talks—“Spatial Reasoning for Terra Incognita: Progress and Challenges of Ocean Informatics”and “How to Get Your Work Out There: Issues of Data Sharing, Access, and Usability.”To quote her website (http://dusk.geo.orst.edu/), Dawn Wright (a.k.a. “Deepsea Dawn”) is a professor of Geography and Oceanography at Oregon State University, where she has been on the faculty since 1995. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a seagoing marine technician for the international Ocean Drilling Program and a post-doctoral research associate at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Newport, Oregon. A few years after the deepsea vehicle Argo I was used to discover the HMS Titanic in 1986, Dawn was presented with some of the first geographic information system (GIS) data sets to be collected with that vehicle while a graduate student at UCSB. It was then that she first became acutely aware of the challenges of applying GIS to deep marine environments. She has since completed oceanographic fieldwork (oftentimes with GIS) in some of the most geologically-active regions on the planet, including the East Pacific Rise, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Tonga Trench, volcanoes under the Japan Sea and the Indian Ocean, and, most recently, American Samoa. In 1991 Dawn became the first African-American woman to dive to the ocean floor in the Alvin submersible.
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