Dawn Wright, who completed her interdisciplinary PhD in Physical Geography and Marine Geology at UCSB in 1994, recently won Oregon State University’s "Milton Harris Award for Exceptional Achievement in Basic Research." The annual award is made possible by a major endowment from Milton Harris, one of OSU’s most accomplished and distinguished alumni, whose research led to the development of synthetic polymers and who was the director of research and vice president of the Gillette Company and later served as chairman of the American Chemical Society.
While at UCSB, Dawn completed a dissertation titled “From Pattern to Process on the Deep Ocean Floor: A Geographic Information System Approach” with Ray Smith as her advisor. In 1995 Dawn joined the faculty at OSU, where she is currently a professor of Geography and Oceanography. To paraphrase her website ), “Deepsea Dawn” got her MA in geological Oceanography at Texas A&M and then worked for three years as a seagoing marine technician for the international Ocean Drilling Program before entering the PhD program at UCSB. While working on her PhD, she was presented with some of the first GIS datasets to be collected by the deepsea vehicle Argo I (used to discover the HMS Titanic in 1986) and developed an interest in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and in the challenges of applying GIS to deep marine environments. Dawn has since completed oceanographic fieldwork (oftentimes with GIS) in some of the most geologically-active regions on the planet, and she writes software that processes the oceanographic data and eases the transition of the datasets into GIS. (Editor’s Note: Dawn also visited the UCSB Department of Geography in March of this year 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.”)
