Distinguished Speaker Series: Dawn Wright
January 27, 2027 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
The Ocean Institute’s Distinguished Speaker Series, presented by the Nicholas Endowment, brings interesting innovations, real-world research, exotic experiences, and delightful discoveries to the surface through powerful presentations from an ocean of experts. Speakers present on a variety of topics ranging from ocean researchers, ocean authors, ocean artists, and ocean athletes.
Light snacks and refreshments will be available for purchase. Doors open at 5:30pm, talk begins at 6:00pm.
Pricing:
$10 – General
FREE – Members
FREE – Students (with Valid ID)
About Dawn
Dawn Wright (aka “Deepsea Dawn”) is Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (aka “Esri”) and a professor of Geography and Oceanography at OSU, 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 wreck of the RMS Titanic in 1985, 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 American Samoa. Dawn is also an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
