From Window magazine: Water Wonders

The green-and-white ferry edges past the channel marker a stone’s-throw from the shoreline, its engines thrumming. Nearby, a pileated woodpecker hammers at a soaring cedar tree and a great blue heron stalks the shallows as small waves crest and stumble up the rocky shore, retreating with muted hisses.

The quiet beauty is deceptive. The peaceful shoreline is at the edge of a veritable hive of teaching and research activity inside WWU’s Shannon Point Marine Center. Located in Anacortes, about 40 miles southeast of WWU’s Bellingham campus, Shannon Point has become a West Coast epicenter of research on the planet’s marine systems – with critical assistance from undergraduate students.

“We offer something that is pretty distinctive,” says Steve Sulkin, the director of Shannon Point for 25 years. “Many university marine centers focus on being a place for undergrads to get field-work experience; others focus solely on high-level research. We’re one of the few that really excels at both.”

When Sulkin was hired as the center’s first full-time director, that was his mandate: to combine undergraduate experiential learning and scientific research. But he had a tough challenge ahead of him.

Read the rest of this story online at the website for Window magazine.