WWU's Erika McPhee-Shaw Elected to Chair to Prestigious Gordon Research Conference

Western Washington University Professor of Environmental Science Erika McPhee-Shaw will be chairing a prestigious Gordon Research Conference in Manchester, New Hampshire in June.

The Gordon Research Conference in Coastal Ocean Dynamics brings scientists working at the frontier of research to discuss, in depth, all aspects of the most recent advances in the field and to stimulate new directions for research. The conference promotes this groundbreaking discussion by implementing a privacy policy to make sure that researchers feel free to discuss any new information.

This year’s conference will take place at Southern New Hampshire University and will feature researchers from Taiwan, China, Japan, Nigeria, Mexico, France, Canada, Russia, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Korea, Germany, Liberia, New Zealand and Thailand.

McPhee-Shaw, who served as vice chair in 2017, is the first woman to chair the GRC in Coastal Ocean Dynamics. At that meeting she gave a keynote address to a group of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

“I enjoy interacting with early-career scientists,” McPhee-Shaw said. “I think that’s because throughout my career I’ve played a strong role in putting forward sessions at the big national conferences and featuring new Ph.D.s as speakers.”

In her keynote address she talked to this younger group about the science she has been working on and her career.

Prior to coming to Western to serve as the director of the Shannon Point Marine Center, she worked as an associate professor at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories at San Jose State University.

McPhee-Shaw is currently working on research of the physics of deep, subsurface waves and how they interact with continental slopes and shelves.