Dawn Wright
Chief Scientist
Esri
Dr. Dawn Wright is Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (aka Esri), a world-leading geographic information system (GIS) software and data science company. Core to Esri’s mission is to inspire and enable people to positively impact their future by connecting them with the geoanalytic knowledge needed to make the critical decisions shaping the planet. Hence, Esri believes that geography is at the heart of a more resilient and sustainable future. As Chief Scientist, Dawn is responsible for strengthening the scientific foundation for Esri software and services, while representing Esri to the international scientific community. She is also still a Professor of Geography and Oceanography at Oregon State University where she has been on the faculty since 1995.
In the early 1990s Dawn was the first female of African descent to dive to the ocean floor in the deep submersible Alvin. On July 12, 2022 she became the first person of any gender and of African descent to dive to Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth, and to successfully operate a sidescan sonar at full-ocean depth. This was accomplished in the deep submersible Limiting Factor.
In April 2021 Dawn was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She holds an Individual Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Physical Geography and Marine Geology from UC-Santa Barbara, an M.S. in Oceanography from Texas A&M, and a B.S. cum laude in Geology from Wheaton College (Illinois). Follow her on Twitter @deepseadawn.