Glen T. Shen, Ph.D.

Executive Vice President

Mote Marine Laboratory

Glen received his BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1979 and his PhD in Chemical Oceanography from the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Joint Program in Oceanography in 1986. He was selected as an institutional postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and was appointed as a Research Scientist thereafter. In 1988, Glen migrated to the University of Washington where he became an Assistant and later tenured Associate Professor in the School of Oceanography. His research led to the development of novel high-resolution records of environmental changes in earth’s recent past. Such records based on subtle chemical changes in marine corals address natural climatic variability (e.g. El Niño) and effects resulting from global industrialization (e.g. penetration of anthropogenic lead into the North Atlantic thermocline). Glen also served as Adjunct Professor in the Quaternary Research Center (QRC), and Fellow of UW’s Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO). He received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991 and he was twice recognized for his effectiveness teaching undergraduates with the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences’ Distinguished Teaching Award (1991 and 1996).

Outside of academia, Glen has been employed in leadership positions by state and federal government with the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. In the private sector, Glen began his professional career as a Process Development Engineer in Procter and Gamble’s Latin America Division. His most memorable experience was to startup from scratch a Singapore-based biotechnology subsidiary of SurroMed, Inc. of Palo Alto, CA. The goal of this ambitious enterprise was to compete against 2-D microarrays (i.e. gene and protein chips) by realizing a solution-array platform based on encoded, chemically-derivatized nanoparticles. Glen has also been an active builder and teacher in the international volunteer community having worked with World Relief, the Costa Rican Humanitarian Foundation, Oaxaca Streetchildren Grassroots, and MEDRIX.