Susan Shaw, an internationally recognized marine toxicologist, author and explorer, shows evidence the toxic Gulf of Mexico oil slick is being kept off of beaches only at devastating cost to the health of the deep sea.


About the author

Dr. Susan Shaw is a marine toxicologist, author, explorer, and founder/director of MERI. She is known for her pioneering research on chemical contaminants in the ocean environment. An outspoken and influential voice on ocean pollution, she dove in the Gulf of Mexico oil slick in May, 2010, to observe first-hand how oil and dispersants were impacting life in the water column. The experience prompted her to call for an independent investigation, the Gulf EcoTox Project, to track the impacts of oil and chemical dispersants in the Gulf food web.

Dr. Shaw has spent the past two decades documenting the effects of hundreds of man-made chemicals in marine ecosystems. She is credited as the first scientist to show that flame retardant chemicals in consumer products have contaminated marine mammals and commercially important fish stocks along the northwest Atlantic, from Canada to New York. This research has influenced policy decisions in the US and abroad, including the Maine legislature's decision to ban the neurotoxic flame retardant decabromodiphenyl ether (Deca), and the subsequent US phase-out of the chemical.

Commissioned by Ansel Adams in 1983 to write Overexposure, the first book on the health hazards of photographic chemicals, she is an internationally recognized expert on levels and health effects of toxic chemicals in wildlife and humans.

In 2009, Shaw published the first comprehensive review of flame retardant chemicals in marine ecosystems of the American continents. She serves on the International Panel on Chemical Pollution, a select group of scientists urging policymakers to improve management of toxic chemicals.

Shaw is a keynote speaker on the ocean crisis and chemical pollution in the US, Europe, and Asia, and is amplifying the ocean message as Chair of the International Explorers Club's State of the Oceans Forums. She has recently been nominated to be a Woodrow Wilson visiting fellow.