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Islander honored for polar exploration

By Julie Lane

COURTESY PHOTO | Islander Lawson Brigham posed by the Coast Card icebreaker, Polar Sea, that he commanded on a voyage to Antarctica in the mid-1990s.
COURTESY PHOTO | Islander Lawson Brigham posed by the Coast Card icebreaker, Polar Sea, that he commanded on a voyage to Antarctica in the mid-1990s.

The name Brigham is well known to Islanders for public service, so it won’t surprise many that Lawson Brigham, a 1966 Shelter Island High School graduate, has won accolades for achievements in polar science and exploration.

Now a professor of geography and arctic policy at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Mr. Brigham is one of only 62 people since 1936 to have received a Polar Medal and Honorary Member Award from the American Polar Society. Mr. Brigham was honored for his contributions in preserving polar history.

The award was presented in November at the American Polar Society’s 80th Anniversary Symposium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

A former Coast Guard captain, Mr. Brigham commanded four cutters, including the American icebreaker Polar Sea, the first vessel to travel between the North Pole and the southernmost tip of Antarctic, a voyage that took seven months.

Mr. Brigham has since served as Alaska’s director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission for six years.

In addition to his work at the University of Alaska, he was recognized for his work with the International Maritime Organization, helping to develop “the Polar Code,” a set of guidelines to protect the Arctic people and the marine environment.

Mr. Brigham is a councilor of the American Geographical Society Board; vice president of the American Polar Society; a senior fellow at the Institute of the North; and a fellow at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s Center for Arctic Study and Policy.

JO ANN KIRKLAND PHOTO | Mr. Brigham on a recent trip to Shelter Island .returns from Alaska to his home here about every five weeks.
JO ANN KIRKLAND PHOTO | Mr. Brigham on a recent trip to Shelter Island.

After graduating from high school, he went to the United States Coast Guard Academy, graduating in 1970. In 2000 he earned a doctorate degree in oceanography at the University of Cambridge, in England. He began teaching at the University of Alaska in 2009 after his Coast Guard career ended.

John Splettstoesser, chairman of the Polar Society’s Board of Directors, called the award to Mr. Brigham “long overdue.”

While he is based in Alaska, he continues to own, with his sisters Marion and Margaret, the home of their parents, Walter and Gladys Brigham, on Winthrop Road. Amazingly, he gets back to Shelter Island about once a month, “more in the summer,” Mr. Brigham said.

He continues to serve on the Board of the Shelter Island Historical Society.

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