Shirley J. Dreiss

Shirley Dreiss was born in 1949. She died on December 14, 1993, at the age of 44, in a car accident. Her death was reported by the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

In 1991, Dreiss was awarded the prestigious Birdsall Distinguished Lectureship for the Hydrogeology Division of the Geological Society of America. Her lectures were titled "The Hydrogeology of an Active Subduction Zone" and "Regional Scale Transport in a Karst Aquifer." After her death, and through contributions by friends and colleagues, the lectureship was renamed as the Birdsall-Dreiss Lectureship.

Dreiss joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1979. At the time of her death in 1993, she was professor and chair of the Department of Earth Sciences at UCSC. Dreiss was an expert in a wide range of specialisms, including groundwater hydrology, groundwater contamination, complex aquifers, arid basin hydrology, water and contaminant transport through unsaturated soils, and the hydrogeology of subduction zones.

Shirley Jean Dreiss (1949–1993) was an American scientist working in the fields of hydrology and hydrogeology. After gaining her PhD from Stanford University, she joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she became Professor and Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences. She made important contributions to the understanding of water flow through karst aquifers and fluid flow in subduction zones. At the time of her early death in a car accident, she was studying the groundwater system of Mono Lake in California. She was awarded the Birdsall Distinguished Lectureship from the Geological Society of America, which was renamed the Birdsall-Dreiss Distinguished Lectureship after her death.