SB Museum of Natural History Presents 16th Annual Legacy Awards
Your Society Invites gal-Friday is pleased to share the 2025 Legacy Award Winners of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (SBMNH), who were announced at a trés private soirée called the Leadership Circles of Giving Dinner held at the Fleischmann Auditorium.
This year’s honorees are UCSB Professor Emeritus Michael Glassow, PhD; geologist John Powell, MA; Peter Sawyer, MS,prior faculty in biology and ecology at the Thacher School; and Paul Wieckowski,Frank Schipper Construction Co.
They are recognized for their generosity in helping to sustain the SBMNH and its Sea Center. The Leadership Circles Members support the museum and Sea Center’s education, research, exhibits, collections, and accessibility initiatives.
Glassow is a researcher on the archaeology the Chumash ancestors, the natural world and recently the Central Coast of California. His soon to be published book is said by the SBNMH to, “…be the first of its kind in almost a century, collecting the vast body of knowledge accumulated in the field since the Museum’s first Curator of Anthropology, David Banks Rogers, published Prehistoric Man of the Santa Barbara Coast in 1929.” Glassow has contributed to the work of the SBMNH Department of Anthropology since the 1970s with archaeological literature, often made in partnership with the museum.
Stewarding the legacy of geologist Thomas W. Dibblee, Jr. in the interest of science, industry, and the general public, is Powell, who has served on the Dibblee Foundation Board for 30 years. Powell worked with the SBMNH to publish Dibblee’s compilation of maps of the geology of over one quarter of California in digital and print formats. For the SBMNH, he also heads field trips to the Carrizo Plain National Monument, where trip participants straddle the tectonic plates on both sides of the San
Andreas Fault.
A Sea Center volunteer for 16 years, Sawyer teaches visitors about the marine exhibits, following his retirement from Thacher School in 2009. He shared, “Visitors are amazed at how much information and wonder is packed into such a ‘little’ aquarium. The tide pool exhibition and the Wet Deck rival the experiences our guests would get at the most prestigious facilities.”
The final honoree of the evening, Wieckowski, was instrumental in building the Sea Center on Stearns Wharf. SBMNH Board Chair Salvatore Milazzo lauded his work saying, “Paul has gotten to know every inch of the museum and Sea Center from the inside out.”
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