Dr. Owen Shieh, Ph.D.

Dr. Owen Shieh is a visiting scientist in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences at the United States Military Academy (USMA). He is supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy, and Environment as the first research fellow assigned to the newly established Sustainable Infrastructure, Resilience, and Climate Consortium.

A meteorologist with more than 20 years of experience across the public, private, and academic sectors, Dr. Shieh specializes in the national security impacts of weather prediction and operational decision support. He has provided support to the White House Presidential Weather Operations and technical meteorological training to more than 2,000 forward‑deployed U.S. military personnel.

He has served on U.S. delegations to the United Nations World Meteorological Organization’s Typhoon Committee and led bilateral technical discussions with the Taiwan Central Weather Bureau, Japan Meteorological Agency, Japan Self‑Defense Forces, and the Republic of Korea Air Force. Dr. Shieh also provides technical training in tactical tropical climatology and limited‑data weather forecasting to U.S. Special Operations Forces, including the Navy SEALs and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) “Night Stalkers.”

Before joining the faculty at West Point as a visiting scientist, Dr. Shieh served as a mission operations engineer at Anduril Industries, where he facilitated the on‑site integration of the Lattice Joint Operating Software into operational contingency planning at U.S. Pacific Fleet Headquarters and advised the integration of environmental data into artificial intelligence‑infused autonomous technologies.

From 2016 to 2024, Dr. Shieh served as the civilian Training and Readiness Department head at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he was responsible for the 24/7 operational training of all U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps personnel who provided tropical cyclone forecasting and tsunami decision support to U.S. government assets across the U.S. Indo‑Pacific Command’s area of responsibility, encompassing nearly 100 million square miles of the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Prior to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, Dr. Shieh served as the weather and climate program manager at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, where he established and led a national team of experts and instructors to develop and deliver hazardous weather and climate FEMA‑certified training courses for state and local emergency managers and responders across the United States.

Dr. Shieh presently serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve as a direct commission meteorology and oceanography officer assigned to the Pacific Fleet Submarine Forces Intelligence unit in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In 2017, he was named “Oceanographer of the Year” and awarded the U.S. Navy Civilian Meritorious Service Medal.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science from Cornell University, a master’s in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Hawaii.