Wayne L. White
Geography, BA: Winter Site Manager Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
For Accessible Web Version of Wayne L. White Spotlight
Take your education seriously and be open to possible changes in your interests as you are exposed to new things. More than likely, you will find the passions you had as a child are what you really are.”
Wayne L. White has been a contractor working mostly for the US Defense Department for the last 25 years. He spent the majority of that time in foreign and remote places: Diego Garcia British Indian Ocean Territory, Singapore, Midway Atoll, Shemya Island Alaska, Iraq, Kuwait, Wake Island, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Ascension Island. Currently, he is a contractor employed by the United States Antarctic Program as the Winter Manager at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (WSM). He will be returning in 2020 as the WSM, and it will be the first time in the 63-year history of the SP Station that a WSM has endured three winters.
As the senior member of the South Pole Station, he is responsible for the lives and well-being of 41 other crew members, the station and science facilities during the long Antarctic winters.
White grew up in the Midwest and joined the US Marines at 18. After enlistment, he settled in Southern California and attended CSUF. White began as a Biology major but switched to Geography as he found more applicable classes to his work in the Environmental field. He worked for Southern California Edison at the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Site doing environmental work for a decade. Then he left to travel the world and never really returned.