Biography: Pamela Logan
January, 1996
Dr. Logan's professional training was at Stanford University where she earned a doctorate in Aerospace Science, and at the California Institute of Technology where she received a Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Subsequently she was employed for three years at the University of California at Los Angeles as a lecturer and research engineer in laser diagnostics applied to experimental combustion. She also holds a third-degree black belt in Shotokan karate, a Japanese martial art.
Parallel to her career as a scientist she has developed a talent for photojournalism, publishing articles and photographs in China Geographic Monthly, Asia Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Silkroad, Footprints, The Explorer, The California Tech, Shotokan, as well as a number of scientific journals. She has recorded the landscape and traditions of inhabitants of ten countries scattered across the globe, with special emphasis on the minority nationalities of China.
Inspired by her martial arts background, in 1991 Dr. Logan embarked on a project to investigate warrior tribes of eastern Tibet. In the course of her research, which was sponsored by the Durfee Foundation of southern California, she traveled over much of western China by train, truck, horseback, mountain bike, yak-hide coracle, and foot. Her book about these adventures, Among Warriors: A Martial Artist in Tibet , -will be published by Overlook Press in 1996. In preparing for this project she studied the Mandarin and Tibetan languages, acquiring a working knowledge of both.
In the spring of 1993 she returned to China to undertake a four-month study of minority assimilation in Inner Mongolia, again funded by the Durfee Foundation. That year also marked the start of her full-time involvement with the China Exploration & Research Society (CERS). Based in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, CERS conducts a variety of interdisciplinary field projects in China. In the summer of 1993 Dr. Logan took part in a CERS expedition to Tibet's Changtang plateau, and to southern Xinjiang.
In 1994 she was called upon to manage a CERS project whose aim is architectural conservation of Tibetan monasteries in western Sichuan province. In 1994 and 1995 she led international teams of specialists to two sites (both accessible only by traveling horseback) where the conservation work will be focussed and a training program in mural conservation will be established.
At present she holds the post of Research Director of CERS. In this role she is working with NASA on a study of the Silk Route that will use Spaceborne Imaging Radar to identify man-made artifacts under the sands of the Taklamakan desert. She has also assisted the World Monuments Fund in obtaining radar images of Angkor in Cambodia, and has traveled to Tuva, Russia to join a Golden Griffen Foundation archeological dig as expedition journalist.
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