In its nearly 60-year history, the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach has had two directors. The search for a third is now underway.

Chris Lowe, who has run the Shark Lab since 1998, has entered the Faculty Early Retirement Program offered by the university.

The program allows him to teach a class every semester and run the lab for up to five years, which should ease the transition for the renowned lab that has been around since 1966.

Lowe said the university has committed to replacing his position and he hopes to stick around long enough to train his successor.

Chris Lowe of the Shark Lab at CSULB. Courtesy photo.

Much has changed since Lowe first started at the lab as a graduate student in 1988. At that time, shark research legend Donald Nelson was running the program, which was designed to study shark behavior, ecology and physiology.

Nelson, a pioneer in using sound to relay information across open space to study sharks, taught Lowe how to build an acoustic transmitter. Lowe and the other graduate students in the program would put that transmitter on a shark or a ray “just to kind of see where they went,” he said.

Research trips at the time involved spending roughly 50 hours in a small boat, often getting drenched by waves or having near-misses with tankers in the channel.

At the end of those arduous trips, they would have one data point to plot on a chart.

Now, the technology allows the lab to track hundreds of animals simultaneously over an area that stretches from Morro Bay to San Diego.

“[The technology] has just evolved so much over my career, it’s amazing,” Lowe said. “Now we’re starting to get into shark’s heads.”

In 2018, $3.75 million in state funding helped the lab develop an early warning system that helps protect beachgoers in Southern and Central California from sharks.

The system sends lifeguards a text alert when juvenile white sharks get within 100 yards of certain beaches.

This year, Lowe said he had 80 prospective graduate students wanting to join the lab.

“The shark lab is internationally known, we get people coming from all over the world now who want to come train in the lab,” Lowe said.

Despite that notoriety, Lowe is searching for an endowment to keep the lab’s budget from fluctuating with changes to CSU funding year-to-year.

Once he’s fully retired, Lowe said he wants to focus on his science communication company, Dr. Shark LLC, to produce documentaries, consult on films or train scientists to be more media friendly.

He’s also working on a book about the history of shark research and a murder mystery novel related to shark research.

Lowe met his wife, Gwen Goodmanlowe, when they were both grad students researching marine biology at CSULB.

The pair also attended the University of Hawai’i together for their doctorate degrees.

Lowe said she’s not worried about him being bored when he fully retires.

“My wife is more worried about me actually completely retiring so we can travel and do fun things,” Lowe said.