Heather Gibson

Heather Gibson is the Vice President for SWCA’s Southern California and Pacific Islands subregion, which includes our offices in Honolulu, Pasadena, and San Diego.

Heather brings a unique set of skills and breadth of experience to this role, including success at building an organization to scale, leading a diverse team, and excellence in strategic thinking and problem-solving. After earning a Ph.D. in anthropology at Syracuse University, Heather taught at the university and elementary school levels prior to moving into environmental consulting, where she led a team and managed large cultural resources contracts at another consulting firm.

Heather joined SWCA in 2014 as an archaeological principal investigator, bringing her expertise in historical archaeology to major projects such as the San Gabriel Trench archaeological data recovery. As a Cultural Resources Director and Senior Director at SWCA from 2017 to 2023, Heather has grown the Southern California cultural resources team more than four-fold to be the largest such team in California at any firm.