West Michigan-based shipwreck explorer, author and museum exhibit designer Valerie van Heest is the recipient of the Marine Historical Society of Detroit’s annual Robert T. Pocotte Historian of the Year Award for 2025. van Heest’s personal mission is to preserve and interpret Great Lakes maritime history in ways that educate, entertain, and inspire. Her work began in 1989 when, as an architectural designer, she co-founded the Underwater Archaeological Society of Chicago. Using her design and diving skills, she developed efficient ways to document shipwrecks and created numerous site drawings. She led several projects on the area’s most significant shipwrecks, in one case testifying for the State of Illinois about the shipwreck LADY ELGIN. Relocation to Michigan in 1995 prompted Valerie, her husband Jack, and others to cofound the nonprofit Michigan Shipwreck Research Association (MSRA). Since then, her team has discovered 20 shipwrecks and documented those and dozens of others. Her work led her to begin lecturing. She has delivered over 800 multi-media presentations and cohosted MSRA’s 25 annual shipwreck festivals in Holland, Michigan, showcasing the work of Great Lakes maritime explorers. She has written dozens of magazine articles, been interviewed for countless news stories, and appeared on a dozen national television programs discussing her research. In 2006 she established In-Depth Editions to publish her first book, as well as the books of other historians whose niche topics are often overlooked by bigger publishers. Of her eight books, she is most proud of those in which she has been able to correct erroneous historical information, including Lost on the Lady Elgin, Fatal Crossing and Big Red Lighthouse. The latter book prompted the state of Michigan to install a corrected state historical marker at the site of the Holland Harbor Lighthouse. In 2008, she and maritime historian William Lafferty, named 2016 Historian of the Year by the MHSD, coauthored the National Register of Historic Places nomination of the shipwreck HENNEPIN. This led to their establishment of the exhibit design firm Lafferty van Heest and Associates. LvH has curated and designed all the exhibits for The Port of Ludington Maritime Museum, and numerous exhibits for the Michigan Maritime Museum, Chicago Maritime Museum, and other museums. She has written three successful grant applications as cooperative projects between MSRA and LvH’s museum clients and has been instrumental in negotiating the donation of collections belonging to others to various maritime museums, including a dozen steamship models, and over 200 artifacts from the LADY ELGIN, NIAGARA, and Northwest Airlines Flight 2501. She is an inductee in the Women Divers Hall of Fame, recipient of Michigan State History Awards for her maritime preservation work and several of her books, Daughters of the America Revolution Women in History Award, and the AGLMH’s Joyce C. Hayward Award for Historical Interpretation. Her greatest honor has been raising, with her husband, two successful daughters, both who are certified scuba divers.