He is broadly interested in the psychology of understanding events. Recent work has focused on understanding how people represent and reason about events in the geosciences. Dr Shipley is a core investigator in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center - an NSF funded science of learning center - where he heads the research strand on undergraduate geosciences education. His research is also supported by a TUES grant to develop a workbook for training penetrative spatial thinking, and a FIRE grant to understand how people infer spatial processes from spatial observations.