- What is the name of the organization you work for and your role there?
- I’m working as the Nutrient Reduction Strategy Coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). MPCA and other Minnesota (and federal and local) partners are conducting a 10-year update on Minnesota’s NRS, and I’m managing that project. So contract and grant management, calendars, coordinating everyone, and writing and editing the revisions.
- How did your experience at IWRC contribute to your career path?
- I was on the original Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy facilitation team with IWRC, and that experience was almost directly responsible for me being hired for my current position. Aside from nutrient management, I also managed the small grants program and peer review at IWRC, and that work inspired a lasting interest in research administration and project management. I spent three and a half years with the Minnesota Legislature working on grant and research administration for projects for the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, and I never would have applied for that position in the first place if IWRC hadn’t shown me how much I enjoy that kind of work.
- In what ways did your work/experiences at IWRC contribute to your professional development?
- Working with and being mentored by former IWRC assistant director Lisa Merrifield has been one of the most important parts of my professional development. Lisa always demonstrated both extreme competence and kindness, and she was (and is) such a role model to me for how to find a way to be really, really good at your job while balancing that with a healthy personal life.
- Are there any valuable perspectives that you gained in the field?
- One of the first projects I completed at IWRC was to topically categorize the publication archive, which stretched back to the founding of the water centers in the 1960s. I had to skim a lot of papers to figure out what they were about because the majority didn’t contain keywords or abstracts. Topics ranged from summaries of early European missionaries’ descriptions of water resources in Illinois to pre-Clean Water Act wastewater treatment technology. It was truly shocking to understand how far the technology, science, and societal expectations about water have come in the last 60 years, and it also gave me a historic perspective about my work. When I get discouraged about persistent water quality problems or pollution, I can think back to those old papers and realize that while the progress has been slow, it has also been enormous in moving toward clean, safe water for everyone. There is still so much work to do to restore and protect water, but being able to look back and see the change in attitudes from the view that tossing stockyard waste into Bubbly Creek in Chicago was a reasonable practice and that it was ok for a stream to catch on fire, to now an expectation that the CAWS should be fishable and swimmable gives me a lot of hope.
- How has your time at IWRC influenced your career and personal growth?
- I was pretty freshly out of grad school and unsure of myself when I started at IWRC, yet I was given a lot of leeway to explore my own ideas. For example, I thought it would be great to establish an IWRC social media presence, but then reality hit and I discovered I didn’t know what I was doing. Turns out a personal Facebook account doesn’t magically create professional social media skills. I started researching branding and developing a platform, but managing the accounts was still out of my comfort zone. I had to learn to work through that discomfort. Ultimately, experiences like that at IWRC have helped me build confidence in my ability to solve problems and to take on projects that push me.
- What are your future career aspirations, and how do you see your experience at IWRC playing a role in those aspirations?
- I feel like my current position has been my career aspiration for a long time, so I hope that I continue to build my expertise in large-scale water resource programs and strategies. Ultimately, like most conservation/natural resources professionals, I would love to work myself out of a job. It’d be wonderful to see all water quality goals achieved in my lifetime so that when I’m retiring, something like a nutrient reduction strategy will seem as archaic to a new IWRC staffer as the research on early wastewater treatment technology seemed to me in 2012.
- What are some of your notable work/projects at IWRC?
- I’m really proud of the work IWRC did on the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy. I still see my role in that as a major life accomplishment. My work at IWRC varied so much that my perspective on what was notable may be a little skewed. For example, there was a stretch when I was the only IWRC staff member, and getting the RFP out and the annual report submitted that year remain notable projects in my mind.
- What is the name of the organization you work for and your role there?
- I’m retired, but I worked for two scientific organizations—Illinois Natural History Survey (1973-1986), and U. S. Geological Survey (1987-2014).
- How did your experience at IWRC contribute to your career path?
- I began my Masters work at Western Illinois University in 1972. A researcher, Dr. Richard Sparks, at the Illinois Natural History Survey obtained a grant from the IWRC in Illinois (located on the Champaign-Urbana Campus of the Univ. of Illinois) to develop Bluegill Toxicity Indices for the Illinois River. The INHS Field Station in Havana, IL, located on the Illinois River, was close to Western Illinois University. The grant funded my Master’s thesis work between 1973 and 1975.
- In what ways did your work/experiences at IWRC contribute to your professional development?
- Only one person in my third generation of Polish-Americans ever went to college, and I was the first to go to graduate school. I didn’t know anything about science as a potential career path. I did not spend much physical time at the IWRC, but met regularly with the Center Director, Glen Stout, and learned how the research I was doing was related to water research being done state-wide. I presented progress reports to peers, and in the process learned how a scientific grant programs operated, funds were transferred, how request and report on the use of grant funds. Being associated with the IWRC office at the Univ. of Illinois also put me in communication with an extensive network of academic and state agency water scientists. These were my first exposures to how river science was done.
- Are there any valuable perspectives that you gained in the field?
- The perspectives I started developing included: what kinds of research decisions were made by scientists at various levels in a scientific organization, how difficult it was to propose and defend science projects, what peer review was for, how important publication was, and how scientists had to balance their communications among the science community, land managers, policy makers, and the general public.
- How has your time at IWRC influenced your career and personal growth?
- My time with the Illinois IWRC convinced me that a career in science, especially water and natural resources sciences, was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
- What are your future career aspirations, and how do you see your experience at IWRC playing a role in those aspirations?
- During my career, the fundamentals I learned during my Master’s work (while being funded by the Illinois IWRC), never lost any of their importance. I had great mentors to show me how to do “the right job” and “the job right”. I was fortunate enough to be recommended for a PhD program at Virginia Tech, and later returned to begin leading science projects within the Illinois Natural History Survey. I eventually led the science of a nationally recognized river monitoring program with field stations in 5 states. At the end of my career, I departed with great memories and the feeling of having made a difference. Now, retired, I’m happy to say that I’m still doing science voluntarily, to support Rillito River floodplain restoration. It all started with that small Master’s project, funded by the Illinois IWRC, on the Illinois River.
- What are some of your notable work/projects at IWRC?
- The Illinois River project was the only active project I’ve had with the IWRC network. I consider it notable, because it was one of the early research projects that got the Illinois EPA and City of Chicago on the right track to reduce the most important pollutants that were limiting fish health in the Upper Illinois River.
