The stories behind faculty CV's
I was born in Arlington, Virginia, just a few blocks from the headquarters of the National Science Foundation. This is the place, I guess, where nerds are born. Nowadays, it’s cool to be a nerd, but it wasn’t always like that. In the 70’s, it was not cool. I was lucky, though, because I had dedicated teachers who made science fun, like our Jr high biology teacher Mr. Howard, who took us on bike trips to freshwater springs and forests with frogs and snakes.
I was lucky to have had a father who helped with science fairs. What I do today with water and biology is like what he and I did then. In one project, we treated fish eggs with salts, acids, and bases; measured their expansion, and made a salmon egg crusher to see how much weight it would take to crush treated eggs; in another project, we sampled water at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake from a canoe… no small feat! Dad was a patent attorney and his clients were mostly poor inventors unable to pay in money so they paid with inventions. The result was a house filled with inventions, punching bags, snow flings, and a high-speed merry-go-round that every kid in the neighborhood wanted to ride on. I was lucky to be exposed to inventors.
At family gatherings, I was lucky to hear the tales from my biochemist uncle, a professor at UC Davis. He made science exciting. Like the time he was scuba diving and survived an equipment failure and had to make an emergency ascent from a 100’ dive.acing nitrogen narcosis, he somehow had the presence of mind to have his body packed in ice, increasing the solubility of nitrogen in his blood and saving his life. Or the time he discovered a wound healing protein in the slime of an endangered fish in the Red Sea.
As a teen, I was lucky to work for my grandfather, a civil engineer and hydrologist who became well known for the Blaney-Criddle formula, a method of calculating crop water requirements that's still used today. At Utah State University, I was lucky that the faculty had created a new graduate MS program called Environmental Engineering that combined civil engineering with chemistry and biology. It sounded perfect to me. When a job opened up at a local wastewater treatment plant, I worked weekends and holidays, and realized that wastewater treatment, with its huge vats of microorganisms, was endlessly fascinating. From my MS thesis on biosolids, I realized how research in engineering could be practical and fun, even if the materials I was working with were a little icky.
When I applied to the Stanford doctoral program, I was lucky that there was an opening in Professor Perry McCarty’s group. I recall the intimidation of Palm Drive, when I drove onto the Stanford campus for the first time, with my wife and two kids in tow. But the Stanford environmental engineering and science program was welcoming, filled with wonderful and supportive people, friends for life, and my mentor was amazing. Despite that support system, it took a long time to finish my research, and, in the end, I was incredibly fortunate to discover a microorganism that helped me cross the finish line. How I found that organism is itself a great story of serendipity, but we don’t have time for that here today.
When I finished at Stanford, I was lucky that the perfect job opening came available at Michigan State University, where an amazing microbial ecologist, Jim Tiedje, was setting up the Center for Microbial, an NSF center that would become a kind of mecca for microbial ecologists from around the world. From this group, I was able to learn about ecological theory as well as cutting-edge tools, like Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (TRFLP) and clone libraries. I loved working with these microbiologists. Later, we had the chance to use the microorganism I had discovered at Stanford for remediation of a contaminated aquifer in Michigan, one of the first large-scale studies of bioaugmentation. I was lucky that people with the expertise for that work were at MSU, especially David Hyndman, a hydrogeologist and expert modeler whose work guided our design.
When Professor McCarty retired, I happened to be at the right age and had gained experience at MSU that enabled me to return to Stanford. I was lucky to recruit Weimin Wu to Stanford and to work with Peter Kitanidis and Phil Jardine at the Oak Ridge National Lab to demonstrate a strategy for remediation of uranium. Without any one of those people, that project would not have been possible.
Stanford is a place where luck gets transferred from one person to the next. One reason for that is the Woods Institute, and the vision of Jeff Koseff and Buzz Thompson. One day our very own Sarah Billington asked me whether I would join her on a proposal to Woods involving anaerobic biodegradation of biocomposites. Well, of course! Eventually that led to the “Green Team,” a wonderful collaboration with colleagues and students from structural engineering and chemical engineering funded by Cal Recycle. This led to work with methane and bioplastic and to incredible colleagues including Molly Morse and Allison Pieja, and eventually to a spin-off company named Mango Materials. Lucky again.
Then came the Codiga Resource Recovery Center, an initiative that grew from monthly meetings with the water utilities folks at Stanford, especially Tom Zigterman, and through Tom’s recognition that water reuse research could enable better water planning for the campus. His initiative opened the door to a proposal to the Provost that was eventually funded. The story is long and convoluted, but without the appearance of key people at critical times, such as Bill Codiga and Bob Whitley and Olivia Chen and Sebastien Tilmans, it would not have been the success it is today.
In this unofficial bio, I’ve emphasized luck because the official bio hides that aspect of life, and so presents us with a skewed picture. I guess it makes us uncomfortable to realize how dependent we are on something we often do not control. But often, I can put a face and a name on luck. I am sure that is true for you as well. We all have people who have brought luck into our lives, and the official CV often does not acknowledge them. Even when we think we’ve named everyone, we are deluding ourselves. The luck we have today comes in part from many people who we cannot name, people who fought to give us opportunities they never had; people who increased opportunities for education or who created technologies that improved the health of the environment we now live in; people who took risks for civil rights. These unknown people made luck possible and have given us the chance to pay it forward.
