Geotimes
Profiles:
News
about people from AGI and its 41 member societies
Archive of past
Society Page/Profiles stories by date
Climbing the Hill
Each year, a handful
of geoscientists comes to Washington, D.C., joining a class of 30 scientists
and engineers who take part in year-long congressional fellowships, sponsored
by a variety of membership organizations and overseen by the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The geoscience fellows serve in a congressional
office for a senator, representative or committee. This year, five earth scientists
have ascended Capitol Hill.
From left to right, the four new geoscientists
on Capitol Hill: Kevin Vranes, Eloise Kendy, Michèle Koppes and Lee
Hirsch.
Worldly perspective
The congressional fellows have already noted how few scientists work on the
Hill. Anecdotally, they have found that their colleagues in the issues they
lean toward tend to be environmental lawyers, but the fellows are not at a disadvantage.
“Having a background in research gives you the ability to think through
the issues,” says Michèle Koppes, this year’s Geological Society
of America/U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) congressional fellow.
Koppes works in the office of Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.). Although she currently
hails from Seattle, where she is a doctoral candidate in glaciology at the University
of Washington, Koppes is a Dutch citizen who has lived in Greece, Canada, Japan,
and Scotland, to name a few of her homes. She has studied glaciers in Alaska,
Central Asia and the Antarctic, and taught glaciology and wilderness skills
to high school girls in summer courses in the Cascade Range in Washington.
Koppes first came to the United States to study at Williams College in Williamstown,
Mass., to pursue a liberal arts degree instead of being tracked through the
Dutch university system. She tracked herself to geology. Her interest in policy,
she says, is centered on “the societal impact of what we do as earth scientists.”
Her work in Inslee’s office will range from climate change issues and wilderness
area designations to forest issues and initiatives.
Koppes has completed all but her dissertation, based on her research in the
Antarctic, where she drilled to the base of ice streams to study subglacial
hydraulics and the marine geology of Antarctic fjords. She plans to return to
the University of Washington once she has completed her fellowship.
Making the switch
Kevin Vranes hopes to continue his involvement in policy work for the rest
of his career, wherever he may be, starting with his term as the American Geophysical
Union congressional fellow.
Vranes grew up in California, almost on top of the San Andreas Fault, as it
cuts up the peninsula south of San Francisco. He studied geology at the University
of California at Davis as an undergraduate. “I had really good classes
where, of course, the science was brought up, but so were the implications,
especially concerning water issues,” he says.
Davis is in close proximity to Sacramento, California’s capitol, and Vranes
says his advisor, Jeff Mount, was heavily involved in water issues. Mount emphasized
the intersections of science and society, he says. “Ever since then, I
couldn’t think about science without thinking about societal impacts.”
After working as a UNIX systems administrator in Portland, Ore., Vranes served
as a GIS specialist for a Columbia River basin mapping project, documenting
the whole basin for fish studies. When he returned to school to get his Ph.D.,
Vranes chose Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, in Palisades,
N.Y., where he studied air-sea interactions during El Niño and monsoon
seasons in Indonesia. That specialization, which he calls “oceanography
in climate,” gave him a highly detailed perspective of the science behind
climate change, as well as the credibility he wanted in order to work on science
policy.
This year, Vranes will work for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), covering energy, the
environment, and other issues, potentially including the Internet and the Clean
Water Act — though not oceanography, which is fine, Vranes says. “I’m
ready to focus on something different.”
Geophysics and human health
Lee Hirsch, this year’s congressional fellow from the American Institute
of Physics, was also looking for something different. Hirsch, who works in the
office of Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), is a geophysicist. He also is a mineral and
rock physicist, former petroleum researcher and, more recently, a Peace Corps
volunteer.
Hirsch’s interest in geology started with a high school earth science elective,
taught by a former oil geologist. After getting his bachelor’s in geology
(working on rock mechanics) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Hirsch studied the upper mantle for his doctoral work in tectonophysics at the
University of California at Berkeley. He went on to research mantle mineral
transport properties as a post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hirsch
then spent a decade at Exxon (which became Exxon Mobil Corp. during his tenure
there), “working on something totally different every two years,”
he says, including flow in porous rocks, hydrothermal testing, percolation theory
and geostatistics.
But Hirsch wanted to do something more in the public realm. So he joined the
Peace Corps and went to Tanzania, where he taught advanced high school physics
for two years. When he returned, he spent a semester at Northeastern Illinois
University in Chicago, teaching introductory earth sciences, until he received
the congressional fellowship.
His Peace Corps experience, Hirsch says, was his introduction to government
and made him want to continue in public service. While in Africa, Hirsch became
interested in issues surrounding HIV and AIDS. He hopes to pursue some of those
issues in his work with McDermott, who is one of the few doctors in Congress
(a psychiatrist) and is active regarding such issues in the United States and
abroad.
Soil interfaces, policy interfaces
Michael Schmidt
notes that there are even fewer scientists in Congress. Schmidt himself recognizes
that the process of decision-making with regard to scientific issues may be
more political than technical. “I was always interested in the interface
between policy and science,” Schmidt says. “This is an ideal position
— seeing in real life how policy is made and how science works or doesn’t
work into the process.” The question he hopes to answer while working as
a congressional fellow, he says, is “how best to use my talents to protect
the environment — is it to do research and let other people use that research,
or in the policy realm?”
Michael Schmidt is the American Society
of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society
of America fellow, and he will start working for Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)
in January. Photo courtesy of Michael Schmidt.
Schmidt grew up just outside Washington, D.C., in suburban Virginia, where he
participated in a 4-H club. As a high school senior, Schmidt took on a soils
remediation project on a mine reclamation site in southwestern Virginia, applying
sewage as a soil treatment. He finished the project for his undergraduate thesis
at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in
Blacksburg.
Schmidt then pursued his master’s, also at Virginia Tech, comparing natural
wetlands to human-made wetlands created for mitigation under federal law, working
with the Virginia Department of Transportation. After receiving a Fulbright
scholarship, Schmidt left Virginia for the University College London, for his
second master’s. He compared sewage sludge remediation policies in the
United Kingdom and the United States, as well as public perceptions of them,
and how the media and policy-makers present the issues involved.
Now, recently returned to Virginia, Schmidt will serve as the congressional
fellow to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), starting in January. He is co-sponsored
by the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and
the Soil Science Society of America.
Politics at last
Eloise Kendy, the American Geological Institute congressional fellow, had decided
in high school that she wanted to be in politics. Advised that a degree other
than in political science would be useful, Kendy instead discovered the geological
sciences as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“The camaraderie and diverse field trips” to sites in Southern California,
from folded coastal strata to inland deserts to fault traces, she says, “energized
me to continue on to grad school at Wisconsin, where I focused on hydrogeology.”
After two years of hydrological consulting in Montana, Kendy traveled for two
years in Asia (hitchhiking through China, among other places), Australia and
the United States. When she returned to Montana as a hydrologist for the USGS,
she was politically active, serving on a local water board while making sure
she avoided conflicts of interest with her work. In 1999, she returned to graduate
school to get her Ph.D., with the intent of becoming a congressional fellow.
At Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., she addressed policy and groundwater
issues in China, working to link the two to achieve sustainable water-use practices
in the North China Plain.
Kendy works for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). She has discovered that working on
the Hill might differ from her expectations of politics. After three weeks of
orientation under the tutelage of the AAAS, Kendy says, “we relearned everything
we thought we knew about government.”
Naomi Lubick
Back to top
