  Geoscientists
Sarah Noble, Lydia Olander, Jana Davis, Katie Donnelly (left to right, above)
and Melissa D. Ho (photo at right) are 2004-2005 congressional fellows.
Top: Naomi Lubick; right: courtesy of Melissa D. Ho. |
Nuclear talk
Katie Donnelly, the congressional science fellow for the American Geological
Institute (which publishes Geotimes), has chosen to work with Rep. Ed
Markey (D-Mass.). Donnelly first introduced herself to Geotimes readers in the
October issue, describing her work as an igneous petrologist focusing on mid-ocean
ridge basalts. When she started her new job in October, she was immediately
thrown into the flurry of congressional activity to pass legislation on the
9/11 Commission’s recommendations, “mainly to do with human rights
issues,” she says, particularly with regard to detained aliens.
This may be a far cry from geology, Donnelly acknowledges, but her other responsibilities
have geoscience connections. She will be tracking security issues that include
nuclear weapons, arms control and arms proliferation, and she intends to follow
test-ban treaty monitoring and uranium enrichment, for which her isotope geochemistry
will be useful.
Space shakeup
Sarah Noble says that since she was 11 years old, she knew she wanted to be
an astronaut. Growing up in Big Lake, Minn., Noble says she became a space enthusiast,
and she then followed that passion from a geology degree at the University of
Minnesota to her doctoral work at Brown University in Rhode Island. She now
specializes in space weathering — how planets and satellites without atmospheres
to protect them, such as Earth’s moon, change under the onslaught of solar
wind particles and other space phenomena.
Although she has not joined NASA’s astronaut corps, Noble says she is looking
forward to watching the agency’s metamorphosis over the next year, working
as a minority staff member for the Subcommittee on Space, in the House Committee
on Science. “It’s going to be an exciting year for space,” says
Noble, who is sponsored by the Geological Society of America. “NASA is
at a crossroads,” with the Bush administration’s proposals for Mars
and beyond and a shakeup of the space administration’s structure and scientific
goals (see Geotimes, October 2004).
Sea Changes
As a marine biologist, Jana Davis arrived at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
in La Jolla, Calif., just in time to study fish populations in rocky intertidal
zones during the 1997-1998 El Niño event. Her doctoral thesis research
showed how climate changes such as changing currents (California’s reverse
directions during El Niño), temperatures and water depths, among other
physical characteristics, would affect fish species and sessile organisms such
as barnacles.
Davis then spent three years at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
on the Chesapeake Bay, after which she moved to a tenure-track position at Williams
College in Williamstown, Mass. After a year of teaching oceanography and other
subjects at the college’s Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program, Davis
was accepted as a congressional fellow, sponsored by the American Geophysical
Union, a position she had been craving for years, she says. Not only does this
fellowship provide a glimpse at professional alternatives to academia, but also,
in a year when the Ocean Commission completed its recommendations on ocean policy
to Congress and the president, she can bring her expertise on fisheries and
oceans to the Hill. Davis works in the office of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.).
Soil connections
Plant physiologist Melissa D. Ho, though a biologist, fits under the geosciences
rubric because, she says, “I have geology envy.”
A native Southern Californian who grew up in an urban setting, Ho says she is
obsessed by crop practices wherever she goes, an interest that has taken her
to Kenya and Israel for research. This year, Ho finished her Ph.D. in plant
physiology at Pennsylvania State University, following on her master’s
work on soils and plant-water interactions at the University of California,
Davis, and undergraduate work in environmental systems technology at Cornell
University. “You can just study the plants or just study the soil,”
Ho says, but she prefers a “whole systems” approach.
Ho, who has yet to select which congressional office to serve, will start on
the Hill in January as the congressional fellow sponsored by the Agronomy, Crop
and Soil Science Societies of America. “You want to use your knowledge,”
she says, moving it out of the lab and into the real world.
Applying science
Lydia Olander, a biogeochemist, has studied soils in Hawaii and Brazil, an outgrowth
of her training in forestry. While working on her doctoral thesis at Stanford
University, Olander tracked nitrogen and phosphorus cycling in Hawaiian soils
using microbial methods and isotope tracers. Her post-doctoral work at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington’s new Department of Global Ecology, based at
Stanford, helped to lay down some baseline research to correlate forest soils
in Brazil and biogeochemical conditions with logging and satellite imagery.
Olander, whose undergraduate work focused on environmental science and policy,
has been interested in the congressional fellowship since she began her graduate
work. She now works for Sen. Joseph Leiberman (D-Conn.), sponsored by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and says she will be focusing partly
on climate change issues. Like her colleagues, Olander says that she will miss
science but is looking forward to the applied aspects of science policy.
Noting her colleagues’ breadth, communications skills and specialties,
from space science to oceans to pure research, Olander says that the congressional
fellows program “picked relevant people” for “the issues Congress
is dealing with today.”
Naomi Lubick
Link:
"The Geoscience
Vote: Funding and the fate of NASA," Geotimes, October 2004
Back to top
 |
Geotimes Home | AGI Home | Information Services | Geoscience Education | Public Policy | Programs | Publications | Careers  |