Meeting Abstract
What kind of scientists will be in demand in the future? Should we be training generalists or specialists? For my dissertation, I looked at factors controlling the distribution and abundance of three species of Uca. I conducted the research in small plots and cages on a few acres of marsh in a single county. I selected sites for access, history, and whimsy. The conclusions were applicable to those organisms in those locations, although they laid out some concepts that might apply elsewhere. A few years later, I secured a position to ensure that EPA did not do anything egregious in managing municipal discharges to the ocean. Here the sites were a few km2 surrounding 210 individual discharges. Although the subject matter was different, the analytical methods learned in grad school were directly applicable. My next position was as a senior ecologist and eventually interim director of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program. The ecological questions were of a different character. How many lakes are acidic? What happens if we change the acid loading to the lakes? People involved in this program pioneered a set of methods to answer these questions. Since then I’ve been involved in a range of research, critical loads of air pollutants in the US and Europe, assessment of aquatic resources in the western United States, and others. My most recent research has even involved collaboration with social scientists! While the methods and thinking learned in grad school provided a great foundation to make contributions to these efforts, I applied additional sets of methods to address new problems, especially ones at larger scales. Since the character of important policy questions is often at these larger scales, one wonders about whether to ensure that grad students are learning and exercising methods that allow them to function on issues requiring techniques and thinking different than those in their dissertations.
