Abstract
We are very excited to work with the new Environmental Engineering Science (EES) Editor-in-Chief, Princeton Professor Catherine Peters, Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) member and past president. With EES as the AEESP official journal, and my new role as AEESP president, the opportunities for collaborative endeavors abound for us in 2020 and beyond!
Last year we surveyed AEESP members on how to better align our needs in publishing our work, with the opportunities that exist in having our own EES journal. As Catherine works with us to increase the value of EES to our profession, you will see the journal promoting special issues and creating a forum for publication of articles on cross-cutting themes around sustainability, Food/Energy/Water Nexus, Big Data, and life cycle assessment, in addition to our traditional fields in water, air, soils, and solid waste, and hopefully will see many of your publications in EES featured in our e-mail news blasts.
Coming off our energy-infusing AEESP conference at Arizona State University (ASU), it is easy to see we are all privileged to work in an area of such global importance. It was abundantly clear to me that we share a mutual joy in doing the work we do and part of that joy is valuing the personal connections we have to one another in collaboration and competition. Our diverse backgrounds are bound by our interweaving academic lineages and we share a sense of confidence and kindness that is unique and should be celebrated. I am truly honored to serve AEESP as president and to have worked with an amazing board of directors the past 3 years—a board that you elected to represent our community. A special shout-out to Professor Maya Trotz who has been a great role model as an AEESP president and served us all on so many levels.
I get asked repeatedly “What is going to be your focus in your year as AEESP president?” One year is quite short, actually, so I got started last year! Maya, President-Elect Joel Ducoste, and I have talked about our collective vision for AEESP and how we can coordinate our efforts as successive presidents over 3 years, to best support the organization and our members. At the top of our list, and something that will be part of AEESPs focus for years to come, is the concept of inclusivity. AEESP strives to be an organization where we welcome and support everyone, regardless of background, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation. Looking at our pipeline and recent history of board members and presidents, this organization and our members have chosen inclusion and valued diversity, over and over again. Our board is made up of representatives of our community and its diversity of geographies, ethnicities, universities, and genders represent you—our environmental engineering and science profession. But although we typically outpace our peer engineering disciplines, we still have more work to do in the ranks of the professoriate to reach gender equity and optimal participation from the diverse population we seek to serve. I hope to challenge you and to serve you in a number of ways this year to move us closer to this goal of greater inclusivity.
My first challenge for you all, both faculty and students, is to broaden participation in our profession by providing teenagers, who are developing their identity and formulating their problems to become passionate about, with an opportunity to see firsthand what our environmental profession is all about. I challenge you all to reach out to a local high school and offer to give a lecture about your passion, about your problem. Connect with students in your community. I have been doing this for the past 7 years in Boulder—it started by guest lecturing in my daughters AP environmental science class, and now my grad students are also doing it. Create these relationships, but do not stop there. Invite one high school student into your laboratory each summer, just one, to learn how to use a “pipette,” or program a sensor, or measure turbidity, and get engaged with a graduate research assistant, working side by side. Connect their work to one of our wicked problems. Its 10 weeks that will change a young student's life. Dedicate yourself to find a student from a background that has been traditionally underrepresented in the engineering community. Our organization has ∼500 professors. If each one of you takes just 1 student into your laboratory each summer for the next 5 years, we will collectively train 2,500 high school students, instill in them a passion for environmental engineering and science, help them find their problem, and slowly transform our profession to represent an even broader population base. Think about it and talk about. Small actions we each take do make a difference.
In my upcoming EES President Letters and AEESP articles, I will be talking to you about other initiatives I am working on with the AEESP board over these next 12 months. One is the recognition of the coming 50th anniversary of the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (1970 under President Richard Nixon) and various activities by AEESP over the year to commemorate the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Toward our goal of increased inclusivity, I am also launching an initiative to explore how AEESP can increase our international footprint. We have ∼100 members from outside of the United States—we are not just a U.S.-based organization. As many of you know, this is a passion of mine and I believe that improving the international connections between environmental engineering and science professors will help us to better address global environmental issues, engage and learn from local knowledge, and increase our diversity. I am setting up a committee of international colleagues to explore ways and develop a platform, to better engage AEESP internationally and go #AEESPGlobal.
Of course, we have a lot of work to do at AEESP day-to-day, to keep running the organization efficiently, providing opportunities for all of you, our members, to do the best work you can in our profession, and have impact. Our committees are filled with volunteers, like me and like you, who carry on our important and established programs, which you can find at aeesp.org. Sign up to volunteer for something you are passionate about. I am going to ask the “most” of you to make this organization even better.
Look for me on twitter @waterprof and follow @AEESProfs for the latest happenings in our community. Join us with implementation of these collective AEESP–EES relationship endeavors!
We are living in an amazing time—let us make it even greater, together!
Karl G. Linden, PhD
President, AEESP
Professor of Environmental Engineering and Mortenson Professor in Sustainable Development