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Professional development is the fundamental curiosity that an individual has around their
profession. That profession could be technical and it could be teaching. It could be almost
anything. That is driven, really, by curiosity and passion. The two together are a very important
component of building the body of work that makes you a professional.
Going back early in my career on the wastewater side, I was intrigued, probably about a decade
ago, with the hypoxic zone problem that's in the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn't get my head
around a fundamental concept that there was a portion of the Gulf of Mexico that was dead.
It had no dissolved oxygen. Nothing could live in it. It was growing at an alarming
rate, acres per day.
I wanted to understand first of all what creates this hypoxic? What is the cause of this? If
you look at it, the largest watershed is the Mississippi River. The technical reason was
that you had nitrogen and phosphorus that was entering into the Gulf of Mexico through
the Mississippi River drainage basin. That was really a wastewater issue ... farming,
point source, and nonpoint source. I wanted to understand how would that be solved? In
active participation in the EPA's investigation program, all of which was just on my own time
curiosity-wise.
Now scroll forward to today and we have a major initiative in the Gulf of Mexico. The
cornerstone of that initiative is this hypoxic zone issue. Having Bryon Griffith onboard
who has been managing that program for EPA for the last decade just was a connection
that I was able to make because I had a curiosity on a technical problem, an environmental problem,
in our country. The curiosity drove me to understand how that could be solved and it's
become a body of work on that particular topic that advanced my profession.