- Hello everybody and thank
you for tuning in today
and for supporting VIMS
and attending our very first
virtual Marine Science Day
supported by Dominion Energy.
We are incredibly excited about this event
because we have people tuned in
from all over the world today.
So my name is Kaitlyn Clark,
I'm a graduate student at VIMS
and I will be your host for this session.
We are really excited to have
both associate professor Christopher Hein
and assistant director for
research and advisory services,
Emily Hein here with us to
discuss their career paths
and their role at VIMS, so
welcome Christopher and Emily.
All right, Chris if you
wouldn't mind starting off
with just an overview of
kind of what your role is
and what a typical day
might look like for you.
- Sure.
Yeah so as Kaitlyn said I am
an associate professor at VIMS
which means I'm faculty
I get the opportunity to conduct research,
to teach students, mostly
graduate students at VIMS
but also quite a few
undergraduates at William & Mary.
I have a lab of
I'd say I've got three graduate students
and five undergraduates
who are working in my lab at any time.
And what we're doing
is conducting research on coastal geology.
So that's my focus in science
is trying to understand
beaches and barrier islands
and how they change with time both
and anything from when you
go before and after a storm
to the last 10,000 years.
So that is,
yeah that's mostly what my job entails
is a lot of research and
teaching all focused on the coast
and how our beaches are changing.
- Awesome, thank you so much for that
and Emily if you wouldn't
mind doing the same
just a little overview
of your role at VIMS
and what a day looks like for you.
- Sure, so my background
is also in coastal geology
and I work with Chris and others
doing some of the similar research
but most of my job is in what
we call advisory service.
So that is taking my own
knowledge of coastal geology
and working with any
other scientist at VIMS
and all of the other disciplines
to answer questions that
local, state, regional, federal
policy-makers and regulators ask
on anything pertaining to marine science.
So that could be how a proposed
project might impact a marsh
to how pile driving might
impact fish species of concern.
- Thank you both for
that intro to your work.
So for both of you,
what is your favorite part of your job?
What makes you excited to
come to work every day?
- I can go first, that's easy for me,
the thing I love the most and
occasionally dislike the most
is that I never know what the next email
or phone call is going to be,
what question I'm going to be
asked. Which is great it
means every day is different
which I suspect is something that
a lot of people enjoy in our realm,
but it means that I get to dig my hands
into all sorts of different topics.
As a coastal geologist I never
thought I would have to know
so much about submerged aquatic vegetation
and anadromous fishes
and anything in between.
- Yeah, you know what,
it's funny, it's the same thing for me.
It's every day is really different.
I'll go to work on it on
a certain day I'll say
I'm just going to sit here
and I'm going to sit at my
computer and tap, tap, tap,
and write all day, I've got
this great idea for a science,
about paper to write or work up data
and then things start blowing up.
And that is actually great
because I really enjoy that
and things blowing up
it's not generally not literal in my lab,
but is very likely to be
that oh one of my students has a question
about they're opening up a core
sediment core that we took from a beach
and what does this mean?
So I got to run down to the
lab and go check that out
and talk through some science with them.
And it's a constant every
day is constant discovery
and learning more about
the world around us
and often in ways that
we didn't see coming
at the beginning of the day
and that's what's really exciting for me.
- That's amazing, I love that.
This is a really interesting question,
someone asked for you
both on your career paths,
was it marine sciences
to coastal geography
sorry, coastal geology
or geology to coastal geology?
Which came first for you
and kind of your career path
and how you got to where you are now?
- Yeah for me it was
definitely coastal geology,
so more of the geology and
to then focusing on coasts
right from the get go.
And so then sort of branching out
into more marine science
after that geological focus.
- Yeah, it's the same for me.
I got into this because I
was always very fascinated
by the world around me.
You know what, I'm not just not
frankly not the living side of it,
but the landscapes, I want to understand
you go somewhere be it a
beach or be it the mountains,
and I always was fascinated
by okay, why is that there?
Why are these mountains here?
And I realized that geology was a pathway,
a way that I could learn about
that and that's why in school
that was what I focused on
in high school, college.
And then as I continued
on in it I realized
well, gee, those mountains got there.
Yup, that took hundreds
of millions of years
in some cases, certainly millions
and then they're there and
over my lifetime that's it.
And what I really liked
about coastal geology
is that you never really get
to go to the same beach twice,
it's constantly changing.
So you can watch it change coast, beaches,
barrier islands, tidal inlets,
these are some of the most
dynamic features on Earth
and you can actually watch
that process of growth
and formation and change in a day.
And that is what eventually
led me to studying the coast,
it wasn't that I just
want to be a beach bum.
That didn't hurt,
but it was that I really want
to understand why that changed
and be able to watch it.
- Well, just to add on to that
I do think it's kind of
funny that Chris says
in the geological world
we are very short time,
studying very short time scales
but at VIMS we study some of the longest.
That our field work
typically doesn't matter
if it's this year or next year
or what season or whatnot,
but you go down to the hatchery
and things change hourly.
- Yeah absolutely,
the timescales on the different
types of marine science
are very broad, very wide for sure.
And with kind of your
the field work aspects
that you were mentioning
Chris someone asked
what are some of the tools
or cool pieces of equipment
that you get to use in your work?
- Oh boy.
Oh well, that's it, that's a good one.
We have a lot.
So,
mostly what I do is I dig holes
but they're just really
glorified holes in the ground.
That is, yeah sometimes we
go out there with the shovel
and dig up sand but most of the time
that doesn't get us deep enough.
So my tools include,
what we call a vibracore system,
which is where we take
a hollow aluminum pipe
strap on to it a vibrating cylinder
that's actually most people would use it
for say a smoothing out cement,
put it up 30 feet in the air
vertically and turn it on.
And what it will do is vibrate
itself down into the ground,
and then we can cap it
kind of your finger on the end of a straw,
cap it and pull it back up and
keep all the sediments in it.
So we do that with this
vibrating system and a tripod.
But we also, if we want
to go deeper than 30 feet,
we going up to 80 or a 100 feet
we have a drill rig for that.
So this allows us to core down
into all of these coastal sands and muds
that have been left behind
by say changing sea level
over hundreds of thousands of years,
as well as hundreds of thousands of years,
really we're focused on the last 10,000.
We also, I guess our
other big tool that we use
is called our ground penetrating radar.
Sometimes you just don't
want to dig the hole
you just want to know what's down there
underneath the ground.
So for that what we use is a tool
that sends out a radar
signal into the sub surface
it bounces off different layers,
comes back up and we can map
what's beneath our feet just using radar.
Those are the two primary tools,
and then we get more creative with those
for example, we have a vessel
out at our Eastern Shore Lab
in Wachaprague on the Eastern Shore
that allows us to take those vibracores
through the middle of the
boat, so you can do that,
in fact we were just
doing that a few days ago
in Assateague Island where we could go out
and sink a core right down
through the middle of the boat
and pick and pull it back up.
Also allows us to take our drill rig
out to the remote barrier
islands of Virginia.
So we have some neat tools
that we're able to do this
all over the place with.
- That's really cool, oh my gosh.
It's funny, I always walk past
the coastal geology trailer,
so it's fun to know
what might be in there.
- Yup that houses "Bruce," our drill rig.
- Awesome.
And along too with the
different cool gear and stuff
people are curious how
is the research funded
and how difficult or time
consuming is it to secure funding
for your research?
- Spend most of my time
trying to secure funding
for the research actually.
That is a major component of our job.
You know the funding
comes from various sources
working in coastal geology.
Some of my questions are more basic about
how the world changed,
how the coast has changed,
how barrier islands have changed
and for that we go to places like NOAA
or the National Science Foundation.
But there are other
components of what we do
that are really focused
on resilience of the coast
and how it's going to be
affected by sea-level rise
and climate change.
And for that there are other agencies
including the Commonwealth of Virginia
that funds the work we're just doing up
in Chincoteague and Assateague.
So that's largely it
and yet it takes a long time
to try to take what we do,
take our questions, take how we,
and think about how that
benefits society as a whole
and address that for
these different agencies,
it's a major component
of my day-to-day world.
And it's fun too because
I got to work with Emily
on some of those projects also
because there's a lot in,
unlike a lot of geology
coastal geology intersects
clearly with advisory service
and the people wanting
to change shorelines
or harden shorelines, well
that's my world as well.
So that's where we get to
bring our expertise together
and quote it for some funding.
- Yeah and there's a question
Emily how often do you spend
your time in the office
versus in the field
kind of, what is your
breakdown of time look like?
- That varies month to month.
So as far as in the field for research
that's a very small amount of my time
I think officially it's actually 5%.
You know that varies.
But then for my job evaluating projects,
a lot of what I do is for the
Marine Resources Commission
asking what the marine
environmental impacts
of a proposed project might be.
And so I spent a lot of time
driving all over the state
anywhere that is tidal,
and so that could be
tidal freshwater up in
Fairfax in Alexandria,
Back Bay down in Virginia Beach,
you know all the tidal water.
And so I have to look
at a project on the site
we can't really evaluate it
unless we're actually there
and can look at it and poke around.
So I spend usually well
when I can leave my house
I would say anywhere from
well, no site visits in a
week to four or five or six
in various places
so it can put a lot of
miles on our state cars.
(laughs)
- That's awesome, that's great
to get to know kind of yeah
how that time gets broken
down especially for people
that are considering a
career in this field.
And with that, you mentioned
that when staying at home
someone asked how is the current pandemic
effecting field work
and advisory services?
- Yeah.
So right now the Marine Resources
Commission in particular
they're the ones who ask for most,
we work most closely with
and they are not allowing their people
to do site visits at this time at all.
So that means that we have
those site visits that we go on
have drastically decreased,
over the last couple of months there,
I haven't been on any since March.
But as we see things starting to open up,
I suspect those will
be carefully conducted
sort of one person at a time
instead of a meeting onsite
that sort of thing.
And so I said, you have some
projects we can evaluate,
just from application
materials and aerial photos
and that sort of thing but it's rare,
those are few and far between.
- Great, well thank you both
so much for being here today,
that brings us right to time.
So yeah, thank you for
letting folks ask you
about your career paths
and your role at VIMS
this has been really amazing.
For everyone watching also
if you navigate back to the agenda page,
you can access all of our
other great virtual sessions
and future interview panels,
you can also browse
through all the resources
that are on the home page for you.
Thanks again to Dominion Energy
for supporting this session
and just once again to our attendees,
we can't wait to have you back on campus
but until then
we're really excited to have
you here virtually with us.
And I hope everyone
has a really great day.
(waves crashing)
