Interview with Jean Bahr

Jean Bahr (#749) Transcript

SP: [Begin Tape 1] I'm Sandy Pfahler from the University of Wisconsin Madison General Library Systems Archives Department. Today, March 7, 2006, I'm interviewing Professor Jean Bahr, chair of the UW-Madison Geology and Geophysics Department. This interview will be part of the Archives Department Oral History Projects: Women in Science and Engineering Series.

SP: Okay, we'll start with some questions about your background, Jean, if that's all right. How you got to Madison? If you could talk about where and when you were born.

JB: That's fine.

SP: Describe your childhood and early schooling, and talk about any family members, teachers, or others who encouraged you in your studies.

JB: OK, well I was born in New York City, but my parents moved to California when I was less than a year old. So I consider myself a Californian not by birth, but at least by childhood. And I spent most of my childhood in 00:01:00California, but my father did a lot of international work as an electrical engineer working on, primarily defense department projects with radar. So we spent a year in Italy when I was eight years old and in England when I was nine. And a year and a half on a small island in the Marshall Islands called Kwajalein when I was in eighth grade and a freshman in high school. And in between that, we also had a number of summer trips related or unrelated to my father's work in Europe to Japan and a number of other places. So I guess one of the formative things in my childhood was just travel and experiencing other cultures. And I think that that's something that probably prepped me to be a geologist in the sense that geologists love to travel and love to see different parts of the world.

JB: So in terms of family members and teachers, I was always a very good student, and I liked math and science from the start. I think my father certainly encouraged, particularly my interest in mathematics. When we were living in Italy and I was going to an Italian school where I didn't speak the language initially, I discovered that math because it was symbolic was something that I understood. And so I could do that very well in classes even before I picked up the Italian language. And so that probably gave me some positive reinforcement there. The school that I went to in England for a year in the equivalent of fourth grade had just a tremendous science program, particularly compared to, I think, what American schools were doing at that time. They had a special science teacher who came into the classes and we did physics experiments. We were also fairly close to London and we went into an 00:03:00astronomical observatory, planetarium, and a number of the British museums, which has a number of sort of science and technology things. And so I think that that reinforced my interest in science as well.

JB: When we lived out on Kwajalein when I was in eighth and ninth grade, this was in-- I didn't say when I was born. I was born in 1954. And so I was 13 in 1967, which was the time of a major revolution in the earth sciences when the model of plate tectonics was suddenly being widely accepted in the geological community. The idea of continental drift had been around for a long time, but it wasn't until a lot of data started coming in from oceanographic surveys that showed the magnetic stripes that really illustrated the seafloor spreading that 00:04:00this became widely accepted. And I was very fortunate in eighth grade out on Kwajalein to have an earth science teacher who was quite savvy and was already aware of plate tectonics. And we were living on an island that was part of a chain of seamounts, which was another one of the pieces of the puzzle of plate tectonics. These chains of islands that have moved across the ocean floor as the ocean floor has spread and it's overridden hot spots was another part of the plate tectonics evidence. And I remember very clearly her telling us that we were living on this fringing atoll of a seamount that was over a hot spot. So I think that piqued my interest as well in the earth sciences.

JB: I returned to California in 1968 and this was just about the time that there was a growing environmental consciousness, the first Earth Day was held in 1970. And I had gotten involved shortly after we got back to the states in the high 00:05:00school's ecology club. And we worked at a recycling center before recycling and curbside recycling was a common thing. We were actually working in a neighborhood at a neighboring town in Palo Alto. And our town didn't have any kind of a recycling center, so a group of us decided after volunteering for about a year in Palo Alto that we needed our own. And we set one up on a curbside. Basically, one fellow's father had a fruit stand and he said, well, when it's not fruit season you can use this as a recycling center. So we went around to grocery stores and collected big boxes and made a big sign that said recycling center. And then just waited for people to start coming. And they did. And that was a major activity of mine in high school, was running this recycling center. Which was eventually taken over by the city. And then, eventually became a curbside thing. I spent a lot of time in high school thinking about ways to 00:06:00try to change people's attitudes towards the environment and was a very committed environmentalist. But also realized that changing people is really hard. And that my talents were in the sciences, and so when I applied to colleges my main motivation was to try to find a place where I could study environmental science. Because I thought that was the way that I could make a contribution to the environment rather than as a political organizer, but as a scientist.

Although I had grown up in California, my parents were from the East Coast and they had encouraged me to look more broadly than just California at schools. And as a 17 year old that struck me as go east, young woman. So I ended up applying primarily to schools on the East Coast. And I chose Yale in the long run, in 00:07:00part because a savvy recruiter had convinced me that because they had a school of forestry and environmental sciences that they were a good place to study the environment. I didn't realize until I got there that the School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences was actually a graduate program, exclusively. But there was still a program at the undergraduate level called combined sciences, which seemed ideal for my interests because you could take courses from a variety of the sciences and combine them in a creative way to look at environmental problems. So, as a freshman, that's what I declared as my major and started taking the courses in the variety of sciences.

JB: By my sophomore year, they had decided that this interdisciplinary program was sort of unmanageable, and they were phasing it out. And told me that I should choose a regular science and that I could still combine my environmental 00:08:00interests in creative ways through my elective courses. And so by that point, I had taken courses in physics and chemistry and biology, as well as in geology. The Geology Department was small and welcoming. They had field trips as part of their classes on the weekends. And so one could go camping, which was something that I enjoyed very much and had done with my parents as a child a lot, and so geology seemed like the right fit. So that's sort of how I got into geology through both some things about the earth sciences that had piqued my interest as a child, but also through this motivation to study some sort of environmental science.

So the geology program at Yale was a pretty traditional one. I did have an opportunity to take courses in water chemistry and there was several environmental engineering courses that I took as electives, as well as some 00:09:00environmental policy courses. But when I graduated I still wasn't very sure of what I could do with a degree in geology in an environmental context. I'd had a couple of summer internship experiences that some of them had been pointed to me by faculty at Yale. One of them was a job that I had found on my own in California one summer by simply going around to environmental and geotechnical firms and sort of knocking on their door. So I had spent one summer working for a company in Palo Alto that did a variety of sort of applied geology projects from hill slope, landslides, and earthquake studies. And also did some environmental planning. And also did some work in groundwater. And when I 00:10:00graduated from college, they had a major project doing a earthquake safety study on the San Francisco Peninsula, looking at a bunch of dams that impounded water supply reservoirs and aquifer recharge reservoirs. And they needed a field person for that. So they offered me a job, which seemed like a good thing at the time. And so I took that. Ended up working for them for four years. But the major project that I actually got involved in shortly after I joined the company was first a proposal and then a project to do a groundwater resources inventory in Mali, which is a country in West Africa.

SP: You wrote the proposal?

JB: I worked on the proposal with my boss, who was a hydrogeologist. I think that my writing skills, even though I didn't know a lot of the technical things 00:11:00about geology, my writing skills were appreciated in this engineering company where people hadn't had a lot of experience writing. And so they made use of me a lot in proposal writing. And initially, the plan was that I would go over to West Africa just for three months. Part of the project was actually setting up sort of a library, a data bank and a library on groundwater studies that had already been done. And so my boss's idea was that I could go over and work in the sort of office environment. Mali is nominally a Muslim country and the firm was, I think, concerned about sending a woman over there. Also, I was the first woman geologist that the firm had ever hired and so they were never quite sure what to do with me, in any case. But the project got delayed for a variety of reasons. Kept getting pushed off. And they were going to send another junior 00:12:00geologist, a man, over to do the field part of the project, which was training local technicians to make water level measurements and collect water samples and do some mapping. And as the project got pushed off, this other junior geologist got increasingly involved and then married to a woman with a small child and decided that he didn't want to take a young family over to West Africa. So the company was sort of left with me, who had been studying French to get primed for this and my boss came in one day and he said, how would you like to stay for two years rather than for three months? And this at the time, seemed like a very good opportunity, and so I readily agreed. That I think changed my life in one sense.

JB: While I was over in Mali--

SP: Now did you go by yourself then?

JB: There was a senior person that the company hired who was actually the project manager. So I was sort of the junior flunky on the project. But I was actually involved in most of the field work. And my boss had some health problems and so he actually left after a year and a half. And I finished. I spent the last six months sort of running the project and finishing things up while he was back in the states and doing some things there. So in the end I was the only person from the company that was on the project. But we had a team of local technicians and collaborators, so I wasn't doing this all alone. But it was while I was over there that I decided that hydrogeology, the study of groundwater was something that I really felt was an important application of my geologic knowledge. It was important environmentally, and it was important to people providing clean water supply.

But I had had essentially no formal training in that subject as an undergraduate because at that time hydrogeology was a specialty in the earth sciences that really wasn't taught very broadly in traditional geology departments. That' changed a lot in the last 20 years, but I think Yale actually still doesn't have a hydrogeologist on their faculty.

In any case, I decided this was something that I could devote my career to, but if I was going to do that I needed some formal education. So I had--

SP: Can I just interrupt?

JB: Sure.

SP: Just talk a little bit about your experience in Mali.

JB: Okay.

SP: Were you afraid at all? You had traveled so much.

JB: I had traveled a lot, but living and traveling in the third world, of course, is a very different experience. And I had never been in a country that poor. Mali still is one of the poorest countries in the world. I wouldn't say 00:15:00that I was afraid. It was definitely a culture shock. But my supervisor, my boss, in the field had spent a lot of time in Africa. In fact, that's why he was hired for the job. And so I sort of followed his lead. And what I found was that the Malian people were incredibly warm and welcoming and so I remember-- one of the things that we did as part of our field work is we would spend about a month in different, somewhat remote parts of the country going around from village to village collecting water samples and making measurements and doing a little bit of interviewing of the people, usually through a translator. Finding out about whether their wells went dry and whether the water quality varied seasonally. 00:16:00Did it get salty as the well went dry and things like that. And we were traveling around on basically, tracks. They're not roads, they're not paved. They're not even necessarily marked. And we would set up a base camp sort of centrally in the area or in some place where there was a little bit of electricity or options for getting clean water and food and things.

One time we were out and it was getting late and we had sort of gotten-- we had gone farther than we had planned and it was clear that we weren't going to be able to get back to our base camp that night. And so we stopped in a village and asked if we could just pitch a little- we had a cot and some mosquito netting and things like that. And the people said sure and then shortly thereafter they 00:17:00showed up with boiled milk and goat meat. And these people have very, very little and yet, they were willing to share this with a bunch of strangers who were clearly much better off than them just because they were spending there night in the village.

SP: Wow. Were there scientists there that you could work with?

JB: Yes, I was working in the-- I was based in the capital and there was a division of water and power that we were-- this water and power service that we were working with. And this was a time when there was a lot of international aid poured into West Africa because of-- as a response to droughts in the early 70s. There were a whole series of droughts and they had just gone through sort of the first one. So at the sort of Service Hydraulique where I worked, there was a UN project that employed three or four French hydrogeologists. There was also a 00:18:00Canadian project that was setting up a water quality lab and water treatment system. And so there were about four people from that project. There was a French military alternative service hydrogeologist who worked on our project. Several of the technical staff of the Malian technical staff had been trained on the former Soviet Union and in Romania. So they had advanced degrees from outside of Mali. The head of the program, head of the groundwater division there who was a Malian, was actually married to a Hungarian woman who was a hydrogeologist. And actually, it was because of her presence that I think my boss had finally decided that they could send me over for the amount of time 00:19:00that they did. Because they realized that there was an opportunity for women. It turns out if you're an expatroate, it sort of doesn't really matter if you're a man or a woman. You're sort of treated as this odd entity in any case.

I was sort of Peace Corps age in mentality and so there were a number of Peace Corps volunteers in the capital. And actually, around the country. And so that was sort of a network of Americans that I could meet to socialize with occasionally when I had need to speak English.

SP: Very interesting. So then you went on to grad school?

JB: So I went on to graduate school. And I ended up going to graduate school basically in my backyard. In part, because I had one trip home from Mali about six months before the end of the project and I used that in part to do a little bit of investigation of where I should apply to graduate school. And I visited 00:20:00one of my former professors at Yale to ask his advice. And he said, well, you know there's an excellent program at Stanford. And he gave me names of several others. So because the firm that I was working for was based in Palo Alto, which is the city adjacent to Stanford, I actually went over to Stanford while I was back.

It was sort of, probably a Monday or a Tuesday in the middle of the week in the middle of the summer. But it turned out that the hydrogeology professor was in his office when I went to pick up application materials and they said, well you ought to meet and talk with him. He knew my professor from Yale and also knew one of my former bosses from the consulting firm who had since left the consulting firm. So I said a couple of right names and suddenly found myself being taken to lunch and around campus, which I thought was really special treatment. Although, after being a graduate student there I realized that this was the standard Irwin Remson treatment of people that he thought were good 00:21:00prospects. But it made a very positive impression. And in part, just because of logistical difficulties, I ended up only applying to Stanford and I sort of figured that well, if I got in that would be great. And if I didn't I would work for another couple of years and apply after I had investigated some other options. But I got admitted and got a good offer.

So my plan was to--

SP: What's a good offer?

JB: Well it was at the time, people would laugh at it now. But I think it was a stipend that was enough money to pay my rent and tuition, a tuition waiver.

SP: Well at Stanford that's--

JB: At Stanford that was a pretty good deal. And I had saved some money from working for four years. And so I knew I wouldn't have to be living on food 00:22:00stamps. And also, I had learned to live fairly simple in Africa.

What was I going to say? Oh, so my plan was to learn enough hydrogeology so that I could go back and do international development work. But I entered Stanford in 1980, eighty which was sort of another seminal environmental event. Love Canal had been in the press starting in 1976, 1977, and 1978. And it really got a lot of attention. And 1980 was the year that the first super fund legislation was passed.

JB: And so I landed in graduate school just at the time that the sort of emerging field of contaminant hydrogeology was starting to come into its own. And as a result of that, I sort of got diverted into problems of first world 00:23:00contamination and never have really gotten back to the third world water resources development work that originally motivated me. Although I hope at some point on a sabbatical or maybe when I retire that I'll get back to some of that work. But my graduate research led me to a field based project in Canada, of all places. Mostly through some connections at Stanford. There was a post doctoral scholar who was at Stanford my first year who worked for the Canadian government. And I was looking for a project where I could do some field work and he had an interesting project in Eastern Canada at a former hazardous waste site that the Canadian government was sort of responsible for. They were using it as a research site and he invited me up to work there. And I spent two summers up there doing my master's project.

JB: I initially thought I'd try to build a PhD around that. That turned out not to be such a fruitful avenue in part, I think, because the faculty at Stanford wanted a little bit more involvement in it. And also, because I didn't have a well formulated hypothesis related to that site. So I ended up sort of switching gears and doing a much more theoretical dissertation project in conjunction with someone at the U.S. Geological Survey. But the motivation for it, looking at how slow chemical reactions affect transport actually came from that site in Canada because it was based on something we had observed in the field. But rather than doing more field testing for my dissertation work, I ended up doing some 00:25:00theoretical analysis and computer modeling. So in the end, it was a pretty nice package.

SP: Were there other women in your field at that time?

JB: Yes. Well the interesting thing about Stanford was that Irwin Remson, who was the major professor in hydrogeology there at the time, actually had quite a tradition of training women. He was the major advisory for Mary Anderson, who was my colleague here in this department and had also trained a woman named Shirley Dreiss who was a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. And Santa Cruz was just over the Santa Cruz Mountains from Stanford and we had strong ties there. And my first year as a graduate student, they had all of us in very large office that we called the bull pen. And I think there were about eight of us, of which four were women. So there was a pretty good gender 00:26:00balance in the graduate program. There had also been a pretty good gender balance in my undergraduate program at Yale, which was sort of surprising because when I was admitted to Yale I was in the fourth class of women and only 25% of the class as a whole was women. But in my geology major cohort, I think about 30 or 40% of the majors were women. But there were essentially no women faculty.

Actually, there were a couple of women faculty members in geosciences at Stanford. But I didn't take any courses from them because I was in a program that was pretty far from their expertise. And I think the only instructor I had at the graduate level who was a woman was a civil engineer who taught 00:27:00statistics, applied statistics. So there weren't a lot of women role models, but there were a lot of women in my peer group and I certainly never got the message in my academic training that there weren't things that I couldn't do because I was a woman. There was a little bit of that in the consulting firm that I worked for. Mostly because they just had never hired a woman geologist. And I recall that in my first year there, they had a first year review and my boss came in and he said that he tried to get me a larger raise, but they felt that they couldn't pay me more than the other woman professional who was a computer scientist. And I felt like they should have been comparing me to the other junior geologists and not to the other woman in the firm. But overall, I think I 00:28:00came along at a time when opportunities were opening up.

SP: Sounds like it. When you got your PhD, did you go right into academia or did you--

JB: Yes. So the chronology was this. In about a year before I was finishing my PhD, the Fall of 1985, I was starting to think about what I was going to do next. And what I really thought I would like to do would be to work at the U.S. Geological Survey in a research position, at least for a while. And I was working for the USGS, they were supporting my dissertation research and my research advisor was actually a scientist from the USGS. And so when I told him 00:29:00that I was interested in staying, he actually pulled a lot of strings and created a position, a new position in his research group so that there would be a position for me.

JB: At the same time, looking through the ads in the American Geophysical Union's weekly newsletter, there was an academic position at New Mexico Tech that seemed to have my name written on it. What they were looking for was someone who was doing exactly what I was doing in my dissertation research, which was sort of a combined physical chemical approach to hydrogeology. And so I thought, well, you know, I really should at least look into this to make sure that I'm making the right decision by staying at the u USGS. But I was still at 00:30:00least a year from being done with my dissertation.

The American Geophysical Union has an annual meeting in San Francisco in December. And so one of the faculty from New Mexico Tech was going to be at that meeting, and so I set up an appointment with him to talk a little bit about this position. And what he said was well, we've really interested in filling this position a little bit sooner then you're going to be done. But we think we're going to have another position opening in the next year and we'd really like to talk with you about that then.

At the same meeting, Mary Anderson, from this department was there and somehow got word that I was finishing or I was getting sort of towards the finishing point of a dissertation and was perhaps, on the job market. And Wisconsin had had an ad that was very broadly written and that didn't really seem to have my 00:31:00name written on it. They were looking for a quantitative geomorphologist, which is someone who studies sort of landscape processes. Or a field hydrogeologist, which was maybe me, but it was written pretty broadly. And I also knew that Wisconsin had-- [End tape 1, side 1]

JB: [Begin tape 1, side 2] Okay, I was describing how it is that I made the Wisconsin connection at this American Geophysical Union meeting. I hadn't initially paid much attention to their ad because it didn't seem to be-- to fit me very closely. I also knew that they had tried to hire someone else that I knew from Stanford a year or so earlier, who was a geomorphologist, a landscape person who worked on landslides. And so my assumption was that although they 00:32:00were advertising this pretty broadly, what they really wanted was a geomorphologist. But Mary came up to me at the meeting and she said, I understand that you're on the job market, we have a position open and if you're at all interested, please get in touch. So I did a little bit of soul searching and I figured well, if I was going to talk to New Mexico Tech, I probably should explore some other options as well. And I wrote a letter to Wisconsin with my CV and as I recall, a lot of my letter said I'm not a geomorphologist and if that's what you want, you don't want me. So I figured that I would send that out into the postal ether and that would be the last that I heard of it.

So I was shocked when, probably a month or so later on a Saturday afternoon or maybe it was in the evening, I can't remember. I got a call from the University 00:33:00of Wisconsin from Mary Anderson and Dave Michaelson, who was the glacial geologists. And they were following up on my letter and asking me some questions, and at the end of this phone interview they said, we'd like to invite you out for an interview. So I figured, well, I set myself on this path. I might as well go through with this interview process. This was in February I guess.

SP: I was going to ask, what time of the year was that.

JB: This was February of 1986. They wanted me to come about a month later in March. Because I remember I came here on St. Patrick's day. And then I thought well, you know, I talked to New Mexico Tech. I told them that I was maybe interested in a job there, but we had agreed that we would hold this off. I felt like I should let them know that I was going to interview at Wisconsin. So I 00:34:00called them and told them that and they said well, we've just about finished our interview process, but we want to interview you too. So I ended up with setting up these two interviews, sort of back to back. I came to Wisconsin first and then to New Mexico Tech.

And when I came to Wisconsin I was just very pleasantly surprised. I had actually visited Madison once before. I had taken a short course in hydrogeology here while I was working in consulting. My boss had sent me here for a hydrogeology short course that Mary had been one of the instructors. So I knew it was a nice town from that experience. But I didn't know much about the faculty and the students. But after interviewing here I came away with the impression that this would be a stimulating place to live, that it would be fun 00:35:00to work with graduate students. I did this sort of 180 degree turn that maybe the best thing for me after finishing a PhD was actually to move onto another place where I would really, be starting my research career independently and sort of not in the shadow of the people who had trained me at a PhD level.

I was also very impressed with the program at New Mexico Tech. They've always had four or five hydrologists, hydrogeologists in a concentration. And so in terms of critical mass of faculty, it's an outstanding program. But it's in a very small town in New Mexico. And while I love the western landscape and actually, when I think of where I might retire that's the part of the world that's high on my list. I didn't see it as a place where I would be happy as a 00:36:00single woman in my 30s moving for the long term. So Wisconsin made me an offer and I accepted, sort of sheepishly told my advisor at the USGS that I had decided that I wanted to take an academic job. And he was very supportive. He was very happy for me, but he had to then find someone else to fill this position that he had created. And he ended up finding someone good for that.

I had also told Wisconsin when I agreed to interview that I wouldn't be able to start in the Fall. But that was actually good to have this sort of deadline that I had to be here in January '87 because it gave me a little bit of leverage with my dissertation committee who would have probably-- I'm a perfectionist and there were some perfectionists there, and the dissertation could've dragged on a 00:37:00lot longer if it hadn't.

SP: So all right, you came to the University of Wisconsin then in 1987. One of the questions here is describe the UW hiring process you experienced. Well, that was pretty simple, really?

JB: It was pretty simple. It was a phone call and an interview. Well, there were some things in retrospect, I didn't know how to negotiate very well. Again, I was sort of doing this a bit on the fly and I didn't have-- I was still a bit far from finishing and I was pretty naive about things. And so I didn't get a very good start-up package. They were hiring three people at one time. And one 00:38:00of those people had a lot better mentoring system in place and negotiated for a large lab and a large start-up package. I was operating sort of in good faith and when I asked for a certain amount of money and was told that they could only give me half that, in sort of good faith I figured well, I guess that's all they could afford. And I accepted it. And I shouldn't have given in so easily. And that actually ended up, I think, slowing down my progress towards tenure. The subsequent chair who came in a year after I was here helped remedy that somewhat by pushing through a lab modernization grant that got me a fair amount of equipment. You know, I should've gotten, if I had been a more savvy negotiator 00:39:00and if the university had been more straightforward, I think I could have gotten a much quicker start on my research in terms of equipment and things like that.

SP: Now do you tell the grad students that work with you that story?

JB: I don't tell them that in so many words, but I do try to advise them to think carefully about what they need and to not give in too easily when people-- because there is sort of a negotiating process. And I think women aren't-- at least of my generation, were not trained to negotiate.

SP: Probably true. OK, your career at Madison, Jean. You've talked a little bit about this, but maybe you could say just a little more. What had you heard about the reputation of the department here in Madison? What is it's national reputation and what is it best known for?

JB: Well, at the time that I was looking at graduate schools, I knew it was a 00:40:00good program in hydrogeology. Mary Anderson had established a strong reputation for the program. I taken the short course here, so it was known nationally, not only in academic circles, but in consulting circles. And it turns out that that reputation was really established initially by Dave Stephenson who was Mary's predecessor. He left a tenured position here to go into consulting, but eventually became the president of the Geological Society of America and now is the president of the Geological Society of America Foundation. But I must admit, I didn't know a lot about the reputation of the department as a whole at the time that I was applying. I just knew that it had a good program in my field. Another part of the hiring process actually that that they did very effectively was that they introduced me, not only to people within this department, but 00:41:00people across campus. Particularly in civil engineering and the state Geologic and Natural History Survey, who had water interests. And one of the things that appealed to me very strongly was that by coming here, I would have access not only to colleagues in this department, but colleagues across the university who shared interests in water and interdisciplinary studies.

The water resources management program, which is a professional masters program, I had heard a little bit about. And there's an Institute for Environmental Studies that at the time I arrived, was about 25 years old. So again, sort of in my environmental consciousness, there was an awareness of Madison. Since coming here, I've learned a lot more about the history of the department. And it's, I think, probably best known just for the fact that it's a broad based department 00:42:00that has trained strong scientists at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in a wide variety of areas. It's had a longstanding relationship to the energy industries, petroleum companies, and for a school in the Midwest where we're pretty far from the oil resources that's a bit surprising. But it's a reputation that continues today. It has a strong reputation in geophysics, although a small group. But we have former professors after whom major geophysics awards are named. I think right now it's very well known for an increasing sophistication of analytical facilities in isotope geochemistry and geochronology. And that's 00:43:00something that's developed for the most part, since I've been here. It had started at the time, started probably in the decade in which I was hired and has continued to build its reputation till today.

Some of the interesting facts about the department is I think that there are more graduates of the University of Wisconsin that have gone on for PhDs and academic careers than any other state school. If you look at the faculty around the country, the Wisconsin connections are broad and deep.

SP: Nice to hear. Describe the facilities in which you work.

JB: OK. So we are currently sitting in my rather messy office.

SP: Now is this your office or is this the office of the department chair?

JB: This is my research office. And as the department chair I have a second office on the second floor, which I've been trying very hard to keep somewhat 00:44:00less cluttered. And keep it populated mostly with things that have to do with department chair business. In addition to that, when I came here I was given shared access to a lab that's across the hall, the hydrogeology lab, which was Mary Anderson's lab. And also, to a small amount of storage space in the basement garage, we called it the cage because it's surrounded by chicken wires. Put field equipment in there, somewhat safely. Since I've been here and actually, primarily only in the last six or seven years, we've actually expanded our hydrogeology domain a bit. The whole garage staging area that surrounds the cage was designated for the hydrogeology and quaternary research groups use, 00:45:00probably seven or eight years ago. Before that there was a lot of just sort of general department equipment that got stored in there. But we finally now with sort of full access to that, have a working area in the basement where we can store core samples and lay them out to look at them, where we can do preparations for field work with a certain amount of space.

We also, five or six years ago, got-- we used to have a small computer lab, sort of in the interior of the main hydrogeology lab, which was not very well ventilated and not very large. And we got another room, it's probably about the size of this combined office, but a little bit different shape that's on the 00:46:00third floor that's now our computer lab, which has about six computers And then a couple places where students can bring laptops and plug them in for computer modeling. Because one of the big things that we do in hydrogeology, we do field work, but we also test our conceptual models of what's going on in the field with computer models. So computer modeling is a sort of integral part of our research. So all of those facilities are essentially shared with Mary Anderson.

Our fourth floor lab here has served a dual purpose ever since I've been here as being both a research lab where we do a little bit of laboratory bench scale sort of work, where we store a lot of field measurement equipment that we take out into the field, but also a place where we set up demonstrations for classes. 00:47:00So we have a sand tank model, it looks sort of like a big ant farm in which we can run water through with dye and that's used both in our hydrogeology classes as well as in most of the introductory geology classes.

And then for the hydrogeology class that I teach in the Fall, we do some experiments where we take columns and we run water through them and we need a place to set that up. The use of the lab as sort of a teaching demonstration area has up till now, precluded us from making full use of that lab for research purposes. Because we can't have experiments set up at the same time that we have these demonstrations going up. But we're in the process right now of remodeling another room on the fourth floor as a wet teaching lab. And as soon as that remodeling is done we'll be able to move all of the teaching demonstration 00:48:00equipment out of the hydrogeology lab and into that teaching lab. And that will give us more full access to the lab there.

And then my students have also used labs, other last in this building, as well as other labs around the university, we've used analytical equipment in soil science and in engineering and in the environmental chemistry and technology program as well. Because we don't have an analytical facility in our lab to do measurements of concentrations in water. So we use labs in other places. But this is a good institution for sort of sharing of lab facilities. That's one of the strengths of this place. That you aren't restricted to only using exactly what you have under your control.

SP: Which I would assume is not always the case, I would guess on some campuses.

JB: Yeah. And that was one of the things again, that impressed me when I came here, that there were lots of opportunities to work with people around campus and that certainly proved true.

SP: Well that leads us right into the next question. Describe the culture of your department. Is collaborative work encouraged? And also, obviously collaborative work is encouraged across the campus as well.

JB: Yeah. I think that that's generally true. I think the overall culture or what I would like the culture to be is a respect for the variety of ways that we do research in the variety of research that we do. And some types of research lend themselves naturally to collaboration. When you're dealing with water, people who deal with underground water certainly need to deal with-- need to work with people who are dealing with surface water. There are other types of geoscience where people work quite well sort of independently or with 00:50:00collaborators that are in other countries or in other places. And so there's a lot of different models. Compared to some other institutions that I know of, I think our department and this institution in general, has been open to a variety of those kinds of those modes. Certainly there always are groups who think, well, what I do is the most important thing and we have a little bit of that in our department as well unfortunately. But I think in general, we've tried to maintain a breadth of coverage in the geosciences. And I think that's been one of our strengths. And I think in doing that one of the things that happens naturally is that you develop a respect for the variety of types of research that go on.

SP: Would you describe your tenure process?

JB: Sure. It's a little bit of a blur now. It was a while ago. It was a stressful process. I think it sort of always is. And I think that I would have thrived more if I had spent a couple of years doing a post doc and had a better idea of how to write grant proposals and how to get things up and running. I arrived here. I took on a number of students right away and then I felt like I was sort of scrambling to get them busy and funded and generate research results. You know, in the end, I think the process went quite well. I think the department was always quite supportive. I think they want junior faculty to 00:52:00succeed. But along the way, you're always getting the message that you're not doing enough, you're not getting enough papers out, you're not bringing in enough grant money. You're spending too much time on your teaching. You're juggling a whole lot of things. But when the process was over, everyone made a point of coming to me and telling me that the votes were unanimous and people on the divisional committee said the same thing. And I think that the department really did a good job of putting a-- no matter what the sort of paper record is, what the department puts in its evaluation that they send to the divisional committee is very important and I'm sure that the department must have put a very strong, positive spin on what they saw of my record.

But you always sort of end up feeling like, well, are they going to change their mind? Was I inadequate? And I think it wasn't until five years later when I wasn't even anticipating it, the department told me that they had voted to promote me to full professor that I sort of felt like, oh, they really do like me. I could sort of relax.

SP: I can't imagine that pressure. I mean how do you stay healthy?

JB: Well, I didn't really. I actually developed some back problems that were I think partly physical. I overused some muscles in a cross country ski race and things didn't get diagnosed in a timely way and that developed into sort of a chronic condition that affected my sleep patterns and all sorts of other things. But I'm sure that the stress of the tenure track contributed to that as well.

SP: And I would guess that in a position like yours today, there's still stress. I mean there's all of these things that are going on around you. But it's a different kind of stress?

JB: It's a different kind of stress. I think I've gotten better at handling it. And for everything that's bad about the tenure process, the security that you get from having tenure is a big part in helping handle the stress afterwards. Because you're not going to lose your job. I think that's the most stressful part of the tenure process, is towards the end you sort of have realized that you really do like this academic job and if you don't get tenure then, what is it that you're going to do next?

SP: Yeah. I can understand that part. What courses have you taught? And just 00:55:00talk about your teaching.

JB: OK, so when I arrived, they asked me, what would you like to teach? And I had an idea for a course that I had not taken because it wasn't offered. But that I thought was something important to develop. And I called it contaminant hydrogeology. It turns out that now there are textbooks in contaminant hydrogeology and there are courses all over the country that are called contaminant hydrogeology. But I was certainly one of the first to begin offering this. So when I arrived in January of '87 they said, that sounds great. Why don't you put this course together? So my first semester of teaching I was putting together, essentially from scratch and without a textbook-- and the textbooks that exists still aren't very good-- a brand new course that I had 00:56:00never taken. I had a vision of what should be in it. But it was a tremendous amount of work to put it together. I got over 30 students right away because there was sort of a pent up demand for this course. And so I've been teaching that course every year except years that I've been on leave, on sabbatical. And the enrollments have fluctuated.

There was a big boom in employment in environmental consulting in the mid 90s. And at one point I had over 50 students in this sort of upper level graduate course, which is a large enrollment for a course at that level. This semester I have about 15. That's a nice sort of manageable number. And then the other sort 00:57:00of core course that I've taught very regularly is the Fall semester hydrogeology course, which is again, an upper level graduate course. Mary Anderson had been teaching that before I arrived, but she was slated to go on sabbatical the year after I arrived. So I knew that I would have to teach it in my second year here and what she said is well why don't you teach it in your first year and then you'll be able to repeat it for a couple of years. And as it worked out, Mary and I have sometimes shared that course. I've also shared it with Herb Wang who's the associate dean.

But until this year when I became department chair, I basically taught that course every Fall. So I've taught in Fall, the hydrogeology course. In the Spring, the contaminant hydrogeology course. And the hydrogeology course in the 00:58:00mid 90s peak, went up to about 110 students. Now it's down in the sort of 30 range. When Mary had been teaching it it didn't have a lab, but it had an option for a lab or a discussion section. And I felt very strongly that it needed a lab. That you need some hands-on experience. And I guess that's part of my teaching philosophy is you need a lot more than just someone standing up and lecturing. You need sort of hands-on exercises or labs. So I put a lot of energy into developing a lab component for that course and even with a teaching assistant who runs the labs, some of the lab exercises are ones where you really need a couple of bodies there, including a field exercise that-- so when I taught it, I've always been a participant in some of the lab work as well.

SP: Is it a different field experience every course?

JB: No, there's a field site that was developed by a PhD student. He put in a whole bunch of wells in a very small area to try to look at the variability, the local scale variability in hydrogeologic properties. And managed to persuade the landowners to let him leave the wells in so that we could use it for this field exercise. So we have a very convenient place. It's over near Lake Waubesa. Not too far from where you live, probably. The Waubesa Beach Community Center has a little plot of land that I call the piezometer for us. The piezometer are a name for a well. So it looks like this little forest of PVC pipes sticking out of the ground. But it provides a convenient place to do that. So I teach those two 01:00:00courses regularly.

I also, since the job that I was hired for was field hydrogeologist, also got drafted to teach a summer course, a three-week course on field methods in hydrogeology. And that course, before I arrived had been taught by Ken Bradbury from the State Geologic and Natural History Survey. And the first year that I came he and I taught it together. And then I've been teaching that on my own since then. In that mid 90s period I was teaching it every summer. The demand now is such that I can offer it every other summer and take care of most of the-- take care of all the people that need to take that. And I offer that primarily for my own graduate students in a sense because they need some field skills to do their research. But there are students from a variety of programs 01:01:00on campus-- civil engineering, water resources management, soil science, who take the course as well. And a lot of the exercises in it, for that one rather than going back to the same place every year, we have some places that we go back to, but we also use it a bit to boot strap some of our own research projects. So if we have an experiment or some drilling or something that we need to do for our research, we do it in conjunction with the class so that we have more people to participate. And I think the students appreciate working on something that actually has some utility rather than sort of an isolated exercise.

In addition to those courses in my specialty, I have also taught introductory level course in environmental geology. I've taught that as part of a team, usually with a geophysicist. So the geophysicist does the sort of sexy volcanoes 01:02:00and earthquakes part of it and then I do the still sexy, but not quite surface processes, groundwater, surface water, coastal processes. And then we tend to share the lectures on energy resources. One of my recent passions as a longstanding environmentalist, I've put a solar roof on my house--

SP: I read about it.

JB: --about six years ago. And so I enjoy talking about alternative energy in that course. And another couple of things. I've been involved in a couple of studies for the National Research Council. One related to radioactive waste and so that always makes a good topic for the environmental geology course. And another looking at restoration of the Everglades ecosystem. And it's a very interesting case study in how do you balance water demands and--

SP: We're ready.

JB: OK, so I was talking about teaching and I guess the point I was trying to make is that to the extent that I can, I like to weave into my lectures things that I've had some personal involvement in. It's more interesting to me and I think it's interesting to the students to get that perspective.

SP: I would think so. How was your research funded? Let's talk about your research.

JB: OK, so I've done a lot of different kinds of things. Well, I'm motivated by the general topic of water resources for people and the environment. I've looked at problems at a whole variety of scales and there's lots of different funding agencies that are interested in different components of that project. My current 01:04:00research, I have sort of two major groups of projects that are going on right now. One is related to former underground storage tank sites where gasoline leaked into the ground and I have a project that's funded in part by the Environmental Protection Agency and in part by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which is aimed at looking at how the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Commerce, which regulate these sites in the state have been approaching a strategy to clean these up by basically letting nature do its work. It's something we call natural attenuation. And they've been doing this, they've been using that as a remediation strategy now for about 10 years.

What we've been doing is looking at some sites that have been administratively closed for about five years. Going back and seeing, how effective is this 01:05:00strategy? Is the area of the contamination that we call the plume, is it getting smaller over time? Is it stable? Is it larger? What we found in general is that the contaminated groundwater area is not getting larger, but it's also not getting smaller very quickly. And that may have some implications for the future policy. So it's sort of some science that's driven by policy.

JB: Another project, which actually has some EPA funding in the form of a graduate student fellowship and that has also been supported by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and some money that comes into the University of Wisconsin system as a whole from the state legislature for groundwater studies 01:06:00is looking at the impact of unsewered subdivisions on groundwater quality. There's been in Dane County where we live, an effective ban on new subdivisions that rely on on site wastewater treatment called septic systems rather than municipal sewers as a way of taking care of their wastewater. The ban was motivated in part by concerns about groundwater quality and I think also, although not stated explicitly, I think it's been a very effective land use planning strategy to try to control urban sprawl.

But the questions of the impact on groundwater quality, while there's a lot of work that suggests that there is an impact, there isn't a lot that really demonstrates how much of that-- how much of the contamination is from septic 01:07:00systems versus agricultural land uses that preceded the developments. And there also have been some new technologies in septic systems that have been implemented, developed over the years. So the Builders Association in Dane County put a lot of pressure on the county executive to allow new unsewered subdivisions with this novel septic technology. And she said OK, we'll allow one new unsewered subdivision, but there have to be studies to document how these systems are working and what the impacts are.

So one of my PhD students, Jeff Wilcox, has been working on that project. He did a nice study of the groundwater quality before the subdivision was developed, which showed widespread contamination from agricultural activity. And now, as 01:08:00the subdivision is getting built, he's looking at ways of trying to tease out what are the subject influences versus the agricultural impacts? And the complication there is that animal waste generates very similar sorts of things in the groundwater as human waste. So what Jeff has actually decided to focus on are some things that animals wouldn't generate, namely things like pharmaceuticals and hormones, personal care products, things like caffeine and acetaminophen. These are substances in groundwater that have only recently been looked for, and the analytical techniques to look for them are still being developed. And there's been more work looking at these kinds of substances in streams and lakes than there has been in groundwater. So a big part of that work 01:09:00has been to optimize some of the analytical techniques. And Jeff is now doing some experiments in our basement lab running these substances through columns to see how quickly they move relative to how quickly groundwater moves. And then he's going to be doing some field experiments at sites at the subdivision where septic systems are now there to at least look at the rate at which water is moving.

Jeff will probably graduate in about a year, but the provision of this new subdivision was that there would be monitoring for a 10 year period. So we expect that they'll be some other interesting follow-on studies from that. Where is that subdivision. It's just east of Sun Prairie. So it's nice in the sort of Sun Prairie area. If it were going to be connected to a municipal sewer system 01:10:00it would be the Sun Prairie system. But it's a little bit farther out. So my current funding is primarily from state sources and from the Environmental Protection Agency.

JB: I was involved in a fairly large EPA funded project starting in 2000 to 2004 called the Water and Watersheds Initiative, which was an interdisciplinary project including not only hydrogeologists, but also surface water hydrologists and ecologists and people from urban and regional planning and rural sociology. The overall goal was to identify what kinds of strategies can be used during 01:11:00suburban expansion that will protect groundwater and surface water resources and wetland ecosystems. So the focus of the hydrogeology portion of that was to develop a better understanding of the sources of water that supply springs in the Madison area. And then, our understanding of the spring sources leads directly to what kinds of strategies do you need to protect them? And the bottom line was that what we really need to be doing is making sure that as we pave over the landscape we find an alternate way for the water, for rainfall, to get back into the groundwater system rather than short circuiting it.

JB: I've had in the past also funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy a consortium called The Gas Research Institute that was funded by the energy industries where we were looking at deep groundwater flow 01:12:00at the sedimentary basin scale level, down at the levels where natural gas and petroleum hydrocarbons are important and the linkages between groundwater flow and those kinds of energy resources. So that's sort of a different scale of problem.

And over the years I've had a generous amount of funding I'd say from some of these state sources of the Department of Natural Resources as well as the UW system. So that's where the major sources of funding. In contrast to some of the research groups in this department, I don't have millions and millions of dollars of research funding. We're often doing things on a bit of a shoestring, but I think we're doing things that people really care about and there's usually a local client who's intimately interested in our results. That gives me a lot 01:13:00of satisfaction.

SP: Now you sent me that information on the Florida Everglades project.

JB: Yes.

SP: And I read that and I said, this looks like an impossible situation. Are you involved in that?

JB: Well, at this point, I've sort of blissfully retired from my major involvement. My involvement was as part of an outside review committee that was set up by the National Research Council, which is branch of the National Academies of Science. If you read in the newspaper about National Academy study says, such and such. It's usually a committee of the National Research Council that does those. And I was invited to be a member of this committee because one of the major strategies that they're trying to use to conserve water in the 01:14:00Everglades for this restoration is to store it underground in aquifers. So they needed a hydrogeologist on the committee. I eventually ended up being the chair of the committee when the original chair had some health problems and I had sort of directed a subcommittee that had come out with the first report. And I guess people thought I was effective in managing that, so I became the chair of the entire committee.

And you're right, it's a really challenging problem. I think it's a probably misnomer to call it a restoration. What they're trying to do is to collect enough water so that they can improve the ecosystem health in some parts of the system. And that's the best that they're going to be able to do. The problem is that they're trying to meet human demands for water and flood control in urban areas, human demands for water for agriculture, preserve sport fishing 01:15:00opportunities, and at the same time provide more water in some critical areas of the ecosystem. And they've promised it all and I think they're only going to be able to deliver part of it. I think the concern among the environmental community is that the flood control and the agricultural water supply and the sport fishing is going to get the water they need before the ecosystem does.

SP: Now it that a federally funded project?

JB: It's a federally funded project and a state funded project. So the state of Florida and the federal government are the two major players. It's an $8 billion, 30 year project, and about half of the money is supposed to come from the state of Florida and half from the federal government. So it is something 01:16:00that has national importance in the sense that our tax dollars are paying for it. And I think it has national importance because I think that the Everglades ecosystem, the part of it that we can improve somewhat is a unique ecosystem. It's important to global biodiversity as well as local environmental issues.

SP: Well I wish everybody good luck.

JB: So I still get calls about it, but--

SP: I'll bet. But you don't plan on going back into the--.

JB: Probably not back into the fray. Our committee probably ruffled enough feathers. And there's a follow-on committee that us chaired by a committee member who was on the committee that I chaired, but when they established the follow-on committee I felt that it was probably time for me to step down. It was 01:17:00a great thing to be involved in, but I'm actually sort of relieved me to be out of the fray.

SP: Well that helps, what you just said helps me move right into the next question. You've described and summarized your research. What do you consider to be your most important contribution to your field? You're young, so you still have time to make that. But so far.

JB: I mean I guess in one sense probably the most important contribution I've made is the students that I've trained. As an educator I take a lot of pride and I've graduated some 30 odd students. Of which, eight are PhDs. I've just have one of my PhD students got tenure at Virginia Tech, which is a very good institution this last summer. And I have several others who are in tenure track positions. So that's probably my biggest legacy.

JB: I guess the other contribution on sort of a broad scale. I was tapped in 2003 to be a distinguished lecturer for the Geological Society of America's hydrogeology division. And I gave lectures at 60 different institutions over the course of the year.

SP: I saw that schedule.

JB: What I'd like to think is one of my important contributions-- a lot of our work has demonstrated how much local scale variability there is in groundwater chemistry, even in places where the geology seems very uniform. And pointing that out and telling people how you can use that kind of information to deduce processes, I think, is an important contribution. And it's not something that 01:19:00I've discovered, but I think that the fact that I had a chance to really broadcast that message I hope is alerting other people to look for things that they might have ignored.

SP: What were some of the highlights of that year?

JB: Oh wow. I guess the personal highlights for me were I love to travel. And so I got to see a large part of the country. I got to go to Mardi Gras by scheduling a talk at Louisiana State right before Mardi Gras. I spent Easter in Virginia. I was in the Fall colors in New England. I got a guided tour of the deposits of the base of Mount St. Helens from one of the people who was worked 01:20:00on that since the mountain erupted. Lots of interesting local field trips with my hosts. Chances to hike in mountains in Canada and Nevada and New England.

SP: So you were able to tack on some personal time?

JB: Yeah I decided that the only way to do this, to survive it, was to make sure that I had as much personal time and fun and a chance to see friends and relatives along the way. I fortunately, had actually already arranged a sabbatical for that year. At the time I was going to do something else with my sabbatical. And when I got asked to do the lecture tour I sort of thought about, well, what should a sabbatical be? And it's a renewal, a chance to explore new 01:21:00areas, and I decided what better way could I use the time then to go and talk to researchers at a whole variety of institutions and really get a handle on what was going on in my field? Professionally, that was the benefit of it. The talks, after you've given the same one or two talks two or three times you can sort of give it in your sleep. And what was really productive and stimulating about the visits was a chance to talk with students and researchers and learn about what they're doing. And then, come back with new ideas about things that I might be able to do.

SP: Well it sounded like a great opportunity.

JB: I would never do it again, but I'm glad that I had a chance to do it once. And my department was very supportive. I had that Spring semester off for a sabbatical, but then Dean Wang very kindly agreed to co-teach the Fall course with me so that I could arrange some additional trips in the Fall around a 01:22:00somewhat reduced teaching schedule. And department chair at the time supported that as well.

SP: Because you couldn't have been able to come back to Madison that often could you?

JB: No, I didn't have a very big budget, so I did a lot of it by car. Which gave me a lot of flexibility because I could stop and see things on the way. But I had sort of four major driving segments of the tour that I did. I'd be home for one week and then off again. So it's a good thing I don't have a family that needed me to be home.

SP: Exactly. What are the most significant developments in your field of study? I know you've said a few things as you've talked.

JB: Yeah. I guess there's been a lot of discussion in the hydrogeologic community about where are we as a science? And in some senses, hydrogeology is a 01:23:00relatively young field in the geosciences. As I mentioned there, at the time I was going to college there were only a handful of universities that even had a hydrogeologist on the faculty. There was a tremendous growth in the 70s and early 80s in our understanding of the processes that control the movement of contaminants through groundwater systems. And particularly, the processes that involve-- that change their concentrations through sort of spreading of contaminants. So that was a major development and I think we're still learning more about that, but we've also-- in some senses, that's matured.

And starting in the early 80s and I think continuing to the present, probably 01:24:00the newer developments is our recognition of the importance of microbial processes in transforming contaminants in groundwater systems. And I think we're still on a learning curve there in terms of what kind of diversity of microbial populations is there in the subsurface? How can we characterize that? The samples that we take are not necessarily going to represent what's going on in the aquifer system. And what are the rates of those processes? So it's sort of at the interface between microbiology and hydrogeology as one of the developments. What we continue to do in hydrogeology in a practical sense continues to involve water resources for people. And in a lot of senses, the science of that is pretty well developed and what varies from place to place are the local characteristics.

So there's been a lot of discussion in the hydrogeologic community. Are we a mature and dying science? I think that the future developments are all going to be at the interfaces of hydrogeology and some other area. And for example, the connection between hydrogeology and ecosystems is something that we're still working to develop. So I guess those are some of the directions that the field is going.

SP: I realized when I asked you about your research, I didn't ask you about publications. And I would like to, if you could just talk about your publications and I'm sorry.

JB: Oh, well, obviously getting publications out is a important part--

SP: Yeah, what you do in your spare time?

JB: Yeah. I haven't been as diligent in getting all of my students work to presses as I probably should. But we're going in that direction. I've published 01:26:00in a large variety of journals. Some people tend to sort of publish entirely in one journal, but I always try to look at what we're publishing and think about who is the audience for it? We've got a paper right now that we're working on for wetlands, which not all hydrogeologists look at, but it's a paper on some of the hydrogeology and hydrogeochemistry of a fairly intact wetland community. And you need to understand the local variability in that system in order to be able to deduce what is it that's changed when a system degrades, for example.

But the major journals that I've published in have been Water Resources Research, The Journal of Groundwater, The Journal of Contaminant Hydrogeology. I have a paper in The Journal of Hydrology that's just coming out, which is sort 01:27:00of a groundwater surface water, riparian wetland area. So I have 40 or so refereed publications over the years, and then lots of abstracts at meetings. Most of my publications, actually the first authors are students. I sort of feel like I'm often sort of managing-- you know, I have a good idea but it's a little bit half-baked and I give it to my students and they take it and they run with it. And then we iterate back and forth during the process. I feel like I have a lot of input, but it's also really their work and I think it's appropriate that they get first authorship.

SP: Okay, now just move out of research and talk a little bit about the whole administrative process. And not necessarily as department chair, but about faculty governance, committee work, other campus activities you're involved in.

JB: This is an unusual place and I realized this even more when I went on the lecture tour, how unusual it is, the culture of faculty governance here. That rather than having a lot of administrators, even though the state legislature thinks we're overstocked with administrative. In fact, most of the administration and most of the work is really done by the faculty. We've got some excellent support staff in this department, but we've always done a lot of things by committee. So there's a Finance Committee and they work with the people who manage the books, but to actually make the decisions about where we're going to spend our money and how much we have to spend, for example. So I've been involved in just about every committee that we have in the department. The department always has involved junior faculty in committee work. They try to buffer them a little bit, but I've been involved in undergraduate studies and graduate admissions and finance and the Computer Committee and the sort of 01:29:00ill-fated Space Committee that we had before we added the space to the building, which alleviated a lot of our space conditions. And that takes up a certain amount of your time because there isn't anyone else that's doing that. So I've been involved in a lot of administrative duties on the department level.

JB: At the university level, I haven't really been involved in much sort of higher level university things. I think I was a senator for one term. But I haven't been actively involved in that. But I've been involved in a lot of other programs in the university and done similar sorts of committee duties in those programs as I've done in this department.

The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, which administers the water 01:30:00resources management program is a program that I've been involved with since my first year here. I got recruited to be part of the water resources management faculty and I think I've been on the Admissions Committee for that program every year except for three or four. And I chaired that program in the late 90s, which provided a little bit of summer salary, but also came with it the responsibility for being one of the leaders of the student summer workshop and trying to find funding for that. And so that gave me a little bit of taste for some of the kinds of things I know do as department chair.

I've also been involved in a program called Geological Engineering, which is a cross college-- it's administered by the College of Engineering, but involves faculty from Geology as well and operates to sort of a virtual department. It 01:31:00has a chair and we have faculty meetings and things like that, but it doesn't-- it has only a very small budget to manage. And again, I've been on undergraduate studies, curriculum committees for that, and advise a lot of students, particularly undergraduates in that program.

And then for two years I was one of the faculty co-advisors for a residential learning community on campus, which is a dorm that houses students with a particular focus. And the one that I was involved with is called Women in Science and Engineering. And they're about 150 undergraduate women who live in the selected portion of one of the dorms, and the job of the faculty co-director is to work with the student staff. And there's also a program coordinator and some housing staff to think about activities for the program to develop 01:32:00enrichment opportunities, lab tours, tours off campus, things like that for the students. And that was something that I agreed to do because most of these things are things I agree to do because I think they're worthwhile and I have some personal connection. And obviously, as a women scientist, I felt a very personal connection to encouraging young women in science. And although I'm no longer the faculty co-director, I'm still involved in some of their activities.

One of the things I started as faculty co-director was a Fall and a Spring camping trip. Actually the student's started it and I said well, I love to camp; I'm happy to do this. So the camping trips have always been sort of a combination of learning a little bit about the geology of where we're going and perhaps a little bit of ecology and some other things. So I'll be doing that again. We're going to Blue Mounds in April and taking a tour of the cave of the 01:33:00mounds. And we'll do some hiking and things like that.

And also, one of the things that we talked about during my last semester as faculty co-director was putting together an evening seminar for the students. Sort of dinner and a conversation. So a series of guest speakers and then some conversations after that. That was put in place this past Fall and so in the Fall I participated as sort of a discussion leader. Went to the dinners and then came to the-- went to the dinners with talks and came to the dinners afterwards to help lead the discussion. This Spring I haven't been attending, but I'm going to actually be giving a talk later in the semester on the Everglades. I'll be one of the speakers that they pick to discuss things about.

SP: That'll be an interesting one, I'm sure. So it's obviously worthwhile as far as you're concerned?

JB: Yeah. It's worthwhile both anecdotally and we actually commissioned a study last year, which was the 10th year that the program had been in existence to look at some of the data about time to graduation and GPA and things of a cohort group that had gone--[End tape 2, side 1]

SP: [Begin tape 2, side 2] Well how did you become department chair?

JB: Well the faculty governance model, at least as it plays out in our department and I think in most of the departments in letters and science involves a rotating department chair. We don't hire people from outside to come in and be chair for life. So the culture that's evolved in our department is that almost everyone gets to be chair or has to be chair. At some point in their career, unless you prove yourself completely incompetent. So I tried that tack. 01:35:00And then I cleverly-- the previous term, I scheduled a sabbatical at the start of the new chairs term, which basically made me ineligible. But I knew that my number was coming up. So each time we have a change of chair, this sort of process of looking at who's available, which is basically the full professors who have not already done it. And then, how this works into their schedule and whether people feel comfortable with someone being chair. I guess that's the ultimate thing. And the timing wasn't great for me this time around because Mary Anderson is on sabbatical this year and she's the one that I could normally trade off classes with. But the timing wasn't good for anybody else either, so 01:36:00when Herb Wang agreed to teach the Fall hydrogeology course in my place and the department agreed to put up some additional money so that Randy Hunt, who's an affiliated faculty member from the U.S. Geological Survey could teach the part of the course that dealt with hydrogeochemistry, which Herb really is not well versed in, that seemed like an acceptable option. So I agreed to be chair. I was the only one that was nominated, so it was an unanimous election by default.

And then, having agreed to do that, I always try to say, well, if I'm going to do something, I should make this an interesting learning experience. So that's what I've been trying to do with the department chair job. And it has been an interesting learning experience. It is a chance to think a little bit more 01:37:00broadly about, what are the priorities of the department? And one of the things that I'm hoping to do, haven't made a lot of progress yet, but hoping to work increasing the diversity of our student population through initiatives at several different levels, including trying to get more involvement with the High School People Program, which is recruiting high school students from selected schools in Milwaukee and some of the Native American tribes to the Madison campus. But more importantly, in our case, to the geosciences by providing them with some opportunities to go camping and see some hands--on things. So that hasn't yet materialized, but I have some plans for doing that. And then trying to boost our recruiting at the graduate level as well. So you know, it's an 01:38:00interesting challenge to focus on things that I don't in my normal course of doing research and sort of regular teaching.

SP: So there are some positive things? Or you're making it a positive?

JB: I'm making it a positive thing. I guess the other positive thing is that the university has a number of workshops and gatherings for department chairs and so I've enjoyed meeting chairs from other departments that I wouldn't normally cross paths with, and learning that our issues aren't very different from those in some other departments that may have different cultures.

SP: How's the climate for women here?

JB: From my perspective in this department, I think it's quite good. I don't know what it was like when Mary Anderson was the only women. When I was hired 01:39:00they hired two of us, so we've always had at least 3 and now we have 5 out of 19 faculty who are women. We're still a minority clearly, but within the physical sciences I think we have the highest percentage of women faculty in any department at the university.

So in my department, I think the climate has always been quite good. I think at the university as a whole, I know in engineering women faculty are greatly outnumbered. But that also has changed dramatically since I came here. There continue I suppose, to be subtle things and things that-- I gave the example myself not being well versed in how to negotiate. And I expect that if you look across start-up packages and things that you'll see that there's some inequity 01:40:00in some of those things. But I think that's been changing and I think that the administration is certainly supportive. I think they want to get rid of whatever biases there are.

SP: Could you talk about-- actually, I was asking you about the professional organizations, but we already talked about that. You did list them. Good. Now life after work. Could you talk about your family? How do you balance work and your family? And then, what do you do for fun and relaxation when you're not working?

JB: OK, well I guess the one thing that I haven't been successful in is really balancing things. And I came here as a young woman in my early 30s. The tenure 01:41:00track was relatively stressed and I guess one of the things that I regret is that I haven't found a mate to-- you know, it would be nice to share my life with someone, although I probably been on my own long enough now that I'd be pretty hard to live with. So my family consists primarily of my parents. I'm an only child. They live in California and they're aging. And then, the rest-- I have some cousins and aunts and uncles, but I'd say that my other family is really a network of friends. Some of them here, but many of them in other parts of the country. And I've managed to stay in touch in part because I like to travel and I've had opportunities to see them. So I have very close friends in Washington, D.C, and every time I go there, I see them. And I have a close friend whose children are-- I'm honorary Aunt Jean who lives in New Mexico and I 01:42:00have an annual visit to them. And we've taken vacations together to a number of places. And friends in California that I've known since childhood.

SP: Do you get back to California?

JB: I get back to California a couple of times a year, usually my parents used to come out here at least once a year, but it's getting more difficult for them to travel, at least. Or my father is less willing to travel. He's 82. My mother was out here in the Fall. One concern that I have is that if they need my assistance, the fact that they're in California makes that a bit challenging. Although, in the position of department chair with a little bit lighter teaching load, I actually have a little bit more flexibility. And so I took advantage of that last Fall, for example, to go out for Thanksgiving, which I haven't 01:43:00normally done. And I go out at Christmas and I'll see them a couple of times over the summer probably.

What do I do for fun? Well, I've always liked doing things outdoors, although I'm getting old and less flexible. But last summer, a college friend talked me into signing up for a 300-mile bike ride through Montana where we would go over the continental divide. We had both passed 50 and we decided that to prove that we weren't really over the hill we would ride over some really big hills. So I spent a lot of my spring last year training for this bike trip.

SP: How did you train?

JB: Riding around [INAUDIBLE] out there in the hills around going out for 40, 50, 60 mile bike rides outside of Madison. We have a wonderful network of bike paths here. That's probably the sport that I enjoyed the most now. When I was in 01:44:00graduate school I used to do a lot of slow long-distance running. But I have a lot of arthritis in my neck and I can't do pounding sorts of things.

I like to cross country ski, but I haven't gotten my skis out very much.

SP: Wait. Talk a little more about this 300 bicycle trip.

JB: Well, it wasn't in one day. It was over a course of five days. And it was an escorted trip, so there were 120 riders and we camped, but they had a van that carried our tents and they cooked all the food and things. So you basically just had to have your bicycle and your water bottle and--

SP: And you went 60 miles a day?

JB: And we went 60 to 70 miles a day.

SP: Over hills and mountains?

JB: Yes, over hills and mountains. Yes, very slowly. I have a small bike for a short person and it doesn't go very fast. But I made it over. Actually, I walked down a couple of the hills that seemed a little too steep that I wasn't quite 01:45:00sure of my brakes. But I went up all of them. Yes. Not necessarily without stopping, but I made it to the top. And decided I really was over the hill because when I was in graduate school I used to do a lot of cycling in the Santa Cruz Mountains and I was in much better shape. But that's something that I'm now determined to do more of that again.

I like music. I used to play quite a bit of classical guitar. Now I'm sort of relegated to strumming folk guitar, but I enjoy playing and listening to music. Traveling is a passion.

SP: Wait. I know I interrupted you when you were talking about camping. When you talk about camping, are you talking about tent camping?

JB: Yes.

SP: Putting a tent up, trying to build a fire, making your food?

JB: Yeah. I used to do more sort of backpacking camping where you'd carry 01:46:00everything on long hikes. I haven't had an opportunity to do that for a long time, but yeah. When I camp it's in a tent.

SP: So where are some of your favorite places that you've camped or backpacked?

JB: Well, in California there's obviously lots of opportunities in the Sierra Nevada. And then when I was in college on the East Coast, I hiked small portions of the Appalachian Trail in various segments and the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah and New England. In Wisconsin, most of the camping that I've done has been either with these trips with students or field trips with my classes. So state parks. But I've taken a couple of trips out to Yellowstone camping trips and the Badlands. And last summer when I-- I drove my car out to Montana with my 01:47:00bike and I have some next door neighbors here who have a summer place in Wyoming. So I spent a couple of nights camped out in their yard in Wyoming. When I was in graduate school, when I was doing this work in eastern Canada, I would drive through Canada and sort of camp along the way in places like Banff and Jasper at the national parks. All kinds of places. Something new. I actually don't necessarily like going back to the same places. It's always more fun to see something that's new.

I've traveled. In the summer of 2002, I spent a month in East Africa with a college friend and his wife and a friend of theirs. We had planned to go on an Earth Watch trip to excavate hominid fossils in Olduvai Gorge, which is one of 01:48:00the places that the Leakey's worked. But Earth Watch cancelled or changed the dates of the trip and we couldn't change our nonrefundable tickets and our lives around, so we ended up just doing sort of a safari trip. But we camped in the Rift Valley up near Lake Turkana. If you'd seen the movie The Constant Gardener, we were right near that little volcano that they fly over.

SP: Now did you do that on your own or did you have a guide?

JB: We had a guide. That part of the trip my friends who had talked me into this had been to East Africa for the previous two summers and they had met a British-- a Kenyan couple of British origin who run a little safari business. He's a pilot and has a small plane that holds two passengers. And there were four of us. So the way this worked is that two people flew up and the other two 01:49:00went with a caravan of land rovers and we kind of met along the way. And then the two who had driven up flew back, so we all got to fly over the Rift Valley and see things from the air, and also got to travel on the ground. That was quite amazing.

SP: And that was in Kenya?

JB: That was in Kenya. On the same trip we went down to Tanzania and climbed a small active volcano that was erupting when we got to the summit, which was very exciting.

SP: I'll bet.

JB: So I'm sure I'll do something like that again. This Spring Break I'm going with a group of students down to the Yucatan Peninsula to look at the hydrogeology there and some of the archaeological Mayan ruins. And the Yucatan is the location where a meteorite impacted the earth that is pretty generally 01:50:00accepted now to be the cause of the dinosaur extinction. Exactly the mechanism of how the dinosaurs were killed off by the meteorite impact is still debated, but the meteorite is highly implicated in that and we're going to see some of the evidence of the meteorite impact as well.

SP: Now is that something the department plans, do you plan that trip?

JB: That's something that I planned, in part because we have an alumnus of the department who has been involved in research down in the Yucatan. He works at the National University of Mexico. And he came through here last spring and said, you know, if you would like to take a field trip with students, I'd be happy to arrange it. So I said, well, that's an offer that I can't refuse. So I structured a Fall semester reading seminar around papers related to the Yucatan. And then, we're using a combination of departmental gift funds to provide-- to 01:51:00pay for the airfare and some of the logistics, so that the students can do this for a couple of hundred dollars. We didn't want to exclude anybody on the basis of financial need.

SP: Oh, that'll be interesting. That's great.

JB: And there's another department field trip at the same time that's going down to Argentina on a different topic. But looking at geology around the world is one of the things that geologists do.

SP: Yeah. Sounds wonderful to me, except for the digging part. You're not camping? Are you camping in the Yucatan?

JB: We're not camping in the Yucatan. Mostly because our guide said that it's actually easier to stay in cheap motels just in terms of the amount of time that it takes to set up and break camp and things like that.

SP: Well that was my last question, Jean, but we've got a little bit of time. 01:52:00Well, is there anything that you'd like to say that we haven't covered yet?

JB: I feel like I've been talking nonstop for a long period of time.

SP: Well it's been very interesting.

JB: I can say a little bit about my involvement in-- another National Research Council duty that I had was a board on radioactive waste management. And that was also a very interesting experience. I served two, three-year terms on this board that has some review oversight responsibilities for the high level waste repository that's planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. And at the start of that process, similar to the start of the Everglades process, I didn't know a whole lot of the details. I had some technical expertise that was useful, but both of 01:53:00those that was a tremendous learning experience for me. Also, very vivid illustration of how much or little science can actually contribute sometimes to major policy decisions. The science can inform the decisions, but a lot of the decisions really are value-based judgments. And that was particularly true in the case of radioactive waste disposal that ultimately deciding how long we owe protection to people and what's an acceptable risk is not a scientific question at all. And yet, science is always being asked to help adjudicate these things. And many cases, I find that the policymakers want scientists to sort of bless policy decisions that they've already made.

But as a result of that, I learned a tremendous amount about that process. I was 01:54:00also able to organize a field trip for students to both Nevada and New Mexico where one of the things that we did was get to go underground into places where they were planning, still are in the case of Yucca Mountain and actually now, are in fact, doing disposal of radioactive waste underground. And so I like to weave those kinds of professional service opportunities. Both learning for myself and learning for students through opportunities for field trips. I may try to take a field trip to the Everglades at some point as well.

SP: I'd like to go on that one. Well, the only other question that I had then was would you talk just a little bit about your solar powered home?

JB: Oh, sure. This comes from my sort of longstanding commitment to the 01:55:00environment. And I think that geologists, as much as anyone, realize that our supplies of fossil fuel are finite and the information, the data we have that suggests that humans are having an important impact on climate, I think, is very compelling. So I've been interested in alternative energy, renewable energy, energy that doesn't produce carbon dioxide for a long time. But I had gone to an energy fair, first Midwest Renewable Energy Fair that was held back in 1990. And at that time most of the solar sorts of things were really for people living in rural areas and off the grid. In 2000, I had decided it was time to upgrade from 01:56:00my 67 Volkswagen Beetle to a hybrid car that were finally coming out and would get better fuel mileage and reduced CO2. So I went to the energy fair that year because I knew that the hybrid cars were going to be on display and they weren't yet in the dealerships.

So I went to see the car and I saw these shingles that you can put on your roof in place of shingles that were photovoltaic and would generate electricity. So I started talking to the guy at the booth and he said, yeah, you know, you can do this in town. You can connect to the utility grid and run your meter backwards. And I said, oh really? I didn't know that that was legal. So there was someone from the utility there and I went over and talked with them and they said, yes, indeed you can do this. And I needed a new roof. My neighbor had been telling me that my roof looked like it was falling apart on the sunny side of the house.

And so the timing was right and I sort of went away from this energy fair with 01:57:00this idea. Well, maybe I'll just put these solar panels on my roof. And did a little bit more exploring, discovered that no other homeowner in Madison had done this yet, but there were a couple of demonstration projects that the utility had paid for. One at the Quaker Meeting House or the Friends Meeting House and one on the University Arboretum Visitor's Center Building and some other places. So I looked into it a little bit more and ended up contracting with the installer who was doing the Friends Meeting House who was working for the utility.

And I ended up being the first homeowner to do this, so there were some things to work out with the utility. But it was affordable to me at the time. It's not going to pay for itself in its useful lifetime, but I think I've gotten more than enough value out of the educational. I've giving tours for community groups and student groups and there's an annual tour of solar homes and I just get a 01:58:00lot of pleasure out of knowing that on a sunny day, like it was earlier today, my roof is generating more electricity then I use on an annual basis. So it's my little contribution to reducing greenhouse gases.

SP: Well, there had been an article, I think, in Wisconsin Week where--

JB: Yeah, there was something in Wisconsin Week and then it was featured in the home section of the Sunday paper shortly after that.

SP: How many years have you had it?

JB: It was installed in the Fall of 2000. It didn't actually get up and running until late February of 2001. So just over five years.

SP: And no problems?

JB: No problems. There were some issues with some of the equipment originally that wasn't performing up to spec, the equipment that converts the direct current that the roof generates into alternating current, which is what comes 01:59:00out of your plug in the wall. And I replaced that with a different or the installer replaced it at his cost with a different model. And since that, then there haven't been any problems at all with it.

SP: Do you know that other people--

JB: There are about a dozen other solar roofs now in the Madison area, including a colleague in this department, John Fournelle who runs our ion microprobe just put up a system that's four times the capacity of mine. So he's overtaken me as the environmentalist in the department.

SP: Yes, but you started it.

JB: But I started it and so I'm very happy to see people following suit. And I paved the way. The agreement that we had to work out between the insurance company and the utility was sort of a blueprint for other people that are doing this now. So it's much easier for them to work through the red tape than it was for me.

SP: Well that's it. Thank you very much, Jean.

JB: You're welcome.

SP: Really appreciated your time and was so interesting.