On Wednesday, April 3, 2024, the University of Redlands celebrates spatial learning, research, and community service conducted by students, faculty, administrators, and campus programs. Join us in the Casa Loma Room on the University of Redlands campus or via LIVESTREAM for the following events!
TBD
James Pick, School of Business & Society, Professor and Director, Center for Spatial Business (CSB), University of Redlands, Redlands, CA
John Glover, Professor, Department of History, Spatial Minor Chair
GIS Graduate Award
Ruijin Ma, Professor & Department Chair, Geographic Information Science
Rebecca Lyons, University of Redlands Professor of Chemistry
"Our Place in the World"
As an environmental scientist, I cannot ask a question without “where” being a part of it. When I moved to Southern California in 2011, I set out to explore this new landscape. I discovered troubling amounts of the endocrine disruptor 4-nonylphenol (4NP) in almost every body of water I tested. This led to a decade-long investigation into the origin, movement, and accumulation of 4NP across the state of California. Using GIS was a critical piece of this exploration. Trends could only be seen with a bird’s-eye view and larger, more connected patterns emerged. I have come to understand where 4NP collects, what ecosystems are affected, and which organisms are at risk. Understanding a problem of this size is both empowering and frustrating. The data I generate is useful for environmental advocates and policy makers, but change is slow, and I feel a certain urgency behind these issues. This quandary brings up the question: what is my responsibility as an individual and a scientist to our environment and the planet? And on a larger scale, as humans, what is our place in the world?
Rebecca Lyons grew up a free-range child near Shelley, Idaho. Exploring places was always a part of her existence. The next frontier for her was inner space when she studied biochemistry at the University of Washington. A brief stint in Big Pharma convinced her that was not the path for her, and she went back to school for a Master’s and PhD in environmental chemistry at the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her focus of study was finding trace organic contamination in situ, the proverbial needle in a haystack. But she knew she wanted to apply this technology to finding contaminant distribution in the broader environment and map location. She said as much when she interviewed with Jim Appleton at the University of Redlands in 2010, just two months after she graduated. And the rest, as they say, is history, which will be covered in this talk.