As an undergraduate, I was in an experimental NIH undergraduate program that emphasized a broad scientific background. That's been the key ingredient that let me work my way into many interesting applied problems, and my undergraduate textbooks in physical chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, and physics are still readily available on my shelf. In graduate school I minored in electrical engineering, my first step in trying to do something useful or applied with my math background, but frankly that work was every bit as theoretical as all my math courses. Even though my graduate major was applied mathematics, I felt like a fraud because I had never once really worked on an authentic applied problem.

After several years of college teaching, I decided to see the “real world.” Through a contact I had made several years earlier when working on a high school science fair project, I was offered a position at a well-known consulting company whose motto was, “Hardly anything is none of our business.” It was true. Here are some examples of the environmental questions I felt privileged to work on.

When and how should our nation dispose of its nuclear waste from power plants, past years of weapons production, and medical and other sources? I've been lowered in buckets into deep mines and flown over large territories in helicopters and planes, trying to identify the pros and cons of different burial or disposal plans and to develop quantitative estimates of future risks.