- I lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and when I was in kindergarten, Hurricane Fran came right over Fayetteville. The eye came over Fayetteville so I could hear it. I didn't sleep at all that night, 'cause I was scared.

- A little petrified.

- Yeah, a little petrified, and we lived in a trailer park. I remembered like after the fact, once we got power back, it took about a week, like just diving into learning about the storm, and wanting to understand why. So instead of kind of running away from this fear, I kind of ran towards it, and that made me want to like be a meteorologist and learn all about the weather so that I wouldn't be afraid of it anymore.

- This is the ORISE Featurecast. Join host, Michael Holtz, for conversations with ORISE experts on STEM workforce development, scientific and technical reviews, and the evaluation of radiation exposure and environmental contamination. You'll also hear from ORISE research program participants and their mentors as they talk about their experiences, and how they are helping shape the future of science. Welcome to the ORISE Featurecast.

- Welcome to another episode of the ORISE Featurecast. As always, I'm your host, Michael Holtz from the communications Department at ORISE and ORU. I'm really excited today to talk to one of the ORISE Future of Science Award winners, Geneva Gray. Welcome to the ORISE Featurecast. Geneva, tell us a little bit about who you are.

- Yeah, it's great to finally sit down and talk with you. I'm Geneva Gray. I am a PhD candidate at North Carolina State University in Atmospheric Sciences, and I'm currently an ORISE participant with the Environmental Protection Agency.

- Awesome, so let's, first of all, let's talk about the Future of Science Award. How excited were you to learn that you were a winner of the the inaugural ORISE Future of Science Award?

- I mean, it just put a huge smile on my face, 'cause I really never won anything like that before, so it was really a surreal feeling, always got the participation thing in sports, never really first or second place. So, it was just a huge honor and listening to my ORISE mentor talk about how my achievements, and just laying them out the way that she did really just made me realize my potential. It really just kind of like, if people talk about imposter syndrome, and I think that just kinda kind of washed it all away. Like I was like, "Oh, this is how people see me," and that it made me feel really good.

- That's amazing. Imposter syndrome is real, isn't it?

- It really is.

- I think we've all been there, right? So talk about the work that you're doing right now for the EPA to the extent that you can.

- Yeah, so I think I can talk pretty freely. I asked my mentor about that, and she was pretty cool with it. What I do is I model extreme precipitation events that are happening now, but I take them into the future. So what happens when a huge storm happens, but the background environment is warmer which a future world is likely to be, so that's kind of the boiler plate, what I do.

- So you would look at a situation, like say the Eastern Kentucky floods of recent note and propel those into the future with warmer temperatures, and that sort of thing. Is that kind of?

- Exactly. That that would be exactly what I would do. So I've done Hurricane Norbert, which is a hurricane that happened in 2014 off the coast of Arizona and actually moved a bunch of moisture over this desert area that's not used to getting a lot of rain, and it flooded a lot of the regions and caused a lot of urban flooding issues, and I've taken that storm and warmed up the ocean, and warmed up the background atmosphere, and seen how much precipitation fell, and more precipitation falls, because there is a an exponential relationship between temperature increasing and moisture increasing, so more moisture in the atmosphere means more rain falling from the sky.

- That has to be a little scary to be looking at that sort of data, and that sort of relationship in the future.

- I have a lot of hope because I deal with people who work in municipalities who are preparing for the future, and they're driving the want for this kind of data, and since they want to see what the worst case scenario is, so that they can prepare for it. And so even if this is a likelihood in the future based on what sort of future the whole world decides to go in, people who are on the ground and cities are preparing to insulate our infrastructure so that it can withstand these sort of rain events. It's a work in progress, and there's gonna be mistakes along the way, but it does give me hope, because I know people care about this sort of research and want to implement it in a very applied manner.

- Right, and that's important is they wanna be prepared for it and hopefully we learn lessons, and do the work to reduce that future possibility of temperature increases in all that, right?

- Definitely.

- So you talked at the outset about your mentor, talking about what it's like to be in a mentored relationship with another scientist, about how awesome your mentor is.

- Oh my gosh, Tanya is an amazing mentor. She understands kind of the work life balance issue. So, I'm also a mother to two children, a five-year-old and a two-year-old and,

- Oh my goodness, your hands are full.

- Yes, so completing my PhD, doing the ORISE participant fellowship thing, and then being a mom is a huge juggling exercise, and Tanya's been there, so she's always in my corner, and she just also as a scientist, just one of the most brilliant Fortran coders, and she just really understands what's under the hood in these atmospheric models, these climate models that we are using, and I'm just always in awe whenever we sit down, and I can't get something to work and she's like, "Oh, if you just change this over to this, then it's gonna run." And I'm like, "How did you know that?" And she said, "20 years of making that same mistake."

- Right, right. That's amazing. Let me ask you, is this your first mentor research experience? Have you had other mentors in your life?

- Yeah, in my academic career I've definitely had, I had two master's advisors, because one moved to USGS from the academic sector midway through, so I had to jump to to a new one, and then I also have my PhD advisor who works, kind of him and Tonya talk frequently about my progress and how I'm spending my time and all of that stuff, so I have multiple mentors. I would say that ORISE has given me a chance to have a female mentor, which I didn't get in the academic environment.

- Okay, gotcha. And I know that that makes a difference. I mean, we talk about women in science and how those numbers are catching up, but there's still a need for more women to be recruited into the sciences, right?

- Definitely.

- Have you had the opportunity to mentor up and coming scientists?

- So part of the ORISE environment at the EPA is there's actually kind of a couple of us floating around in the division, and whenever a new one comes in, I do give them kind of the low down of how everything works, and mentor from that side of things, but as a scientist, a lot of my mentorship of undergraduate students has happened during my master's degree. I worked at the State Climate Office of North Carolina, and they had always a huge influx of undergrads come in during the summer, and I would build projects for them, and mentor them, and help them with their coding, and their methods, and really just like build them up as young scientists starting out and learning about the atmosphere. That was always a very rewarding experience.

- That's very cool. I just love hearing about mentors mentoring others, and I just think science is such a collaborative process that you need those relationships not just with younger scientists, but with your mentors, and with scientists across discipline. So talk a little bit about that, knowing that science is a collaborative process, what is that like for you at the EPA?

- Right, so the branch that I work with is part of a modeling development division, and so all of everyone in the branch is all meteorologists and coders, but we have to work with different branches that do the chemistry, that do the emissions modeling, that do all of that other stuff, and so it really is like always constantly making sure when we say certain words we're, it doesn't mean something else in a different discipline.

- Gotcha. Sure.

- Each little micro discipline has so many individual like codes, and phrases, and sometimes a similar phrase could mean completely different things when talking to a chemist versus talking to an atmospheric scientist.

- Gotcha, so you wanna make sure you're all speaking the same language. Interesting.

- Yeah, and it takes a kind of a back and forth even this is a very established group, and they work all so well together, and it's amazing how efficient they could be. It really is kind of like to wax poetic about like government process and how efficient it is. Like people like to say that it's like, "Oh it's so inefficient," but when you look at it from the civil servant perspective, it's just so amazing to see how it's such good people who are so dedicated to their job and working so collaboratively, but even being together for sometimes decades, you still can get caught up on some of the minutia. And so watching them work through that has just been an educational experience for me to learn how to communicate effectively to people, not just the general public or anyone interested in science, but also to other scientists.

- Gotcha, so let me ask you a little bit more about that. Was that a challenge for you coming into an organization where, like you said, there are like, you've built in efficiencies, and they've been working together for so long and, "I'm the new girl, hi," How does that work? Is that a challenge? Do you get sort of welcomed in and caught up in it, I guess, right away? Does it take time?

- Right, so it takes a little bit of time. You really have to put yourself out there and go to the Bagel Tuesdays, make it to the retirement parties even if you've only met the person a couple of times. It does take effort on my part to integrate into the office culture as it were, but I go back to my mentor. She's always introducing me to people and making sure that in case when you're the new person you might not be remembered when they're sending Outlook invitations, and she's always forwarding to me, and making sure people add me to list serves, and all of that such so that I am included in the office events, and I would say it took a little bit of time and then of course the pandemic made it a little harder to weasel my way in on meetings, 'cause you can't just like then pop in. You see a meeting happening.

- Welcome to teams, yeah.

- Exactly.

- Awesome, Geneva, have you always been interested in meteorology and science? Has that always been like, I guess when did you first realize, "Hey, this is what I wanna do?"

- Right, so it goes back to when I was in kindergarten, and yeah, so I lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and when I was in kindergarten, Hurricane Fran, which was in 1996, so I guess I'm aging myself, came right over Fayetteville. The eye came over Fayetteville. So before the eye of a hurricane is the most intense wind and rain and that's where you get all of the high winds, and just what makes it an intense storm, and so if you do get to experience the eye it's calm in the center, but on either side, it's quite an intense storm. So I was five years old and it came over while we were sleeping, but I could hear it. I didn't sleep at all that night, 'cause I was scared.

- A little petrified.

- Yeah, a little petrified. And we lived in a trailer park, so in a pine forest and pine trees, they're adapted for storms like this, but only to a certain point, so there was trees falling, and I could really remember those thuds thuds thuds.

- Oh gosh.

- And I was terrified, and I remember like after the fact, once we got power back, it took about a week, like just diving into learning about the storm and wanting to understand why. So instead of kind of running away from this fear, I kind of ran towards it, and that made me want to like be a meteorologist and learn all about the weather so that I wouldn't be afraid of it anymore.

- Yeah, how cool. That's a great story. Terrifying storm. Kind of great way to manage the fear to really embrace it, and obviously now you're looking at a career in science, and I guess, do you have an idea of, after your ORISE experience, what comes next?

- Right, so I will have a PhD. It kind of coincides with the ending of my ORISE experience, and so I'm looking at some postdocs in different locations. Hopefully, I've been also applying to different jobs as well, kind of keeping my options open. I don't really wanna move my family around which is always the sticking point, but I'm pretty open. I just, I love the science so much that really wherever I can fit in, I'm gonna be happy. Like researching and understanding the finer points of what makes something tick, so my passion is climate science. I love how applied it can be, how relevant it is. It can sometimes view that harder in the federal government to find that sort of position as policy implications kind of ebb and flow based on the administration.

- Absolutely, yeah. I think I know the answer to this, but would you recommend an ORISE experience to your fellow graduate, undergraduate, post-doctoral colleagues?

- Oh, definitely. In fact, I have sent any ORISE positions that I see to some people and a couple of them have then been selected, so yeah, unfortunately there's no signing bonus, which is my one complaint.

- Maybe we need to get Leslie and team working on that.

- But I joke, I joke, but they enjoy it, and I talk about how much of a rewarding experience it is, and it really gives you and perspective that you don't get if you're just doing, I don't say just doing, but if you're doing the graduate research experience through an academic mentorship just out of a university, some of them can give you the kind of office culture like experience, but you really understand what kind of the horizon looks like after graduate school when you get to participate in an ORISE experience.

- And you're in the lab, and you're actually, I don't wanna say actually doing research, 'cause you're always doing research, but you're actually, you're doing the science on a practical level.

- Yeah, and it's always great when you're talking about your science and somebody kind of walks up in an informal poster session, internal to the EPA and starts chatting with you and giving you advice, or being excited about it. They walk away and because I'm still relatively new, I don't know who the big wigs are by facial recognition and it's great to hear then somebody say, "Oh that's the Director of the Office of Research and Development who just came by and loved your stuff." And so it's always nice like when you get that kind of like, "Oh that's like a big wig in the EPA"

- And you can't even fan girl, 'cause you don't even know it was.

- No, you don't even know it was, so you're like, "Oh yeah, let's just talk about the science," and because they are scientists too, they can talk to you at the same level, and then they walk off and you've planted that kind of nugget of like, "Yes, this research is important," and it's just super rewarding. And also, as an aside, just interacting with other researchers that also then their research then goes into inform public policy and how people make decisions on protecting people's health and the environment, it's just like, "This is, it's a great calling. It's a great, beautiful process that I get to be a part of thanks to ORISE."

- And that's really the kind of the brass ring, isn't it? That's awesome. Last question for you, Geneva. What brings you joy?

- Oh, that's such a beautiful question. So I'm gonna try not to like bring a tear to my eye. Joy is just such a beautiful thing. I love being outside and walking in nature, and not hearing anything but the sound of nature, and maybe sometimes my kids are also chattering. That's okay. But just being out there and listening to the stream, and looking up and seeing, now the leaves changing. It's just such a serene experience and just brings me such profound joy.

- Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. I love that. That's a beautiful thought.

- Thanks.

- Geneva Gray, thank you so much for spending this time with me. I really appreciate it. Congratulations again on your ORISE Future of Science Award, and for all of the great work that you're doing. I hope that we get to chat at some future point when you've had a few more years under your belt, and done some more research. I'd love to talk to you again.

- Of course. Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast.

- Awesome, thank you so much. Have a great day.

- You too.

- Thank you for listening to the ORISE Featurecast. To learn more about the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, visit orise.orau.gov, or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at ORISE Connect. If you like the ORISE Featurecast, give us a review wherever you listen to podcasts.