School of Engineering

I graduated from HSU’s ERE program in 1992. I have worked my entire career after HSU for the California State Water Resources Control Board, where I am currently the Deputy Director for Information Management and Analysis.

I am also the son of retired ERE Professor Bob Gearheart, so I grew up in Arcata, and attended local schools. After two years at UC Davis, I returned to HSU to enroll in ERE and complete my education. I got a summer job for the following four summers working for the County of Humboldt’s material testing laboratory. This was a fantastic way to learn about environmental engineering, not to mention the back roads of Humboldt County.

HSU provided me with access to the hills, rivers, and ocean, and my experience from an early age of the power of raw nature and the outdoors, combined with being instilled with environmental protection values, and topped off with technical skills aimed at protecting and enhancing water quality, prepared me nicely for my interview with the State of California’s recruiters who were looking for water resource control engineers.

After graduating from HSU, I took an engineer position with the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) working on contaminated soils, stormwater and watershed regulatory programs. One of my favorite memories was cruising the San Diego Bay with a colleague in a rented skiff, collecting samples from the south end of the bay, where power plant cooling waters created a year-round habitat for sea turtles and seahorses. We almost got blown into the path of an aircraft carrier and almost ran out of gas, but in the end we got our data!

After seven years, I moved to the San Francisco Bay RWQCB to enhance my experience of working on watershed- based regulatory approaches. The Santa Clara Watershed Management Initiative is one of the longest running, most innovative and effective watershed management forums in the country. I worked closely with many ERE alumni on that project, and really learned a lot. After a year and a half, I took a position with the State Water Board in Sacramento, where I have worked since 2000. The opportunity to work toward the protection of California’s waters is a rewarding profession, one that hooked me from Day 1. It’s hard to imagine being happy working anywhere else, because the mission of the Water Boards – protecting the beneficial uses of water for all Californians – is powerful and well-supported by management.

My current role is the best one yet. I direct the statewide Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program (SWAMP), which aims to check the health of our surface waters, and inform regulatory decisions. I serve as the “Chief Data Liberator” (not my real title!) for the organization, which is really ten distinct “boards,” with approximately 2,000 staff led by 68 governor-appointed board members. The Water Boards manage more than twenty enterprise applications that serve as “databases” of all types, and some house environmental data (surface water quality, ground water quality, habitat, etc.), while others house programmatic data (facilities regulated, type of regulation/permit, inspection results, enforcement, etc.). All of this data must be turned into information, then knowledge, and eventually wisdom to better do our jobs. My office of 27 scientists, engineers and “data scientists” is charged with the task of strategically helping data, of known and acceptable quality, flow toward users.

An example of a project to help do this is a partnership between the State of California and the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to host a “Water Data Challenge.” The 2016 California Water Data Challenge was a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the CEQ and a State agency. It challenged participants to leverage open source technology and available water information to support decisions around water reliability and resource sustainability in California. Inspired by President Obama’s commitment to improving open data and government, the Challenge demonstrated the potential for collaboration, transparency, and innovation to address water management issues.

I love my job at the Water Boards, and the combination of my synergistic roles – get the data on health, and free the data for decision makers – really feels like a capstone to all the experience I have received working here. All of this was driven by the outstanding foundation of knowledge and education I received at HSU, and growing up in Arcata. My motto has always been, “Be the Change.”