Rebecca Klaper: Water ecologist cleans up

The best part of Rebecca Klaper’s office is that it’s only her part-time office. The rest of the time she’s out in the open air, floating on lakes – usually in a boat – collecting samples for her research. While the job description may also apply to your fancy-fisherman uncle, Klaper is actually a researcher at the Great Lakes Water Institute, a subdivision of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Judging by her tan and confidence showing me around the docks where she launches off from, it’s a job she likes doing.

When she’s not out in the sun, living the dream, she’s either in the lab working on studying “emerging contaminants,” a relatively new term describing both new pollutants and previously unstudyable products, or out in public leading the charge to study water.

“People really need to start paying attention to water as a limited resource,” she says at one point, uncharacteristically serious. “It can be a renewable resource, but in this country we don’t treat it as one.”

She blushes when I suggest she may be Jacques Cousteau’s successor, who managed to be “a fantastic scientist” while getting people excited about science at the same time. But she agrees her overall goal is to “get people excited about science.” She wants to be able to get through and fire their imaginations, she says.

We all know fire and water don’t mix, and yet the ideas of water’s importance – and scarcity – are catching on. Like Klaper says: “Water is the new oil.”

Ellen Zweibel: Astrophysicist’s turn to shine

“The most intellectually satisfying part of the day is working with my equations.”

It’s not the part of a day most people would say they enjoy, but it’s easy to understand how comfortable University of Wisconsin-Madison astrophysicist Ellen Zweibel has become with solving equations.

Looking around her office, mathematical formulas abound, whether displayed prominently on the blackboard or hastily scribbled on scattered papers, which cover her tables like mathematical snow.

When I ask her to explain her love of equations to someone more … literarily minded, she quickly responds, “It’s about understanding nature.” Just like the best cartoonists can capture an entire image with just a few lines, so must scientists be able to capture complex phenomena with a few essential features. “It takes judgment, it takes creativity, and what’s more exciting than nature?” she says.

Zweibel realized the ability for her to explain some physical aspect with the power of symbols and relationships was very exciting. In fact, despite being drawn into science by the physical beauty of nature, it’s the beauty of the abstract that truly captured her imagination.

Now, she deals so heavily in the abstract, she finds many ‘applications’ of physics daunting. “I can’t [even] fix a flat on my bike!” she says, laughing. “I’m not good with physical details,” which pretty much exiled her from the lab, guaranteeing a more abstract existence, dealing only with equations.

Well, almost. “If I don’t get exercise, I feel very stale,” she says, gesturing at a dusty green bike. Besides dealing with abstractions of the known and unknown, riding that bike is a part of her day she wouldn’t trade for anything.

“I’m very connected to my work, I do something every day, seven days a week,” she says. And even if the thought of working with equations seven days a week seems torturous to others, for Zweibel it is literally her life’s work, turning the beautiful into abstractions, and vice versa. “I’m very, very lucky. I’m a person who’s happy to go to work.”

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