The Lasting Impact of Retiring Executive Director, Bill Ball

 

 By Paula Jasinski and Gina Sawaya, Green Fin Studio

 

CRC has been beyond lucky to have had Bill Ball lead the way over the last five years. The impacts of his long professional career can be felt throughout the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed and much further afield. With Ball’s retirement as CRC’s Executive Director at the end of the year, it is a good time to take stock of his many contributions to CRC and beyond.

During his five-year tenure, Ball made CRC more accessible and supportive to local researchers, provided opportunities for young scientists to flourish, and communicated the value of the CRC in innovative and inclusive ways.

“The international reputation of Dr. Ball strengthened the strong reputation of the CRC and his dynamic energy has advanced the CRC as an institution and enhanced the experience of contributors to the CRC enterprise,” said Peter Goodwin, President of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) and long-time professional colleague of Ball.

John Wells, former chair of the CRC Board and long-standing Director of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), added, “Bill is leaving CRC in a strong position as an advocate for the value of science in our lives and the importance of working collaboratively as consortium institutions in clear recognition that all of us are smarter and more effective than any of us alone.”

 

An early love for the Chesapeake

 

Dr. William P. Ball grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where he spent his childhood swimming, sailing, and generally playing in and on the Bay every summer. “Saving the Chesapeake Bay is the whole reason I got into this profession in the first place,” Ball explained of his pursuit of environmental engineering. He studied civil engineering at the University of Virginia, and then got his Masters in Environmental Engineering and Science from Stanford University. 

Following his time working on wastewater and water treatment (and reuse) issues in the Chesapeake watershed with an environmental consulting firm — during which time he received his PE license — Ball returned to Stanford, where he completed his PhD studies focusing on physical-chemical processes affecting contaminant fate and transport.

After three years on the faculty at Duke University, Ball moved to Baltimore to join the Department of Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). At JHU, Ball’s research focused on issues of adsorption, diffusion, and transport affecting organic chemicals in aquatic environments, with special attention to contaminant interactions with soils, sediments, and aquifer materials. His research also includes a body of work with black carbon materials ranging from soot, chars, activated carbons, carbon nanotubes, and other engineered nanomaterials. He advised 15 doctoral students, some of whom have gone on to become leaders at the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), including Qian Zhang and Rebecca Murphy.

In his early years in academia, Ball noticed an NSF call for environmental observatories and thought, “this is my chance to do something with the Chesapeake.” Ball’s friend Dominic DiToro had just taken a position at the University of Delaware and introduced Ball to Michael Kemp and many others doing fundamental academic research on issues of Chesapeake Bay water quality. The group successfully landed several multi-university, team-based projects. As Ball puts it, he had finally come “full circle” with his high-school aspirations.

Working with DiToro, Kemp, Tom Gross, and Kevin Sellner (then a program manager and Director of the CRC, respectively), Ball co-led a team that developed a winning proposal for a planning grant in the area of cyberinfrastructure for environmental observatories and, later, a multi-university $2.1M collaborative effort on “A Prototype System For Multi-Disciplinary Shared Cyberinfrastructure – Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO).” In his role as lead PI on that project, Ball got to know the Bay community better and worked with many talented students, including Murphy, Zhang, Jeremy Testa (now at UMCES), Damian Brady (now at U. Maine), and many others. According to Ball, it was “an amazingly productive and collaborative group that enjoyed meeting, learning from each other, and representing the Chesapeake in national-level discussions about environmental observatory development.”

The team continued to develop Bay-related projects and win other NSF grants. Ball considers himself fortunate to have served as lead PI on a project aimed at “Concept Development Toward a Collaborative Large-Scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research (CLEANER) with a Focus on the Chesapeake Bay,” as well as a related collaborative research project on “CUAHSI/CLEANER Project for Demonstration and Development of a Test-Bed Digital Observatory for the Susquehanna River Basin and the Chesapeake Bay” in collaboration with Michael Piasecki at Drexel University. 

Under funding from the Water Environment Research Federation, Ball and DiToro worked with students (Brady, Murphy, and later, Zhang) on “Process-Based Statistical Interpolation Methods for Improved Analysis of WATERS Test-bed Observations and Water Quality Models.” It was also during this era that Bill first crossed paths with Dr. Peter Goodwin, current UMCES President, who was then at the University of Idaho and participating in various water resource development initiatives as part of NSF’s “CLEANER” and “WATERS” programs.

In the three years prior to January 2015, just before coming on as the Executive Director of CRC, Ball and colleagues prepared four separate multi-institutional proposals related to regional-scale modeling and analysis of estuarine impacts of nutrient loadings to the Chesapeake Bay under future conditions of land use and climate change. The fourth try was the charm and a project was successfully funded at a level of roughly $2 million for four years under the NSF’s program on “Water, Sustainability, and Climate.” It has supported several students at JHU, including Zhang and Dano Wilusz, who Ball co-advised with co-PI Ciaran Harman at JHU. The project has also supported strong teams of faculty and students at UMCES (co-PI’s Lisa Wainger, Mike Kemp, Jeremy Testa, Laura Murray, and Judy O’Neal), the University of Maine (co-PI Damian Brady), and Cornell University (co-PI Ariel Ortiz Bobea).

“In these endeavors, he ensured the experience, rich data source and the innovative integration of modeling, management and policy developed by the Chesapeake science community was used to guide the development of major research initiatives at the national level,” explained Goodwin. 

Through these grants and the associated meetings and workshops with other Bay researchers, Ball got to know the Chesapeake community and became more involved with the CRC. “If you have those relationships you can better understand and appreciate the importance of CRC’s mission as a facilitator of research collaboration — that is, as a means of bringing the best possible science to bear on really important problems,” said Ball. 

 

 “I feel that I have been preparing for this position all of my life”

 

In 2014, Ball applied for the Executive Director of CRC. Ball was interested in connecting different institutions, acting as a liaison between science and management, and growing the role of CRC in promoting research. He explained in his application, “In many ways, I feel that I have been preparing for this position all of my life.”

“We hired Bill in 2015 to take the helm of CRC because of his background in environmental research and his genuine desire to bring science to bear on environmental problems in Chesapeake Bay and to help ensure that CRC scientists were deeply engaged with regional managers and policy-makers,” explained Wells, who was Chair of the Board when Ball was brought on.

Ball immediately wanted to make CRC more visible and well understood by all regional scientists, but especially by its own member institutions’ faculty and students, so that they might better use the organization as a resource. “The audience I’ve always wanted to reach is those scientists who don’t understand us,” Ball explained. “And, importantly, to have them work with us to help us build better networks for collaboration.” 

Ball has been outspoken in his support for the Chesapeake Bay Program and NOAA, using his position at CRC to advocate for funding for Bay science in the face of repeated threats of budget cuts at the federal level. 

“Bill has strived mightily to restore the ‘R’ in CRC,” said Fred Dobbs, current Chair of the CRC Board. “Times and funding channels have changed in the decades since CRC was established, and the institution has necessarily evolved in its function.” 

“Bill Ball did more to put the ‘R’ back into the CRC than anyone in recent memory,” echoed Bill Dennison of UMCES. “He helped expand the Chesapeake modeling conference to incorporate the broader research and monitoring aspects of the Chesapeake restoration effort.” 

In his second year as Executive Director, Ball worked with Board members and Virginia Tech faculty (especially Dr. Brian Benham) to bring Virginia Tech in as the seventh institutional member of CRC. Ball notes that Virginia Tech was “well poised for membership, thanks to its long history of important contributions to the Bay Program partnership in the areas of environmental engineering, agricultural and watershed management, and freshwater ecology.” Additionally, Ball pointed out that VT had an important presence in the Virginia academic system that nicely complemented the contributions of VIMS and ODU and is geographically located in a previously unrepresented portion of the watershed. Ball said he was especially delighted that both the CRC Board and the VT President (Dr. Timothy Sands) quickly agree with the addition and VT joined the CRC in late fall of 2016.

Additionally, Ball spearheaded a new “outreach campaign” in collaboration with long-partnering contractor, Green Fin Studio, that included an update to the logo,website redesign, making sure CRC is well represented on social media, and expanding the scope and reach of external communications through initiation of the CRC Quarterly newsletter. He also led the development of the Chesapeake Bay Expertise Database (CBED), a database of over 300 Bay scientists and managers, meant to help students find mentors and for researchers to find collaborators. 

“Never one to shy away from detail, Bill delighted in communicating in depth the role and importance of CRC, its breadth of activities under his leadership, and his own new research findings. A cursory conversation with Bill was usually not in the cards,” said Wells. 

One of his defining accomplishments was his work with a CBPO/CRC staffer Darius Stanton to initiate a new program for career development called the Chesapeake Student Recruitment, Early Advisement, and Mentoring (C-StREAM) program. C-StREAM funds summer research opportunities for students from underrepresented backgrounds as “Fellows” who are given special attention for possible on-going support. The program is intended to help build a pipeline for students who might otherwise not have the opportunity and has already garnered strong support from the EPA and NOAA, as well as leveraged support from existing REU and other internship programs at CRC member institutions. 

In the past two years, the program has supported over a dozen fellows and will continue to support more students next year. 

Ball has been a strong manager at CRC, helping to ensure its financial security and, with assistance from a strong staff, recruiting excellent staffers for the Chesapeake Bay Program. He and staff have also maintained continuously strong support for the Science and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) and Chesapeake Community Modeling Program (CCMP). 

 

The future of the CRC

 

Ball hopes that the CRC can do even more to help “grow the pie” for all researchers by building better teams that can, collectively, find more funding for each member. He believes that with a little more collaborative effort among its individual member institutions, the CRC could play an even more active and effective role in advocating for state, federal, and private foundation funding of fundamental water research.

He also advocates strongly for a renewal and rebuilding of public support for higher education and academic research. “Among other things, more easily accessed funding might relieve some of the current pressures on academic freedom,” Ball noted. In this context, he also emphasized that “research directions are increasingly influenced by the need to follow funding sources that are all too often influenced by political processes and private-industry short-term financial reward. Faculty are being increasingly pressured to find support not only for their students, but also for larger and larger fractions of administrative overhead. With more public support of education, faculty and students could hopefully be more free to pursue their ideas toward long-term societal benefits.” Toward these ends, he would love to see the CRC do more to help generate the needed political support for its institutions’ core missions.

Looking forward, Ball is pleased to see the CRC moving into such good hands. “The Board did an excellent job of reviewing a large and diverse pool of candidates for the ED position,” he noted. He was very pleased with the choice of Dr. Denice Wardrop as the incoming Executive Director and has already begun working on a transition that they hope can be the “smoothest ever.” Ball’s advice for Wardrop is, “enjoy the job. There’s a lot of freedom with this position, and you can take it wherever you want to go.”

Many of Ball’s colleagues will remember his enthusiasm, leadership, and creativity. “On behalf of the Maryland science community – thank you, Bill, for your career contributions to the environmental profession and for everything you have done for the CRC,” said Goodwin. 

“Bill will surely be remembered for his passion, energy, new ideas, and a keen eye towards putting advocacy to work in a societal framework,” said Wells. “Indeed, Bill is leaving CRC in a strong position as an advocate for the value of science in our lives and the importance of working collaboratively as consortium institutions in clear recognition that all of us are smarter and more effective than any of us alone.”