This episode of Buff Innovator Insights features Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and Director for the Navigating the New Arctic Community Office, both hosted at CU Boulder. We’ll hear about how his family-centered upbringing in rural Pennsylvania formed the foundations for his lifelong work exploring the relationships between the physical environment and the communities—especially indigenous communities—that dwell there.
Terri Fiez
Hello, and welcome to Buff Innovator Insights. I'm your host Terri Fiez, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. This podcast features some of the most innovative ideas in the world. And it introduces you to the people behind the innovations, from how they got started, to how they are changing our world for the better.
Today we'll meet Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at CU Boulder. He's Director for the Navigating the New Arctic Community Office, which CU Boulder is hosting in collaboration with Alaska Pacific University, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Dr. Druckenmiller has more than 15 years of transdisciplinary research experience in arctic and subarctic regions, much of it in collaboration with Arctic communities. He also has experience participating with a host of national and international Arctic research and policy institutions.
During today's podcast, we'll learn about how growing up in a close-knit family in rural Pennsylvania spawned his research interest in the physical environment. The educational experiences and a special mentor who shifted his focus to include the relationship of the physical environment with the communities that dwell there.
And how his role as Director of Navigating the New Arctic Community Office, sponsored by the National Science Foundation is allowing him to bring Indigenous communities to the forefront of such work. Let's meet Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller.
Well, thank you Matt for joining us here today. So let's just get right into this. What part of the country did you grow up in?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
I grew up in the rural part of North Central Pennsylvania. An area of the state filled with rolling mountains, forests, a lot of farmlands and an abundance of wild trout streams. We lived about 15 miles from the nearest town. So growing up as a Pennsylvania country kid was a certain part of my identity growing up.
Terri Fiez
How do you think that shaped your future growing up in such a rural area, and removed from any cities?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, most of my memories as a kid were playing in the woods with my three siblings. I have a brother and two sisters. And we were surrounded by forests, and that was our backyard. We also had a family cabin, about 25 minute drive away up in the mountains, on a beautiful mountain creek.
And that was really our primary vacation place. We didn't travel much as a family. And so, so much of my childhood memories are in the forest around our home and in the cabin that my grandfather built, my great grandfather rather, just after World War II.
Terri Fiez
Sounds like a pretty idyllic upbringing. So what were some of your favorite subjects in school?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, I can remember early on in middle school, and going into high school that the subjects that I really enjoyed most were social science, history and geography. At a very early age, I took a great interest in maps, and I think that stems from inheriting my grandfather's National Geographic collection. So I would say social sciences was really central to my interest. But I found that I most excelled in engineering, math and science.
And as a kid, I think you're taught to, in some ways to follow what you're good at. And so at early age took that as an indication that I should probably pursue something related to math and science. And looking back on it, now, as a father, I think there's a need for a good balance between following what you're good at and following what your true passions are. Because sometimes they vary a bit. And I think the challenge in life is trying to find areas where those two things intersect.
Terri Fiez
So outside of academic topics, what kind of extracurricular activities did you participate in?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, I was really interested in sports. I tried most sports that I could, I played football, I wrestled, I played tennis, basketball, soccer. And I really learned that I was a very average athlete. I did not excel, I put in a lot of hard work, but I was an average athlete. I also in school, and perhaps as a result of being so average in sports was, I took an interest in environmental science.
Our school had a stewardship club, an environmental stewardship club. And in my junior year of high school, I ran to be the president of the stewardship club. And I was probably the only person running. But regardless, I became the president of our stewardship club. And during my junior year, I organized a trip with my high school chemistry teacher for a group of us, about 15 students to go down to Honduras.
Where we, for two weeks, were part of a program where we did biodiversity surveys in primary rain forests and secondary rain forests. And also did surveys of the coral reefs off of the mainland of Honduras. And so it was my first real exposure to science and to doing field work, which really just, I think set me on the course for wanting to do field work in my career.
Terri Fiez
So it sounds like you had a lot of interests outside of academic topics and within academic topics. So how did you choose where to go to college, and then also what you were going to major in?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, my father, he was a carpenter. And he built houses for a large part of his life. But then he went on to be a professor of carpentry at Penn College of Technology, which is an affiliate campus to Penn State University. And early on, I learned that he had a pretty substantial educational discount. And so I went to Penn State, I think it was 75% off tuition.
But it also was that Penn State had a really good engineering program, various engineering programs. And I was aware of that, and I really wanted to be useful in my career. And I think that stems to an interest I had in the environment.
I grew up at a time where acid rain was a big topic of interest in the Northeastern Pennsylvania. That really shaped my interest in wanting to pursue a career focused on environmental remediation. And so I went to Penn State, and did my undergraduate degree in environmental systems engineering, focusing on air quality.
Terri Fiez
So you get to the end of your degree, and you've got to decide what to do next, how did you decide what to do after you graduated?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, at that time, I did an internship with General Electric, and it gave me a taste for joining the workforce. And so I think the decision I made was to not really make a decision, to kind of stay where I was at.
My undergraduate program had a kind of a sister master's level program in geoenvironmental engineering. And for that, I decided to focus my master's research on carbon sequestration. So my research was looking at injecting carbon as a form of sequestering carbon.
Terri Fiez
Well, didn't you have an experience with a particular professor that really shaped your future?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Yes. While I was doing my master's work, I had early on read a book called Glacier Ice by Austin Post and Edward LaChapelle, which is just a fantastic book to introduce you to the subject of glaciology.
And after reading that book, I decided to take a graduate level glaciology course with Richard Alley, who's a world renowned glaciologist who studied ice stabilization glacier movement in Greenland and Antarctica. And it's just that, that course really just shaped my career.
It convinced me that glaciology was what I wanted to do. So at that time he suggested some folks here at CU Boulder to potentially work with. Some people at the University of British Columbia, and then also at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
And as I applied to these programs, and began to interact with potential future advisors, I became convinced that the best fieldwork opportunities would be in Alaska.
Terri Fiez
So what did you do after your master's then, it sounds like you went to Alaska?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Yeah. Immediately after I finished my master's at Penn State, probably a couple weeks after, I packed a single bag and flew up to Fairbanks. And I remember very vividly flying into Fairbanks, it was the summer of 2004 during one of the worst wildfire seasons that Alaska had faced in recent decades.
But despite the wildfires, I still got a beautiful view of Denali, of the big mountain, which really just convinced me that I'd made the right decision. Shortly after arriving in Fairbanks, I began to join a research team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Doing months of glacier volume surveys using a small aircraft throughout the Alaska range. And it was to date one of the most remarkable experiences I've ever had.
Terri Fiez
So how long were you up in Alaska, and how did you end up in Boulder?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, I began a PhD in glaciology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. But I also upon living in the state and traveling a bit, and including into some of the rural communities. I became really interested in the intersection of research with concerns of Arctic communities.
And so I transitioned, after about a year and a half studying mountain glaciers, to focusing on coastal sea ice stability. And that allowed me to develop some research projects during my PhD. Looking at how Indigenous Inupiaq communities in Alaska utilize sea ice as their means to provide food for their community.
So my work was looking specifically at the stability of the ice that attaches along the coast. During the time when the community is out on the ice hunting for bowhead whales in the springtime. I decided that I wanted to pursue postdoctoral work in partnership with these whale biologists.
And so I came down here to CU Boulder to do a postdoc. And that postdoc focused on using a lot of the sea ice data sets that exist here at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, to examine how bowhead whale habitat is changing. And working with a biologist to translate changes in the physical environment to changes in the body condition of bowhead whales. So relating changing habitat to how whales feed and where they feed throughout the Arctic.
Terri Fiez
So you talked about doing the scientific research, but really bringing the social sciences, the communities that are served by these environments. And clearly that was an interest from the time you were very young. How did you... As you went along in your PhD, how did you incorporate that, the social science aspect?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, I became really interested in the knowledge of traditional, Indigenous knowledge holders in Alaska. Because spending time with some of the hunters in the communities, some of the elders, now, I really saw in many ways, my grandfather in them.
And I understood that the knowledge they acquired was over a long time of moving in the environment, observing the environment, developing a relationship with it. And I decided to have one of my graduate committees at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Both an anthropologist who could bring that longtime perspective of how researchers have worked with Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, as well as an Inupiaq elder and whaling captain from the community of Wales, Alaska, who served as a member on my committee and really guided my research on being culturally aware of the concerns of coastal Inupiaq communities.
Terri Fiez
So my experience with having non-traditional people on your committee, they tend to ask the hardest and the most insightful questions. So was that your experience?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Interestingly enough, I don't know if it was. I think some of the hardest questions came from the physical scientists on my committee. I had a snow physicist, an oceanographer and a sea ice geophysicist. And the hardest questions came from them, not because they were focusing on their own discipline, but because I was lucky enough to have these three men on my committee who really shared the same interests that I shared.
They were generally interested and learning from Inupiaq tradition on local knowledge. And so we were going through the process together. And so they asked me a lot of questions that I was always asking myself. Questions that neither of us knew the answer to, "How can you provide usable information on assessing sea ice stability to a local hunter?" And as they ask these types of questions, it was clear that they also didn't know the answer.
Terri Fiez
So you were recently funded to lead a National Science Foundation, NSF, Navigating the New Arctic Community Hub. Tell us what that is, and what is the goal that you hope to achieve?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Navigating the New Arctic, referred to as NNA, is one of NSF's big ideas. So their big ideas are meant to be very large scale, across the agency efforts to tackle complex challenges. So Navigating the New Arctic is NSF's commitment to focusing research support to addressing some of the more critical issues being faced in the Arctic.
The Arctic is changing more rapidly than almost any place on Earth. The rate of warming in the Arctic is over twice the rate of warming that we see elsewhere on the planet. Now, we've seen dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice in summer, upwards of 70% loss in total volume of Arctic sea ice. We see the form of permafrost, the shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet. We see migration patterns of key species being disrupted.
And so the Arctic system on almost all fronts, is being affected by change in global climate. And so this new office is really meant to serve as a coordinating research hub for the 140 plus individual research awards that have been granted through the NNA initiative.
And so we are supporting projects and developing collaborations across projects, focusing on interdisciplinary collaborations to address very specific challenges and to try to make research more useful to those that need it. And we're also trying to build capacity for research teams to practice more culturally appropriate education outreach activities.
We're trying to address some of the issues that have been persistent in the Arctic between researchers working with Indigenous communities and concerns around equity in research and ensuring that research partnerships are truly reciprocal. And also we are trying to encourage the community to adopt open science practices, to ensure that science is accessible to everyone.
That the process is transparent, and that the datasets that result from these huge investments in Arctic research are available to those that need it. And that there is a real focused effort on ensuring that usability in research is invested in.
Terri Fiez
Who are the partners in this work?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
The Navigating the New Arctic Community Office is a partnership between CU Boulder, which hosts the central office, and Alaska Pacific University, which is located in Anchorage. It recently became a travel university focusing on building their service enrollment of Alaska Native students and professionals. And the third partner is the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
They are really doing the bulk of the education outreach activities. We also have an Indigenous advisory board that largely represents tribal institutions that exist in Alaska and to some extent internationally.
And we are beginning to develop a host of events and mechanisms for ensuring that Arctic peoples have an input into the research that's being done through the NNA program. And have a process for bringing some of their ideas and interests in collaborative research forward to the research community.
Terri Fiez
I think when we talked, we talked about the idea of authentic collaboration. So Matt, how do you build trust with this Indigenous community?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
I think one of the primary components to building trust, in addition to simply realizing that it takes time and it takes focus, is making a deliberate effort to recognize history and to learn history from multiple points of view. And certainly, the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic have a very particular history that has been filled with trauma.
Whether it be the forced loss of language, forced into boarding schools, in many cases, forced relocation of their communities. Those are traumas that live to this day in communities. You don't have to go too far back within families to find a connection to a grandparent, or even a parent that underwent these times in history.
And so we're really living at the present, at a time of historical reconsideration of what the past looks like. And simply acknowledging that with partners, and showing that you are investing the time to recognize that history. And to look at it through their perspective, now, it's a huge step towards building trust and moving forward together in partnership.
A gathering that is planned and organized by Indigenous collaborators, really begins with showing respect to knowledge bearers. Often time giving credit to the elders that are present, and that contributed to acknowledging the gifts from the land. And it really just sets the research and the discussions that follow on a course that a researcher likely would not set the collaboration towards.
And having improved relationships, research partnerships with Indigenous communities. I think brings the research so much closer to actual application, to actually being able to address the challenges that the Arctic faces.
Terri Fiez
So what are you most proud of in your career, and what would you like your legacy to be?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, I would say I'm most proud of the relationships that I've formed with those who are shaking things up. Those that are leading the community, often leading from behind. And I've just been so proud that I've somehow been able to identify some of these people and to get to know them, and to develop trust. And what I want my legacy to be, and in my personal career I think, I want my legacy to be the same as I want in my personal life.
I want to be remembered as a good person, as a kind person, someone that didn't take others for granted. And someone that gave more than I took. We all take, I take. But it's important to find an approach where you can give more than you take. And that's something that I tell my children. And I think that's something that I try to bring into my professional life.
Terri Fiez
Final question. As you think about the next decade or two, what are you optimistic about, and what's your hope for the future of the work that you do and the breakthroughs that will be found?
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Well, as I mentioned, we've spent a lot of time in recent years focusing on developing equitable research partnerships with Arctic peoples. And my hope for the future is that there is another switch, which we begin to see more and more Indigenous scholars lead the Arctic research community.
I think we're on that trajectory. And I'm encouraged because I see a growing number of young leaders, many of which I get a chance to work with through this, Navigating the Arctic Community Office. And they have decided that they need to work with scientists, and to make a lasting change and through partnership.
And I think the trajectory that we're on is for their leadership to take center stage. At least in the context of addressing some of the more critical societal challenges that we see up in the north. And so I'm optimistic about that. And I'm also optimistic that the academic scientific research community is ready for that to happen.
Terri Fiez
Well, thank you, Matt. This has been a very enlightening conversation. And I just really appreciate the way that you view the world and your contributions to it. So thank you for spending this time today.
Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller
Thank you very much, Terri. It's a great pleasure to speak with you.
Terri Fiez
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Matthew Druckenmiller, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at CU Boulder. And Director for the CU Boulder Navigating the New Arctic Community Office. To learn more about Dr. Druckenmiller, you can visit nna-co.org.
For this and other Buff Innovator Insights episodes, you can also visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host and Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at CU Boulder, Terri Fiez. Thanks for listening to Buff Innovator Insights. We'll see you next time.
