virginia schutte virginia schutte
stewardship, Schutte realized research and teaching offered a natural path towards a vision she already articulated. The world as revealed to her through intuition and her own scholarship was, as L’Engle had written, a circular and interconnected reality. For others, she knew it was not necessarily their reality. When Schutte interviewed for an undergraduate college scholarship, she was prepared for questions about her environmental interests and being a Kentucky native."I was very aware of strip mining, etc…and the guy talking to me began going on about how we needed to shift gears." Schutte pauses, grimaces, and delivers the startling punch line: “And tell farmers to make computers instead." Point of View: Hitting People the Right Way
virginia schutte
Schutte’s parents' enlightened point of view still amazes and inspires. “They believed in hitting people the right way,” she says cheerfully. And so, she plans just that—a plan she will do en masse. “I am into teaching and getting a teaching certificate—I want to be a professor." So, Schutte embraces what others might fear: “I want to teach the giant, 350-person intro courses! You may be their last contact with science before they enter the workforce and you get to have their attention." Meanwhile, her doctoral focus has two main research thrusts. One concerns the idea of mangroves as structures."Mangroves create an ‘engineered’ ecosystem. They are ecosystem engineers, like corals on a reef or grasses on a plain." Those mangroves, as they naturally grow, protect shorelines if left intact rather than removed. “They would have dissipated the energy of the tsunami after Boxing Day." (The 2004 earthquake and resulting tsunami occurred on December 26, with the epicenter off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.) Her research further considers how mangroves act both as natural filters and incubators of sea life."If you have pollutants in the water they will settle out in the mangroves, rather than traveling offshore to systems like coral reefs. Mangroves are a nursery ground for a lot of things." She observes a lot of baby fish and finds tiny lobster and octopus in the roots of mangroves in conducting research in the subtropics. That sea life is colorfully depicted on her own videos, which she developed to explain her research. “Mangroves do a lot for us; that is why I am so excited to study them."
UGA Graduate School Magazine summ e r 2 013
29