Researcher crusades for policies to protect water: Dr. Deborah Swackhamer
People Stories

Researcher crusades for policies to protect water: Dr. Deborah Swackhamer

An Agate Original (link below) | Dr. Deborah Swackhamer

It’s March, and Deb Swackhamer recently returned to Minnesota from the Solomon Islands, where one of the highlights of a snorkeling expedition was watching “cleaning stations,” where brightly-colored tiny fish called wrasse eat parasites and dead tissue off manta rays with 20-foot wingspans. “These huge manta rays would circle around, slow down, and let the ‘cleaner fish’ clean them off, which feeds the smaller fish and keeps the rays healthy,” Swackhamer said.

Before long she’ll be off to the Caribbean for more snorkeling and SCUBA diving. Recently retired from the University of Minnesota, she’s immersing herself in her favorite places. But she’s also chairing an important advisory board at the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and speaking to groups all over Minnesota about the importance of clean water. It’s a relaxed schedule compared to what she was used to in her nearly 30 years as a professor. Swackhamer’s career combined hard work on cutting-edge research with savvy policy chops to produce an unusually influential body of work. As a graduate student she made surprising discoveries about polychlorinated biphenyls – research that contributed to the decision to ban PCBs globally; she capped her career by […]

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