The first time I traveled outside of the United States was right after graduating high school when my French teacher took about 20 students to France. To say I was excited is an understatement, and to this day I can vividly recall the thrill I had when, shortly after arriving in France, I ordered an ice cream cone in French—and it worked! My four years of French were validated!
Jump ahead to 2002 when a random phone call came in at the office—a consulting firm in Dubai was looking for an air modeler to help them out with a project they had with the government of Dubai. I must confess, I had to look up where Dubai was…but always up for an adventure I took the job, and thus began one of the most rewarding aspects of my career—working overseas.
Since that time I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. I’ve modeled individual industrial facilities, I’ve modeled entire cities, and I’ve represented the State of Maryland as part of an environmental delegation to Serbia.
A few years ago I was introduced to the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), and eventually they asked for a proposal to do a fairly small modeling project. In an effort to make my proposal a bit more enticing I added something extra, basically offering that if they selected me and bought me a plane ticket and put me up in a hotel I’d travel down and teach them a modeling class. Well, I was selected for the work and just this past week I wrapped up that effort by traveling to T&T to teach that modeling class.
If you’ve attended one of my modeling classes before, you already know how much I enjoy doing that sort of thing. Well, this was no exception but it also had the added bonus of something personal to me—I truly derive a lot of professional satisfaction out of sharing my knowledge and expertise with fellow air pollution colleagues from other countries.
And in this case I could not have asked for better hosts or students. The folks at EMA were generous and the roughly two dozen people who attended the class were engaged and curious. In the class itself there were more than a few who understood enough about modeling to ask some good questions. For instance, we spent a lot of time discussing unique wind flow issues on T&T and how they could affect model selection, as well as how monitor concentrations can be used to augment modeling analyses.
So in the end it was a great week for me as it merged two of my professional interests—working overseas and teaching. One of the things we’ve deliberately set out to do at Blue Sky Modeling is to afford our colleagues the opportunity to pursue the kinds of work they like. In this case it was not only fun to do something a bit outside of the box, it was terrific to help another country improve its capacity to protect and improve its air quality.