Khasab

If my trip to Al Ain, detailed in my last post, was categorized as “travels as a poor, starving college student,” the most recent trip to Khasab and Ras Al Khaimah would be “travels as and with Emiratis.” Translation: not poor, and very far from starving, but still in collegiate style. Mohammed Alzaabi, a fellow junior petroleum engineering student, asked me if I would like to join him and a group to go to Khasab. I had mentioned earlier that I was hoping to see as much of the Emirates as possible, so this wasn’t completely out of the blue. Of course, in my new academically unburdened self that I never got in touch with at Mines, I gratefully accepted.

Mohammed drives a 2010 Chevy Silverado short bed, crew cab pickup (see photos). In fine style, although at the unfine hour of 5 a.m., Mohammed picked up Saeed, Ahmed and I in front of the Oasis on campus. We purchased some breakfast, and then barreled down the highway to Ras al Khaimah (RAK), where Jasim and more friends would meet us for the trip to Oman. The high speeds attained in the Toyota en route to Al Ain were exceeded on this journey while I was sleeping, Alhamdulillah. (Alhamdulillah means, ”Thanks be to God.” It is, like insh’allah and khalas—“enough,” “all right, then”—used with great versatility. Example, but all in Arabic: -How are you? -Alhamdulillah. Or: -How was your vacation? -Alhumdulillah, great, thanks. Most commonly used as a reply to, “How are you?”)

Instead of taking the main coastal highway, we took a more inland route, and saw several camels behind the fence on the side of the highway. They provided the perfect excuse for a photo and stretch break to get all of us over the hump of grogginess from our early departure.

After a brief round of visits with the entire group in RAK, the caravan—consisting of a Toyota FJ Cruiser, Toyota Land Cruiser and Chevy Silverado—bombed on down to the Omani border/UAE exit checkpoint. Traveling with a group of Emiratis is a wonderful experience. The Gulf politeness and composure really came through. The routine was the same for the exit and entry checkpoints on either border: drive up to checkpoint, roll down window, “Salam Alaykum” (with a slightly longer “s” than normal), some remarks in Arabic, a brow furrowed in pensiveness enough to evoke genuine concern for the other person, some slight head bobbing, and a calm and orderly exchange of papers, IDs, etc. Everything is cool and collected, and I am included in the group.

After another hour along the coast (the Musandam Peninsula) we arrived in Khasab. Instead of putting ourselves on an already scheduled dhow cruise, this group rented its own dhow for the next several hours. On the dhow, we went fishing (little more than dropping calamari-baited hooks into the water off a reel—no rod) and then swimming, when I swam into a jellyfish and got stung many times. We spent the day visiting, talking, swapping stories and taking in the sun.

On our return to shore, Easa (Arabic for “Jesus”) invited the whole lot of us to his house in RAK for dinner. Easa is a fellow classmate at the PI, a senior in petroleum engineering. While Abu Dhabi boasts museums, universities, shiny skyscrapers and endless foreigners, RAK is 50% (+/-10%) Emirati, and the beloved home of a number of PI students. It is like Al Ain in terms of size, but is also graced by a decent ruminant population: cows, bulls and goats meander the streets, and right up to the border.

Dinner was a true cultural experience. We were welcomed by Easa outside, and walked into his majilis (sitting room) together. The equivalent of our living room, this rectangular space had a continuous window seat around its perimeter, thick pillows as backrests, heavy red and gold curtains that match the seating fabric, and a slightly vaulted ceiling with indirect fluorescent lighting. The nine or so of us removed our shoes at the door and sat down. Easa, meanwhile, brought in the coffee, tea and dates.

This dinner was true Emirati/well-bred Gulf hospitality that I had read about so much. Our host made several circles of service around us:
1. Distribute the small coffee cups.
2. Pour everyone a cup full of coffee. Recipients say thank you and drink while the host continues around the group.
3. The host continues around the group, refilling cups until the drinker tips his cup side to side to indicate he is done.
4. Cups are collected and put on the central tray. Host returns with a box of dates and walks around the group offering them. Guests sit on the cushions talking to one another (or in my case, asking Alzaaib many, many questions about procedure and tradition).
5. Tea is distributed in a similar fashion, albeit this time with little teacups and saucers.
6. Visit, BS (play video games in this case, which I don’t think Sheikh Zayed did in his time).
7. A mat is rolled out on the floor and a tray of food arrives—seafood with all the necessary accoutrements. Everyone sits down on the floor, plates get distributed, and we dig in. I asked for a fork, but partly because of the food that was served and partly just the way it’s done, man’s opposable thumb is the fork/spoon/knife of choice.
8. Finish eating. If you can get up, go have a seat again. The host then comes with a tray of perfumes that people spray on themselves. He makes his round.
9. Host arrives again with what looks like a wood chip or a little piece of bark smoking, only this costs a lot more, smells wonderful, and comes from Cambodia. He carries it in front of everyone, who get a few seconds of wafting smoke all over. If you’ve got your ghutra on, waft the smoke into the fabric.
10. Say, “Akram k’Allah.” The gist of this is, “May God be generous to you as you have been to me.”

At this point, we piled into the vehicles and headed back to Abu Dhabi. I was grateful to be included on the outing, and especially grateful for dinner and the no-questions-asked hospitality.

Kazakhstan

If you have the choice to fly on Etihad Airways for a marginally higher price, do it. The planes are new, seatback TVs large, music selection extensive and international, food quite good, and flight attendants very attractive. On my 4-hour flight to Almaty, Mathilde was my French flight attendant: pretty, polite and very pleasant smelling. If foxy flight attendants are not the only reason you fly, the low change fees and high ticket flexibility should be enough to convince you. I digress…

I flew into Almaty, Kazakhstan, where I met my friend and Mines alum, Khadisha. We were in several classes together before her graduation, and somehow the idea cropped up to visit Kazakhstan during vacation while I was in Abu Dhabi. Our tour of Kazakhstan included visits to Kulsay lake, Charyn Canyon, Almaty, Turkestan and the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, Shymkent, Aksu Zhabagly, lots of tea, and even more bread. I’ll spare you the minutiae, and make some general observations instead.

Kazakhstan was a member of the USSR and became independent in late 1991. It is the ninth-largest country by land area, has a population density slightly more than Canada, and has enormous natural wealth, including oil. It is a land-locked country: Water that falls in its borders stays in its borders. No downstream consumers. It is the breadbasket of Eurasia, a producer of high-quality wheat. As a former Soviet country, there is a culture of education instilled in most of the citizens.

Almaty and Shymkent are great cities. I preferred the smaller size of Shymkent, but Almaty is a modern, vibrant city. There are big shopping malls; lots of citizens have excess money to spend on consumer goods, as well as the occasional Lexus or Mercedes that would drive by. New, trendy coffee establishments are popping up, and a very new and very shiny metro system connects key parts of the city. The tree-lined streets, mountain views, and free interaction of men and women, rich and poor, Kazakhs and Russians, were all refreshing to see after several months in the UAE.

Let me break some of the edges on this diamond that I have made Kazakhstan. It’s still some sort of gem, but not in the pure carbon realm just yet.

Thankfully, my trip included a decent amount of travel outside of the cities. All the destinations I mentioned earlier are great visits. The Mausoleum in Turkestan presented a mix of history, architecture, and moderately developed tourist facilities, and was easily accessible by train. Aksu Zhabagly had tremendous natural beauty, and a trip there means a nice tour of the countryside as well.

To leave city limits in one’s rear-view mirror is to go back in time 20–40 years. Within the city, there are some signs of an active flux capacitor. The queue at a traffic light might include a new silver Lexus, BMW, maybe a Toyota of some sort, and most definitely a late-’80s E-Class Mercedes. On the street corner, women wearing trendy leather boots with well made-up faces wait while texting on their Blackberries and iPhones. The light turns green, people walk, cars move and an old Soviet-era public bus with a hand-painted destination sign and a diesel that burns more oil than fuel lurches forward. Behind it could be a Lada, or perhaps another Soviet jalopy.

Leave city limits, and the vehicle breakdown is as follows: 35% old MB E-Class, 35% Lada, 14% old VWs, Toyotas, Opels, etc., 15% heavy truck traffic (old, oil-burning, but miraculously still running), and 1% new luxury cars (a rarity). I mentioned the breakdown of the automotive fleet; perhaps it would be more relevant to mention the breakdown of the roads. Potholes vary in diameter from 6 to 30 inches and in depth from 3 to 10 inches. The percentage of road surface in the U.S. or UAE that is marred by potholes is in the 0.001% range. In Almaty and Shymkent, the percentage is probably 3%, and in the countryside, I estimate it to be at least 20%. There are no remaining lane markers, so a sinusoidal path is most common for drivers, with some variation for oncoming traffic and particularly deep or extensive potholes.

The villages are different from small-town America. There are no white picket fences, manicured lawns or ranch-style homes with swing sets in the backyard. All houses have several bovines and chickens in the backyard, a pile of hay and some rusty old Soviet-era cars and trucks. Still, every now and then, a shiny, new vehicle rests peacefully in these out-of-place surroundings. There is clearly new wealth coming into this country.

People everywhere were purposeful and proud to be Kazakh. And, rather unusual after the demographic breakdown of the UAE, most people were Kazakh. There were white people like me, but they were Russian. My white teeth and American grin made me stand out. One lady asked if my teeth were fake.

Here’s my view of Kazakhstan in short: a resource-rich country with relatively few fears of attack from outside or within, blessed with tremendous land area and a population that wants to improve the country. Fears of Iran, a trade deficit with China, a stagnant GDP, Islam extremism and resource scarcity are not on the country’s mind. Nowhere to go but up—Alhamdulillah!

France

Copper wire was invented when two engineers were fighting over a penny, and I must have been one of them. The original plan was to go to Georgia (the country), as it was the cheapest European country to visit from Abu Dhabi—the flight and five nights would have cost less than $600 easily. However, following discussions with Khadisha, very limited Kazakh, lots of sign language, many miles in the back seat of a Lada swerving around and sometimes unavoidably going through deep potholes, I said, “Khalas.” I found a last-minute, well-priced fare from Abu Dhabi to Paris. When I landed in Abu Dhabi, I rushed to the Qatar Airways office, canceled my ticket with them, called up the Gulf Air reservations desk, and booked my ticket for a departure the next day. (Note: Canceling a ticket in the U.S. or Europe is usually synonymous with losing the entire fare and paying an exorbitant fee. Not so with Gulf-based carriers: My cancellation, 22 hours before the flight, incurred a $50 fee and ticket refund. Had I cancelled before 24 hrs, it would have been only a ~$30 fee.)

My brief trip included a visit to Strasbourg (on the German border) and a voluntary night in Charles de Gaulle Airport (cheaper than a hostel). The two memories I have of this trip are: 1) no insh’allah; and 2) extreme frugality.

I arrived and headed to Gare de l’Est in Paris to take a train to Strasbourg. The train was scheduled to leave at 12:55. It left at 12:55:00. In Strasbourg, the bus stop had a schedule that said a bus was to arrive at 15:29. It arrived at 15:30. The Alsace history museum was located exactly where the map said, and the entrance fee was precisely what the tourist office said it would be. For my return to Paris, covoiturage was the best option. On the A4 highway, cars signalled when they wished to pass, and returned promptly to the right lane. For the first time since January 26, my arrival date in UAE, there was no use of insh’allah—although a surprising number of non-Arab French had incorporated this word into their vocabulary, as I have done. There was order and sensibility in everything that was wonderful to see. My opinions here are all the more rosy because I enjoy speaking French, the weather was perfect, and there were pretty girls riding bicycles all over Strasbourg.

I withdrew 250 euros when I arrived in Paris and vowed to not spend more. This amount was to include all transport, lodging, food and attractions. Unfortunately, along with the absence of insh’allah was the absence of a third-world subculture that exists in Abu Dhabi. One can easily live on less than $10 a day in Abu Dhabi and still gain weight, excluding lodging but including all food and transport. Not so in France. The one-way bus fare was equal to a full meal (and then some) at the hole-in-the-wall type of Indian or Pakistani restaurant I prefer to frequent. Just as copper wire can be thick or thin, so could I. I walked everywhere, including passing and re-passing the same sandwich stand or boulangerie and simply dreaming about how good the 3 euro basic fare must taste (equivalent to 15 dirhams!).

One night after dinner with a pretty French girl that I met at the university, I decided to skimp and walk back to the far-flung hostel (40 minutes on foot). It began to rain. I continued to walk. While my extremities were chilled, my heart was warmed by the 1.60 euro bus fare I was saving. Other times, I held on dearly to a 1 euro coin in my pocket, warming and polishing it between my thumb and index finger, so I could finally spend it in the gare (train station) in a vending machine to buy a gaufre sucree (waffle). Regrettably, Nutella crepes were too expensive at 3.50 euros, so I did without. My sore back and tired eyes from sleeping in CDG were made whole by the 20 some odd euros I saved by not sleeping in a hostel.

***

Despite the excitement of my adventures, I was very glad to get back to Abu Dhabi. I like a little bit of vacation, but more than a couple of days really leaves me knackered. I walked out of the airport with the confidence of someone who is returning, and not arriving. Until May 25, Umm Al Nar, Abu Dhabi, UAE, is where I call home.

“This is one of the best things I could do with my day,” said freshman Sydney Rogers as she cleaned out kennels at the Foothills Animal Shelter on the first day of spring break (March 12, 2012). “I’ve always enjoyed helping out the community. This is just another way.”

Students did a number of odd jobs at the animal shelter, cleaning, organizing and even chopping ice that formed in one of the dog runs.

Earlier that morning a group of students served food and bussed tables at Same Café in Denver, a restaurant where there are no prices and patrons pay what they can. Later in the week, students volunteered at The Gathering Place, a shelter for women, children and transgender people experiencing poverty and homelessness.

“I’ve got friends in San Diego right now,” says Juan Beltran while hosing the floors at the animal shelter. “I figured I’m here until this afternoon so why not take advantage of this opportunity to give back.”

The staff at Foothills Animal Shelter certainly appreciated the effort.

“We’re so thankful the students from Colorado School of Mines generously donated their time during spring break to help with maintenance and cleaning projects at Foothills Animal Shelter,” says Executive Director Heather Cameron. “They made a huge difference not only by increasing the beauty of our facility, but also by benefiting the many orphaned animals in our care.”

“The 13 Wild Women did not start out with any sort of idea about who would join us for these planned yearly sojourns,” says Kristin Westwater McDonald ’86. Various friends came along during their early years, but it wasn’t long before a core group of the most committed emerged.

2008: Anna Maria, FL

And commitment is the right word: “For better or worse or Wild Woman Weekend” is the mantra the group has jokingly adopted. “I was the first to get married, so we started a tradition of having the husband agree prenuptially that he would never stand in the way of Wild Woman Weekend,” says McDonald.

Jean Rickert Wilson ’86 initiated the first Wild Woman Weekend (aka WWW), based on an idea from her husband, David Wilson ’84. He got together with friends from Mines for a Corundum Man triathlon (“nine on the Mohs scale of hardness,” McDonald points out), in which the events were darts, pool and beer drinking.

“The reason we started in South Fork is a lot of us were geophysicists and that’s where we had our geophysical field camp,” explains Melanie Marquardt Westergaard ’87. “About seven of us drove in Lezah Fellin Saunders’ ’90 enormous 1964 Mercedes Benz.”

She recalls one day in 1999, just prior to her wedding, when she was preparing to go on a winter climb with her now-husband, Edwin Westergaard, outside of Anchorage, where they lived. Ed told her he was going to pick up someone from the airport en route, and when they arrived at the airport, she saw Jane Hallenbeck Paris ’86, who was also living in Anchorage. “I happened to have the very same bag as hers because she got it for me, so I said, there’s Jane with her bag, and there’s Jane with my bag. Turns out I was being kidnapped to go to Wild Woman Weekend,” Westergaard recalls. In her fleece and heavy boots, with a ball and chain around her ankle, she was headed to sunny Sedona, Ariz., for the 13th WWW.

Campus connection

The group has left its mark on the school. All 13 joined the sorority Omega Delta Psi (five were founding members in 1983) and participated in the decision to affiliate with Pi Beta Phi; this new direction led to bringing the Colorado Delta chapter of Pi Phi to campus in 1985. Most of them swam for Coach Bob McCandless (a Mines Hall of Fame Inductee), and many started the first Mines women’s club soccer team, coached by Thomas Wildeman, now professor emeritus of chemistry and geochemistry. “We had to wear the old boys’ soccer uniforms because there was literally not one cent for us to have uniforms,” McDonald laughs.

Sports, sororities and seismic crews helped to bring the WW together. Catherine Reasoner Gardner ’85 met Wilson as a Mobil summer hire “in the wilds of Montana,” Gardner recalls. “We spent that summer working together and running around Flathead Lake—two blonde college co-eds on a seismic crew populated by rough-and-tumble east Texas boys, and Flathead and Blackfoot Indians. Together, as 19-year-old girls from Mines, we laid geophones up and down mountains, thwarted bears and amorous juggies, laid out explosives, drove vibroseis trucks, ‘flew’ helicopters and learned to drink ‘Red Raniers.’”

1992: Taos, NM

The adventures have continued for 25 years, from the close call during the deep-river crossing on horseback in Lake Tahoe, Nev., in 1995 that “almost lost a few people,” according to Westergaard, to the trip to Calistoga, Calif., in 1997 when news made it around the world that Princess Diana had died. They have sea kayaked, mountain biked, rafted, skied, hiked and, most importantly, reconnected in those quiet—or loud—conversations that keep friends close. As the years have passed, “we found it’s not about the activities,” Westergaard says. “It’s become more about having a fun house and spending time together.”

The friends returned to campus for their 25th anniversary last year, and in addition to taking in some homecoming activities, the group went on a Mines-style scavenger hunt, created by the women who live in the Denver area. “We took away their phones and made them do things like identify the chemical formula of apatite, determine the thickness of the Denver formation, and find out when Cecil and Ida Green passed away,” McDonald says. Westergaard chimes in, “Then they went to some of the fraternities and had to get fraternity guys to give them a piece of their homework.”

How did these women manage to remain so intimately connected for a quarter century? McDonald knows. “As you are starting your life after school, there are so many demands on your time and money, that if you don’t prioritize these friendships, they could easily wane. I am very grateful that we got the group going early, and now it really has a life of its own. There is no way anyone is going to stop now.”

2011: Golden, CO

1. Michele Vivona ’86 (mathematics); senior VP, LexisNexis Global Digital Strategy; lives in Burien, Wash. Post-Mines highlights: married to Keith Heffernan; lived in Menlo Park with Karla and Scott; traveled; has been adopted by some great dogs.

2. Karla Fischer Dailey ’88 (chemical engineering and petroleum refining); senior resource planner, City of Palo Alto Utilities; lives in Menlo Park, Calif. Post-Mines highlights: married to Scott Dailey ’85 and has two children; world travels.

3. Lezah Fellin Saunders ’90 (mechanical engineering); DIY contractor and volunteer: president of the board for Ouray Chamber, Parks & Rec Committee; Ouray School Accountability Member; running for School Board; Board Member for Ouray County Fairgrounds; lives in Ouray, Colo. Post-Mines highlights: hazardous waste with Westinghouse and Laidlaw; pharmaceutical manufacturing and sales; ethanol plant logistics manager with Pinal Energy; married to Tim Saunders and has four children

4. Jody Kamrath ’88 (petroleum engineering); BP facilities engineer; lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Post-Mines highlights: has worked in the oil industry for 23 years with Mobil, Area Energy and BP; ran 12 marathons (including Boston on her 40th birthday); finished two Ironman triathlons.

5. Melanie Marquardt Westergaard ’87 (geophysics and geological engineering); geoscience advisor, Encana Oil & Gas (USA); lives in Golden, Colo. Post-Mines highlights: lived and traveled abroad with husband Ed Westergaard; discovered oil and gas; experienced amazing adventures flying her own plane over Alaska.

6. Jean Rickert Wilson* ’86 (geophysics); hiker, skier, golfer, mountain biker, stay-at-home-mom to three kids; lives in Evergreen, Colo. Post-Mines highlights: married to David Wilson ’84; worked 15 years for Amoco in New Orleans and Houston; enjoys vacation homes in Winter Park, Grand Lake and Hawaii.

7. Betsy Ryan LeaRussa ’89 (civil and mechanical engineering); project controls lead, ConocoPhillips Transportation Projects; lives in Houston, Texas. Post-Mines highlights: worked 22 years with Conoco (later ConocoPhillips); engineering and business jobs in refining, marketing, commercial development and transportation; married to John LeaRussa and has two children.

8. Kirsten Derr ’86, MS ’89 (geophysics); environmental analyst, Encana Oil & Gas (USA); lives in Denver, Colo. Post-Mines highlights: traveled to 22 countries seeing the countryside mostly via hiking, biking and kayaking; still swims and sometimes competes.

9. Jane Hallenbeck Paris* ’86 (geophysics); senior hydrogeologist, Oasis Environmental; lives in Golden. Post-Mines highlights: married to Chet Paris and has two daughters; lived in Alaska from 1989 to 2004: one of seven founders of Oasis Environmental (based in Anchorage).

10. Catherine Reasoner Gardner ’85 (geophysics); co-owner of Gardner Oil & Gas; lives in Houston. Post-Mines highlights: married to a Mines physics major, Eric Gardner ’85; drilled for the black stuff on three continents.

11. Kristin Zembeck-England* ’85 (geophysics); geophysics manager for Southwestern Energy; lives in Houston. Post-Mines highlights: married to Kent England and has two daughters; has worked in the oil and gas industry for 26 years.

12. Kristin Westwater McDonald* ’86 (geophysics); president and founder, T2 Technologies; lives in Littleton, Colo. Post-Mines highlights: married to Bill McDonald and has two sons; traveled to all 50 states with the boys.

13. Julye Nugent* ’86 (geophysics); VP geoscience, BHP Billiton Petroleum; lives in Houston. Post-Mines highlights: met Ted and relearned how to sail, raced catamarans, and sailed our trimaran to the Bahamas three times; as a geophysicist, had the opportunity to drill some of BHPB’s biggest discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico.

*Founding member of Omega Delta Psi

To me, listening to Spear is a little like taking a ride on Ms. Frizzle’s Magic School Bus. A microbiologist, he describes microscopes as inverted telescopes—windows onto the cosmos of microscopic organisms that make up the greater part of life on earth. Careening through the human body, he challenges basic ideas of self. “I used to think of ‘me’ as me,” he says, “but now I think of ‘me’ as a community. I’m a big, complex ecosystem.” Elaborating, he explains that many of the microbes that live on and in each one of us (which far outnumber our own cells) aren’t just along for the ride. They are vital to health. “Without them,” he says, “I wouldn’t be alive.”

Speaking along similar lines, but shifting to a very different scale, Spear says that many scientists choose to think of the Earth as divided into separate spheres—the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere—but he doesn’t. He thinks of it as one thing. “To me, the entire globe is an organism,” he says. It’s not a new idea, but coming from a practical environmental engineer and scientist like Spear, it’s particularly compelling, which is why it came to mind during discussions about the cover.

If the cover design caught your attention, check out our feature, which explores the idea that organisms capable of turning a lump of hot, inanimate rock into the vibrant planet we inhabit today probably have more to offer, and not just in the area of environmental engineering. It’s an interesting field, and a story we’ll keep our eye on for future issues.

Beyond the cover story, there’s lots more for you to dig into in this issue: vignettes from the Peace Corps, innovations in hydraulic fracturing technology, advice on leadership from Newmont Mining’s CEO (including his predictions for the price of gold), tales of Wild Women, bridge-building in the developing world, and plenty of sporting achievements from the fall season.

I wish we could report more about winter sports, in particular men’s basketball. However, as I write this, the #1 ranked Orediggers (29-2 for the season) are preparing for the Central Region Championship game tonight, so it all still hangs in the balance. But no matter the outcome, it’ll make a great story for the next issue.

Nick Sutcliffe
Editor and Director of Communications
Colorado School of Mines Alumni Association

P.S. One gem not to be missed is “The Gift of El Tio” by geologist Larry Buchanan ’73, PhD ’79 and his wife, Karen Gans. You’ll find a synopsis on this site and plenty of glowing reviews online. Be warned: It’ll keep you up late!

Microbes living on or in the human body are critical for health. Outnumbering our own cells, we literally couldn’t survive without them. The same can be said for microbial life in our natural environment, where clean water and oxygen are just two essentials that come largely courtesy of microorganisms.

Yet, while microbes are such heavy lifters in our natural environment, their role in our built environment is limited.

But that’s changing, and various members of the Colorado School of Mines community are contributing to the transformation as they look beyond wastewater treatment—where they have been used for generations—and explore new ways to put microbes to work on biofuels, plastics, gas stimulation, industrial cleanup and even mining.

“Virtually every surface is covered in microbes, and they are all performing some sort of service that we take for granted,” says John Spear MS ’94, PhD ‘99, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Mines. “My job is to look at life in any environment and ask, ‘Who is there? What are they doing? And how can we use what they are doing to benefit humans?’”

Put a corroded steel pipe or a piece of rotting lumber in front of most people and they see the nuisance impacts of microorganisms; Spear sees a world of opportunity.

Since taking his teaching position at Mines in 2005, Spear has joined a growing number of scientists on campus and beyond who are working to, as he puts it, “connect the dots” between microbiology and mining, metallurgy, and petroleum and chemical engineering. For years a small group of applied scientists have contended that with a better understanding of microbes, we can extract minerals more efficiently, clean up hazardous waste more economically, develop cheaper biofuels and plastics, and much more.

Now, with fuel prices on the rise, a warming planet, and water quality increasingly threatened, more people are listening, funding is more forthcoming and the idea of enlisting microscopic organisms to engineer our world in creative new ways is catching on.

“Microbiology is an extremely exciting field right now,” says Spear. “In the next 10 years, it could enable us to solve some really complex problems.”

Matthew Posewitz and collaborators are working to develop more productive strains of algae for biofuel production.

Green crude

As far back as the 1950s, scientists have studied the potential of cultivating algae as a source of oil. Like tiny floating factories, microalgae use sunlight and carbon dioxide to manufacture fats, which they pack away as a food store. Since they generally grow swiftly (some able to double their weight in just a few hours if conditions are right) and many strains can live in brackish water, they could be cultivated in environments where they don’t compete for water or land with food crops. They’re also super-efficient, generating 10 to 30 times more oil per acre than other biofuel oil crops such as soybeans, according to a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratories.

In 1978, the U.S. Department of Energy launched an ambitious Aquatic Species Program at NREL to explore feeding carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants through tanks of algae. With annual funding of $2.75 million, scientists gathered 300 hungry algae strains to study, but when oil prices bottomed out, so did interest in the program, which died in 1996.

Today, algae are making a comeback. “There’s an incredible amount of interest in this right now,” says Matthew Posewitz, an assistant professor of chemistry and geochemistry at Mines, who has been studying algal biofuels for 12 years. “We have made a lot of progress in the last few years.” Posewitz points out that most of the oil we pump out of the ground originated from unicellular microorganisms that geological pressure, heat and time have converted into oil. “Essentially, we are trying to do that in real time,” he explains.

A key challenge with algae, Posewitz points out, is that they naturally prefer to make long-chain fatty acids, but short-chain fatty acids work better at lifting a jet or keeping a school bus running in mid-winter temperatures. It can also be exceedingly costly to squeeze the oil out of plump, well-fed algae. (In 1996, according to NREL, the price of oil hit $20 a barrel, while the price of algal fuel was estimated to be four times that.)

“The big issue has always been that fossil fuel is extremely inexpensive, and it’s hard for biology to compete with that,” Posewitz says, but they are making headway.

With several million dollars in new funding from the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, ConocoPhillips and others, Posewitz and his colleagues have collected more than 150 prolific strains of wild algae in vats that line his lab. Their aim: to develop a strain—either through genetic manipulation or changes in inputs such as food source and sunlight levels—that quickly stores short-chain lipids and liberates them easily.

In fact, he and two scientists in his lab, post-doc Randor Radakovits and graduate student Robert Jinkerson, just published a paper in Nature Communications that lays out a blueprint for a genetically modified alga that splices traits from several other organisms into the species Nannochloropis gaditana, which is naturally a great lipid producer.

“We have a great wild critter and now we are going to make it even better,” says Posewitz, explaining that it not only can thrive in saltwater, but will also produce short-chain fatty acids and isoprenes that are better fuel molecules.

The blueprint is based on their own research and on the work of numerous labs around the world; it’s an uber-alga incorporating qualities cherry-picked from a robust body of knowledge that Posewitz believes is reaching critical mass. “We are at a watershed moment in this field,” he says.

NREL has also revived its algal fuels program and is working with a company called Algenol to expedite commercialization. It could be decades before algal fuels rival fossil fuel in price, Posewitz says, but for those willing to pay a premium for a vehicle that runs on algae-generated biofuel, that option might soon be a lot more available.

Gas farming

Meanwhile, Golden-based Luca Technologies (at which Spear serves as scientific advisor) is working on another new “real time” fuel option—one that encourages native microbes, called methanogens, to multiply and gobble underground coal deposits, converting them to methane for use as natural gas.

“Traditional oil and gas is more a hunter-gatherer approach,” explains Luca CEO Bob Cavnar, who describes his company as farmers. “We are actually growing gas slowly by reactivating and feeding these methanogens.”

Thus far, the company has purchased about 160 underground deposits in Wyoming (mostly uneconomic coal-bed methane wells that were shut down), which they are infusing with nutrients to wake up the naturally occurring coal-eating microbes and encouraging them to multiply and produce gas. However, the approach is so new that they have to clear some regulatory hurdles before they can start harvesting the gas. “We think this is a huge opportunity to get natural gas into the market,” Cavnar says.

Plastic bugs

Chemical engineering professor John Dorgan has a different end product in mind when he sees a teeming vat of bacteria: plastic.

Since 1993, Dorgan has been pioneering the field of bioplastics, which rely on microorganisms to chew up plant sugars, like those in corn, and spit out plastic precursors. “When they are fat and happy, they grow polyester, but when they are lean and stressed, they excrete it and use it as an energy source,” explains Dorgan. Back when he entered the field, few people had heard of bioplastics; today they are widely used in food packaging, plastic utensils and clothing.

Now Dorgan is seeking to improve the manufacturing process by figuring out how to use cellulose from sources like corncobs and stalks to feed bacteria, rather than just relying on edible corn sugars.

“You could redesign our farm harvesting machines and instead of throwing out the non-edible parts of the corn, you could collect them and use them as a valuable source of fermentable sugars for plastic,” he says. “It’s a readily available resource that does not compete with the food supply.”

His research is particularly focused on finding or engineering the appropriate microorganism for the job—one that can chew through intractable cellulose and pack on plastic. Will the day come when our car parts and carpets can be made from bacteria-derived plastic? Absolutely, says Dorgan.

“This field is moving quite rapidly,” he says. “I have no doubt in my mind that within 50 years we will be able to make whatever plastic we want out of renewable resources.”

Microbes to the rescue

Microorganisms are also playing an increasingly important role in cleaning up industrial waste.

“Instead of hogging it out of the ground and hauling it off to a landfill, we can treat contamination in place,” says Scott Noland ’87, who graduated from Mines with a degree in chemical and petroleum engineering. In 2002 Noland launched Remediation Products Inc., a Golden-based company that populates the pores of activated carbon with 25 species of hydrocarbon-hungry microorganisms for injection into subsurface plumes of petroleum or other pollutants.

For decades, environmental engineers have relied on naturally occurring resident bacteria to help with in-situ cleanup. The problem: It’s hard to generate enough bacteria to spread out and make contact with all the contaminant compounds, so it often takes a long time. Noland says his system delivers a huge population of just the right bacteria straight to the food source—the hydrocarbon—making short work of the cleanup. “Our product can clean up sites overnight,” claims Noland, recalling a Kentucky gas station owner who spent $730,000 over eight years on other cleanup measures before hiring RPI. Six months later he received a “no further action needed” declaration from the state, having spent an additional $180,000.

Hydrocarbons aren’t the only problems microorganisms can tackle.

Based in Highlands Ranch, Colo., ARCADIS has stimulated native microorganisms at hundreds of sites across the United States, South America and Europe to clean up contaminants like hexavalent chromium, chlorinated solvents and explosives.

“The field is evolving as we develop approaches that incorporate hydrogeology, geochemistry, microbiology, engineering and other specialties to more effectively treat a broader array of contaminants,” says ARCADIS scientist Richard Murphy MS ’95, PhD ’00, whose degrees are in environmental science and engineering.

Mining with microbes

When it comes to mining, microorganisms have played a critical role for more than a century, since early biohydrometallurgists at the Rio Tinto mines in southwestern Spain first began piling up heaps of low-grade ore and leaving them to biodegrade over years, liberating inherent copper.

In the 1980s Mines graduate James Sharp ’61 took this process a step further, exploring the idea of boosting production of specific bacteria at mining sites to hasten the processing of low-grade ore. The idea grew out of his own frustration with a silver-bearing manganese oxide deposit he owned in the mountains of Colorado. It didn’t make economic or environmental sense to use leaching processes, which rely on cyanide and other chemicals, but he didn’t want to walk away.

“I can vividly remember him coming into the office and throwing around this idea of using bacteria to increase recovery of precious metals,” recalls Karen Oden, who worked with Sharp as a graduate student in Arizona in the 1980s. “It was definitely a new idea at the time.”

Over the course of three years, Sharp and Oden identified Bacillus strains that worked particularly well to break down the manganese lattice and liberate silver. Sharp, who died in 1998, ultimately founded the company MBX Systems, which held six patents and was later sold to other corporations that enhanced the biohydrometallurgical technologies.

Today, mining companies across the globe put armies of microorganisms to work liberating valuable metals from ores. “One-third of the copper we produce comes courtesy of three strains of bacteria,” says Harry “Red” Conger ’77, president of the Americas division of Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, the second largest copper producer in the world.

Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is the largest hot spring in North America. The spectacular colors of yellows, oranges and browns are the product of photosynthetic pigments contained in trillions of organisms that make up microbial mats around the shores of this and many such hot springs. These organisms, evolved to tolerate extreme temperatures, are more hardy than most and may be more suitable for industrial production of fuel, plastics, enzymes and other biologically derived products.

Engineering the future with microbiology

Ultimately, Spear believes microorganisms will play a much larger role in the engineering of our built environment. In his lab right now, he’s working with students on how to remove uranium from contaminated groundwater, turn wastewater into electricity, and prevent microorganisms from degrading underground fuel and sewer pipes. He also continues to look at various ways the extreme biology of microorganisms living in geothermal hot springs can be put to work.

He believes there are plenty more problems that biology can help solve, and he’s always on the lookout for opportunities to bring them to light. “With more connectivity, we can solve bigger, more complex problems,” he says. Often, the answers to those problems may be, literally, right before our eyes.

“Life has been around on this planet for about 4 billion years. That is 4 billion years of evolution to optimize processes,” Spear says. “If nature has already done it, why do we need to re-engineer it? We should look for solutions in nature first and capitalize on her processes.”

Scroll down to see pictures: Click on a thumbnail to view the entire photo, and mouse over it to view the arrows that allow navigation through the pictures.

Marilyn North, internal auditor, Mines
PC service: Micronesia, 1967–1969; taught English to K-8 students.
See Mines’ feature story for more on Marilyn’s experience.

Mark Patton ’70, president, Patton Enterprises
PC service: Amazon, Brazil, 1972–1974; performed marketing research on the export market for tropical fruit products; volunteer coordinator.
Most memorable PC moment: Traveling by river boat up the Amazon to coordinate with other volunteers in our group.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? I manufacture oil field equipment. One of our markets is Latin America. Knowing the culture and languages has been very helpful.

Roger Hutchison PhD ’89, CD ROM, Inc.
PC service: Botswana, 1979–1981; served as water technician supervisor, installing diesel-powered water pumping systems in villages without clean water.
Most memorable PC moment: I wanted to buy my wife a dress and went to a shop with about 30 women making dresses. In the local language, I said Ke batla Motsese (“I want a dress”). Instead, I mispronounced “dress” and asked for a pregnant woman.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? I run a computer company. My experiences in Africa helped shaped a certain humbleness and sensitivity toward people and cultures that were so different from how I was brought up in northern Maine. Spending time with the bushmen of the Kalahari desert was unique. They had no possessions but when they looked at the horizon, they believed that they owned everything their eyes saw.

David Frossard, CCIT, Mines
PC service: Philippines, 1985–1987; established freshwater fisheries.
See Mines’ feature story for more on David’s experience.

Jay Straker, associate professor, Mines
PC service: The Republic of Guinea, 1989–1991; taught English to high school students and adults.
Most memorable PC moment: Just learning to feel at home in Guinea, developing strong friendships with people in the forest town of N’Zerekore.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? I teach in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at Mines. Guinean history became the focus of my graduate school research. I wrote my dissertation on changing experiences and representations of young people in that country, and have published a book titled “Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution” (Indiana University Press, 2009).

K. Godel Gengenbach, director, International Programs, Mines
PC service: Krakow, Poland, 1995–1998; developed a magazine for allied health care professionals with current articles from worldwide medical journals; taught at the University of Economics, focusing on cultural transitions in a society shifting from a demand to a market economy.
Most memorable PC moment: Arriving in the glorious city of Krakow, and meeting my counterpart, Dr. Janusz Bromboszcz, a warm, generous, man with a vision for improving the skills of health care professionals.

John Simpson ’99, civil engineer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
PC service: Choluteca, Honduras, 2001–2003; designed and constructed rural water systems.
See Mines’ feature story for more on John’s experience.

Jimmy Trask ’03, mechanical engineer, Burns & McDonnell
PC service: Singida, Tanzania, 2003–2005; taught high school physics, chemistry and math.
Most memorable PC moment: Tons! Kids, music, people, culture, travel. Awesomeness.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? Helped me big time in the long term for keeping perspective on life and how you live it.

David Frossard and Ginny Lee, CCIT, Mines
PC service: Zambia, 2003–2005; established freshwater fisheries.
See Mines’ feature story for more on David and Ginny’s experience.

Jackson Lee MS ’11, graduate student
PC service: The Philippines, 2005–2006; worked on water sanitation.
Most memorable PC moment: I conducted several eco-talks at high schools serving students living on the edge of the primary rain forest. Students were often surprised that the U.S., a country with everything, does not have rain forests with trees the size of houses. Giving students a wider perspective of their environmental treasures prompted me to reconsider returning to teaching as a career.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? The experience taught me that leadership is a public service. An ideal leader works as hard or harder than every member and expects no reward.

Julia Ventker Ouattara ’02, MS ’03
PC service: Mali, 2005–2007; worked on issues related to water sanitation and education.
See Mines’ feature story for more on Julia’s experience.

Gwendolyn Woods ’06, graduate student, University of Arizona, Tucson
PC service: Maewo Island, Vanuatu, 2006–2008; taught teenagers basic business skills and home economics.
Most memorable PC moment: One memorable moment for me was when my three full-time home economics students, the student teacher working with me, and I boarded the ship to take a trip into the capital, Port Vila. We spent months holding fundraisers and selling handmade clothes and crafts to raise money for the journey, and we were finally off to spend a few weeks in Vila. While we were there, we would visit the technical college and the university campus to learn about opportunities for further education, visit local markets to interview the women there and be inspired by some of the latest clothing styles, and learn some new recipes, taking advantage of the variety of produce available there. I was nervous but very excited to be embarking on this trip with those with whom I worked most closely.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? I am currently studying for a PhD in environmental engineering from the University of Arizona. The U of A has the largest Peace Corps Fellows program for Returned Volunteers, so my school choice was certainly affected by Peace Corps. I think serving in Peace Corps also solidified my commitment to learning more about and working in water engineering and seeing how I can apply that to both domestic and international issues. I’m also involved with the Engineers Without Borders chapter here, and I think Peace Corps has shaped to a large extent how I view international development work, especially considerations and attitudes that I was not really aware of before.

Whitney Svoboda, field engineer, Schlumberger
PC service: Sidéradougou, Burkina Faso, 2008–2010; taught math and English to middle school students.
Most memorable PC moment: All of the experiences I had while spending time with my students stand out and remind me of the bond I shared with them. Teaching my students new things and having them understand and apply their new knowledge was more rewarding than any work I’ve ever done. I made relationships with my students and fellow teachers during my two years of service that continue on today. The personal relationships I made with the people in my village are the most memorable thing I experienced during my service.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? I am an engineer in the field right now. Being in the Peace Corps has showed me that I can take on any challenge and I can adapt to any situation I am put into.

Robin Simmons, volunteer, Peace Corps
PC service: Paramaribo, Suriname, 2010–present; water/sanitation advisor for the Pan American Health Organization.
Most memorable PC moment: Living with an Amerindian family in a small community during training and getting to experience life the way they do.
What do you do now, and to what extent has your Peace Corp experience influenced your life since? (If you are currently serving, please reflect on how you anticipate your experience will influence your future.) Still serving. This experience has changed my perspective. Of course this experience has reminded me to consider the global view of every issue. Working with the Pan American Health Organization has been a practical reminder of the interconnectedness of every aspect of people’s lives. On a personal level, little things don’t bother me as much anymore and I find I have much more patience. I am much better at waiting for things to happen in their own time without getting frustrated at my own lack of control over situations. That seems to be a big key to successful Peace Corps service.

At 2 a.m. on October 14, 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy stood on the University of Michigan campus and floated an unexpected idea to the 5,000 students gathered before him: Who would be willing to devote two years of their lives to help people in the developing world have a better existence?

Within weeks, the off-the-cuff challenge had spawned a groundswell of support for a peace-promoting volunteer corps, with thousands of students signing a petition saying not only that they liked the idea, but also that they were ready to enlist. Despite skeptics who called it a “juvenile experiment” and thought it would be a bastion for draft dodgers, Kennedy moved swiftly, signing an executive order 39 days after taking office to establish a “Peace Corps to meet urgent needs for skilled manpower” around the world.

More than 50 years and 200,000 volunteers later, Colorado School of Mines alumni and staff remember not so much what they brought to their host countries, but what they took away.

“Every volunteer will tell you they got more than they gave,” says Mines CCIT information and technology professional David Frossard, who completed two Peace Corps assignments and has done more than 60 presentations touting the rewards. “It is a transformative experience that shakes you out of your narrow worldview and makes you a citizen of the world. It completely changed my life.”

Frossard and three others from the Mines community shared their stories on the following pages.

Fish farmer to cultural anthropologist

David Frossard was a reporter at a small Colorado newspaper in the 1980s when memories of the idyllic Peace Corps TV ads he had seen as a kid began to pop into his head, luring him to a different life.

“They showed this guy with a woven basket full of fish walking through narrow rice terraces,” he recalls. He quit his job, sold his belongings, and signed up, offering to “go anywhere and do anything.” As luck would have it, he was assigned to the very location where those ads were shot—helping villagers in the Ifugao Province in the Philippines establish tilapia ponds, improve their water system and build a library.

His experience from 1985 to 1987 opened his eyes not only to the successes of international development work, but also to the unmitigated failures. Determined to better understand what makes the difference, he went to the University of California, Irvine, to earn a PhD in anthropology with a focus on development. That research ultimately led him back to the same village in the Philippines (where he wed Ginny Lee, a Mines computer support specialist, CCIT, in a three-day tribal ceremony complete with pig sacrifices) and on to Mines, where he taught sustainable community development.

Mines students are very good on the technology side, he notes; on the cultural side, sometimes not so much. This makes Peace Corps an ideal fit for Mines grads, he argues. They have valuable skills to offer and it complements their education well.

By 2003, the pull of the Peace Corps set in again for Frossard, and the couple applied. Their assignment: aquaculture in Zambia. “I was vastly less naïve this time around,” Frossard says. “We tried not to do for them, but with them.”

During their two years in northwest Zambia, they lived in a mud hut crafted from abandoned termite mounds and rode their mountain bikes as much as 100 miles round-trip to visit surrounding villages. They worked with farmers in dozens of communities, teaching them how to dig tilapia ponds, incorporate them into their existing farms (using garden waste as fish food and pond muck as vegetable fertilizer), and market them. “It was a relatively new activity that didn’t have gender assigned to it, so the whole family could be a part of it,” says Lee.

It also enabled residents to boost their income exponentially. “When one of our farmers harvested 80 kg of fish from one fish pond, he tripled his annual income in one day,” Frossard says, adding that now this same farmer has nine ponds.

Lasting impact, 50 years later

Mines internal auditor Marilyn North was still in high school when Kennedy unveiled the Peace Corps in a televised speech.

She knew immediately it was what she wanted to do. In June 1967, she graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in history and French. Two months later, at the age of 22, she moved to the tiny island of Moch in Micronesia, a half-mile long, one-quarter-mile wide and a population of 500. After learning the island language of Mortlockese, she settled into a wooden, two-room house on stilts and set out to—as she puts it—“save the world.”

“For the first six months, I thought I knew how everything should be, but then I realized, ‘these people are doing just fine,’” she recalls. “They just wanted to learn English.” During her two years in Micronesia, she taught English to roughly 150 K-8 children, who had rarely encountered a Westerner.

Now 66, her career may have shifted to an entirely different field, but she says her experience of living contentedly with less has served her well, both personally and professionally. “I am always looking at operational efficiencies,” she says.

Her advice for Mines grads considering joining up? Go for it.

“The Mines experience provides students with incredible skills,” North asserts. “Combine that with the Peace Corps experience, and you can really offer the world a wonderful gift.”

A new identity

When Julia Ventker Ouattara ’02, MS ’03 first stepped foot on the West African soil of Mali in 2005, it was the watershed that would lead to a new identity, a husband and a changed view of what “quality of life” means.

“The quality of life in Mali, as defined by aid organizations, is not very high, but early on I sensed a lot more happiness there than I did here,” says Ouattara, who joined the Peace Corps after graduating with a master’s degree in environmental science and engineering from Mines, and working a brief, unfulfilling stint as a consultant.

Once she arrived in the rural village of Missirikoro as a water sanitation volunteer, she spoke only the local language of Bambara, changed her name to Yiritio, or “tree woman” (a name given to her by her host family), and immersed herself in the culture. “I wanted to live like they lived and really try to understand their lives,” she says. “That’s the point of the Peace Corps. It is not to go in and impart all this knowledge that no one can relate to. It is to go in and learn what they need and will actually use after you are gone.”

The region was rife with waterborne diseases and malnutrition, with 42 percent of children dying before the age of 5. The drinking wells had no covers and often became fouled with dirt and even dead animals. Babies survived on only flour and water. Armed with a self-starter mentality she attributes to her Mines education, she got to work helping villagers design and build 15 concrete well aprons and trap doors to keep out pollutants. She also started an infant nutrition program and launched a science-based radio broadcast.

On December 26, 2006, Julia married her neighbor, Yaya Ouattara, before 100 “surprised, but mostly accepting” villagers, including Yaya’s 17 siblings. After staying a third year to teach preschool, she returned to Colorado with her husband, had a son (now 2) and decided to go back to school. Her goal now: to teach high school chemistry.

“The Peace Corps taught me how much I love teaching and how important family is to me,” she says. “I love science, but I can’t go back to those cubicle walls and long hours.”

A two-for-one deal

For John Simpson ’99, whose degree is in civil engineering, the Peace Corps presented an opportunity to simultaneously quench his wanderlust and get a master’s degree. As an early participant in the Peace Corps Master’s International program, he was able to attend Michigan Technological University (the only university to offer the program at the time) for one year of technical training and social anthropology, and then spend two years in Honduras. Today, more than 80 universities participate in the program.

Simpson’s assignment plucked him from his small town of Durango, Colo., and took him to the sweltering metropolis of Choluteca, Honduras, where—unlike typical rural Peace Corps assignments—he had an apartment with air conditioning and cable TV to come home to at night. During the days, he would ride the bus or hitchhike into villages, offering his hydrology expertise to well-intentioned international aid volunteers who lacked an engineering background.

“Sometimes people in other fields who go into the Peace Corps end up doing projects that the public hasn’t really bought into. But if you are an engineer doing a technical project, you can go in and be highly effective, helping with projects that they really want,” he says. “I think they need engineers more than any other profession.” In all, he worked on 30 projects, from minor repairs to entire systems. By far the greatest challenge was transporting construction material into rugged, mountainous building sites with no road access.

On one six-month water system project, village kids loaded buckets with sand and gravel from the river and carried them to the top of a hill to mix concrete for a water tank. Then the whole community pitched in to dig a 2-mile trench and install pipes to feed new taps in 150 homes. “To stand outside with some of the old-timers who had been there 60 years and see how happy they were when they turned on that water—it was really rewarding,” Simpson recalls.

He walked away not only with a degree and a shot at a good government job, but also fluent in Spanish and a new sense of ingenuity. He now works as a civil engineer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“Things are not going to be exactly what you think when you are out in the field, and sometimes you just have to go with the flow and make it work,” he says, crediting the Peace Corps for teaching him how. “You will not get an experience like this immediately out of college anywhere else.”

Mines alumni and staff have joined more than 200,000 other Peace Corps volunteers on assignments over the last 50 years. Read about a few of them.

"You must act to shape the future you want to see and not wait for the future to shape you," O'Brien said in his address at Mines' 2011 Midyear Degree Convocation.

After graduation, Mines had the opportunity to question O’Brien about his thoughts on leadership and other subjects.

Mines: You spoke about leadership in your address. How do you characterize your own leadership?

O’Brien: I’m naturally an introvert, so I’d say my leadership style is more quiet and determined than loud and brash. I tend to set goals and try to meet them. It doesn’t mean I can’t be an extrovert—in this job you pretty much have to learn how to do that, so I’ve taught myself.

Mines: What qualities do you look for in those you appoint to leadership positions?

O’Brien: The first thing is, I try to hire people who are smarter than I am. I want somebody who’s got the natural raw intelligence and inquiring attitude to think about and address things differently than I might. Complementary leadership styles are really important. Also, more and more I look for the willingness and the emotional intelligence to be able to figure out how to collaborate with people. It takes more than just skills, and it takes more than just honesty and integrity, too; it takes a desire to want to work with others. Most importantly, I look for people who are as committed as I am to company first, team second, individual last.

Mines: Was there a time in your life when you began thinking of yourself as a leader?

O’Brien: I don’t tell a lot of people this, but when I was in fifth grade I went to a Catholic school, and there was a nun who was teaching class. One day she pulled me into the cloakroom to lecture me and said, “There are a lot of children in this class who follow you. You’re going to lead them all to hell.” I had a lot of friends, but at the time I didn’t really think of myself as a leader of my friends. What she was pointing out to me is that people listen to me and follow me and I think it’s because she had identified something in me that became very important to me. So I would check myself and say, if other people are following me, is this what I want to do?

Although that wasn’t a leadership moment—I mean, who are you leading in fifth grade?—it was something that stuck with me, and particularly with the last comment, which is, you’re going to go to hell. That’s not where I wanted to go. It got me thinking, and as I went through high school and then into college, I had many occasions to lead. Starting from being on the playground—you know, I’m the team captain and picking sides, and trying to do it responsibly and not make people feel bad—you begin to think, how can I do this better? I examined my life along the way, and when I wasn’t leading I was trying to learn leadership from people who led me.

Mines: Is there one book in particular that has resonated for you?

O’Brien: A book that builds a little bit on what we talked about today is called “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.” It’s about taking on those hard conversations with people, and how you can do it in a respectful and insightful way, gain alignment, and put people in a place where they know what’s expected of them, but they know if they do well, they’ll do well in their careers. We have a lot of those sorts of conversations, and not just with employees. I sit down with politicians regularly and those are sometimes difficult conversations.

Being able to talk with people about tough issues in honest ways—I think that’s a good book for people to think about that, and helps me remember that not telling people the truth because it’s difficult is a losing proposition for you and for them. You owe them the honesty about what they can do and what their career could be, and about what they’re doing right and what they can improve on. If you don’t tell them, how do they know? Particularly with the tools that we have today, people want instant feedback: How am I doing? Feedback in big corporations is still batch processing. A couple of times a year we sit down and tell you about your performance—you should be doing this, or you did that, or great work, you’re on track—and that’s not good enough anymore. So being able to have those conversations routinely is something that I aspire to do.

Mines: Given your insight into macro trends in your industry, what skills do you think are most critical to success in mining for this generation?

O’Brien: I was saying to one of the professors earlier that if I could describe one thing that I would like more of from the School of Mines, it’s to get people to think about not just their thing in their job or their project, but how does their thing fit with the company thing? You’d be surprised how critical that is to people’s thinking.

Mines: A legal career to a mineral extraction career is not the typical path. How did you make that transition?

O’Brien: I graduated from college and I wasn’t certain what I wanted to do, so as I said [in the commencement address], I just went to work. I ended up going to work for an oil and gas company. It was a very small company based in Portland, Ore.—we had maybe 100 employees. The guy who was the CO was a lawyer, SEC background, became CO of the company, and he pulled me aside one day and said, “I think you’ve got a lot of potential. I’d like to have the company pay for you to go to law school.” How do you turn that down? His requirement, though, was that I had to go at night and that I had to continue to work. He got me started. Unfortunately, oil and gas prices went down and the company wasn’t doing that well, and I got snagged by another company in town in the coal business. I told them that I was in this program, and they already had an education program, which is, they were going to pay for 80% of my education. Not only could I, but I was provided the resources.

I say I never practiced a day in my life—that’s not exactly correct; I have practiced for a week. I’ve never been a laywer. That practicing for a week was because I didn’t have another job between another event in my life, but I really went to law school again much like I went to the University of Chicago: I went to learn how to learn. The great thing about law school is they teach you that while there’s black and white, most of the world is gray, requiring interpretation of both sides. The whole ethical component of being a lawyer appealed to me. I always went [to law school] knowing that I was going to be a business person, so I studied those things a lot of people don’t study, like tax law. Lewis & Clark (the law school) is known for its environmental law, so I took a number of environmental programs as well, just to try to broaden my horizon a bit. It was about learning, it was about trying to investigate a little bit more about what my capabilities were. Actually, the law came pretty easy to me. I don’t say that in any way other than it appealed to me—I seemed to have the logic down. It was not that difficult to go four years at night, work full time, and get through and graduate.

Mines: During your speech, you said Newmont is not the Peace Corps, but that you’re very proud of what the company does. What would you particularly point to?

O’Brien: The first thing about the gold business is we produce a product that is not like copper, iron ore, or metallurgical coal. It’s not an integral part of the foundation of society in terms of building cities, making people’s lives better by providing electricity through copper or air conditioning, electric cars. It’s not what we do, although we do produce some copper. We produce gold, which, in a lot of ways, is a luxury item. One of the things I check myself with continually is, we’re producing something that people place value on because of its nature, not because of its utilization.

Every ounce of gold we’ve ever produced in the world is still with us. It’s one of the most recycled products that you can possibly have. We like to tell people that all that gold fills up two Olympic-sized swimming pools. That’s it. It’s a very rare commodity. So as long as the world places value on gold, I think our responsibility is to be the best miner of gold in the world. At some point people may wake up and decide gold has no more inherent value. Warren Buffet would tell you he thinks it’s just a big slag of metal and we shouldn’t be doing all this stuff to generate it. But other people have different opinions.

As long as we’re going to do it, we should do it well. Doing well for us means we’re environmentally responsible, we’re socially responsible, and we commit to those local communities who host us. As I said [in the address], we’re not perfect—we have a situation going on down in Peru right now that is causing a lot of anxiousness in the community, in the government, with our employees, our contractors.

What am I proud of? If you look at our operation in Batu Hijau, Indonesia, it’s a very good example of what this company can do. We started with an exploration program there, and at the time, there were fishermen on the island, rice growers, no industry. There was a high incidence of malaria. Children would die of malaria. About 90 percent of the population had been impacted by malaria at the time. We sent our explorationists into the jungle and built a mine. Connected to that, we have almost eradicated malaria because it’s an island, so it’s a little easier than it is in Africa to commit resources to eradicate malaria. The incidence of malaria is less than half a percent per year now there.

We did that through resources. We used other people’s ideas to help us with that, so it’s not like we created it all ourselves, but we put it to work. We created a school for both Indonesians and expats, and in the last five years we’ve actually merged those two schools. There are probably about 200 families that live on the island, and we have a school for them. When those kids graduate, they go somewhere else. We helped fund that school and get them going.

Most importantly, what we do is we try to offer people who want to improve their lives as a local community. Instead of generations of fishermen—we can allow generations of fishermen to exist, so we try to co-exist—we can also take their sons and daughters and put them to work. When you go to our mine site in Indonesia, you see the diversity that Newmont has, which is one of the other things I’m really proud of—we have Muslim women driving trucks, Muslim men working in the pits. We have people from Peru speaking Spanish while they’re working around the mill or in the operation. Americans, South Africans, Australians, all blending together, much like this school, in ways that are so global that you really do figure out it’s a very small world, and how you act every day shows up in the Internet and the press, positively and negatively.

Mines: You’re in an enviable role, but also a stressful role. How do you manage your own stress? I see you have an Ironman watch. Do you work out regularly?

O’Brien: I try to. You’ll notice that I don’t have any gold adornment. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like it; it’s just not me. I like to cycle quite a bit. I played rugby in college, I played college football, division III—we were awful. Team sports appeal to me a lot. It’s been difficult for me to figure out to keep myself going. When I turned 50, I did my first triathlon, so I’ve done 10-15 triathlons (shorter distance, not the big ironman, even though I have the watch). I’m a lousy swimmer but I seem to be able to make it through it. When I travel I try to run as much as I can, either on a treadmill if I’m someplace that’s not so user-friendly, or I travel to a lot of great cities in the world and so that’s one way I get out to tour them.

Mines: You also mentioned lifelong learning. Do you have something you’ve built into your routine that ensures that you’re learning something?

O’Brien: Couple of things—first, and this is on my mind because I’m in the middle of it right now—I have kept my law license alive, so that means I do continuing legal education every year. I have to register for that and keep my license, and even though I don’t practice, it’s like having a great car—you want to be able to drive it when you want to.

But that’s very small. I’m a pretty voracious reader. I carry around my iPad, Kindle, whatever. I like fiction, but I also realize that a steady diet of fiction only gives you one world to look into. I do have a program where every week I read a professional book to try to improve myself. Most recently, because of my job and because of how corporate governance is changing, I’ve read four or five books on corporate governance. I’ll select a subject and get a bunch of different viewpoints from it, and then try to incorporate it into what I do going forward.

The gold business is very interesting because it’s impacted by economics, so there is a lot of economic press that I get every day that I read and try to absorb. Sometimes I even get it right. A lot of times I get it wrong, but it’s the two-handed economist, so there are always two sides.

When I visit a site, I always do a safety inspection. I try to get out and engage employees, talk with them about safety. We have some hints that we can use as executives for the kind of conversation you want to engage people in. I can learn from those people every day about what it is that we’re doing right, what it is that we could still improve on and what their concerns are, or what we can build on because they really get it. We’re going through a big safety program in the company, so that’s a big part of what I do.

The other thing that I try to do is sit down with our mine planners: Why are you doing it this way? Did you think about doing it differently? I’m not a mine planner, but it’s the fundamental device upon which almost everything else we do in the company is set. I like to say that most of these kids are in their early 30s and they’re really running the company, not me. In every region this year I’ve had probably four or five really great conversations with line engineers. From those conversations, I walk away with an ability to assess somebody who’s probably going to be a rising star in the company. They help me gain an understanding of what challenges we’re facing out in the field.

Lastly, I do read a bit a fiction, because I go on long plane rides around the world.

Mines: Given your insight into macro trends in your industry, what skills do you think are most critical to success in mining for this generation?

O’Brien: GDP in China and Southeast Asia are growing, yet are also being constrained by ownership of the kind of base natural resources. They’ve got a great suite of all of those premium-priced materials, rare earth commodities, but they don’t have a lot of base metal, which is why they’re straining Australia to get all the iron ore that they need and straining Europe, America and South America to get all the met coal that they need. As long as our growth goes on, the skills that come out of this university are going to be required.

The other thing that’s important to remember in that context is, when I look around Newmont and when I talk to other CEOs, we have a lot of very experienced, very capable people in our industry today, but most of them are over 50 or under 30. That 30- to 50-year-old crowd is one we missed in mining. One, the mining boom wasn’t booming. Two, people thought it would be much more interesting to get into finance—Wall Street, Internet companies. We got into 2000 and there was nothing better than being a dotcom company. Sometimes people look at mining as kind of a base place—who wants to go do that? So I look around and ask those people [who chose finance], how’s that going for you today?

Particularly in this environment, mining offers attractive opportunities not only for people who are just graduating, but also for those people who have graduated and gained some skills over the last five to 10 years. I think there will be a lot of retirements, and in this category, we don’t want people to retire. It’s requiring us to figure out new ways of having people work, innovative ways of satisfying their end-of-career desires to spend more time doing what they want to do. We don’t want to end their careers, because they’ve got an intense knowledge, not just of the industry, but of our company.

I’m trying to meet the dual needs of a retirement workforce and skills in a very macroeconomic environment, which is positive. Why do I think that? China, for one. What could go wrong with that is that two-speed economy, where the U.S. and Europe go into a long recession, which would reduce the demands that the United States and Europe have for products coming out of China. I think that’s less of a problem than it used to be, though, because China is generating its own demand. We see it in gold. All the gold produced in China never leaves China. Why is that? One, they’re trying to diversify their dollar holdings, but two, the Chinese have just in the last five years been able to buy gold. They’ve just now been able to put investments in gold, yet it is the largest demand in terms of investment, other than the exchange-traded fund, of gold in the world. They’re generating their own demand now. I’m positive about that over the long run.

It’s great to have an engineering degree—whatever your passion is, whether it’s environmental, structural, civil engineering. I think the critical skills come on top of that. How do you take your knowledge and put it to work? One, you have to evidence that you’ve got the knowledge, and two, that you have the desire to put it to work. Those critical skills come from being able to tell people about what you do and ask people about what they’re doing. You need to do both, because then you can find opportunities for yourself.

I’ve found often in my career that the times I was most effective as a leader was when the people I was working with didn’t report to me. I had no authority, no ability to really tell them to show up and do things, but we aligned ourselves because we found we had a similar passion to try to get something done and were willing to commit the time outside of our own vertical silo of work. A critical skill for people, then, is beyond collaboration. It’s identification of things you’re really interested in, passionate about, and that you’re going to go for, and you’re going to go for in ways that invite people to join you.

Sometimes I see in our company that we have people who are really focused on their project. I was saying something to one of the professors earlier that if I could describe one thing that I would like more of from the School of Mines, it’s to get people to think about not just their thing in their job or their project, but how does their thing fit with the company thing? You’d be surprised how critical that is to people’s thinking.

We found in the last couple employee surveys we’ve done that there are two things that impact employee satisfaction at work. One is, do they have a good supervisor? Supervisors don’t get trained in engineering programs; in fact, sometimes it trains them out of it. So we’ve learned how to get better supervisors. The second most critical thing that we need to do to keep our employees is keep them engaged, and engagement for them is, how does the work that I do connect with the work of the company? Nobody wants to be out on an island unless they know that island is a critical focus for the company, that we’re paying attention to it—and to them, by the way—and that their results matter.

One of the things that we have really tried to do is to let people know what is the work of the company and how they can fit in with that, so that when they come to work, they feel more powerful, like they’re working on the right things. And if they’re not, they have a supervisor they I can talk to, who will tell them, OK, don’t work on that any more, work on this. Those are two really critical skills: how people connect to the company, and how people connect through their supervisor to other people in the company.

The last thing is taking the passion for your own life. Don’t let us run your life. I think a lot of times people become victim of companies, and they look up and say, well, the company’s not taking care of me. But this is the big thing about integrity. If you don’t like working somewhere, only you can change that. You have to recognize that, you have to change it. If you really like working somewhere, tell people that. Tell them why, and tell them what you’re going to do about it.

Mines: I think for a lot of our alumni, the stigma associated with mining is kind of painful. How do you deal with that?

O’Brien: When I tell people what I do, I generally just tell them I’m in the mining business—I don’t tell them what I do in the mining business, I don’t tell them I’m an executive, I just tell them I’m in the mining business because I’m proud of it. The world creates a lot of products, but most of them depend on what we do. It’s dirty work some days, and it’s difficult work. The people in this business oftentimes don’t get recognized for what they do. But what I say in particular about the gold business is, look, I get it, gold is adornment. People see it as precious. The day they don’t, we’ll stop gold mining. It’s a societal thing. It’s a need that people have we’re trying to satisfy.

Importantly, as long as gold is in that quality and has that value and that perception of value, if you’re going to be in the gold mining business at all, you should want us to do it, because our standards are higher, and because we truly value the things that we talk about—safety, environment, doing our business in a sustainable way, which means not just green (because we’re not green—we leave a big, deep hole in the ground, but we can leave that hole in the ground a lot better). Here in Colorado, some of the legacy mines have left scars on the earth, which, beyond scars, produce acid water and a lot of deleterious minerals. We can do a better job than that, and we are. So we try to figure out how to minimize how we impact the earth while satisfying a demand in the marketplace.

I love the enthusiasm that people have about their careers here: PhD candidates, the first graduates out of college—but importantly, all those in-between—150-plus people with advanced degrees. Those people can have an impact particularly on areas of water usage, which I think is going to be the most critical natural resource we have in the world.

How we impact the environment differently and, importantly, how we engage with communities to let them know about it [is critical]. Community response can go from the “Oh no, there’s a mine in my community—not in my backyard” all the way to—and we see this in Peru—“Wow, mining’s going to be here! I can get a job, my kids can have a job, and I can have a fundamental life change.” Too much enthusiasm, where everybody thinks they have a job because they’re close to a mine—not the right answer. No enthusiasm or rejection—not the right answer.

When I talk about collaboration, it starts right there, getting people to visualize what could be the benefits, and then we need to stand up and deliver those benefits—not just mining, but investments in the community, helping so that when we close a mine, we leave behind trained people who can take on other careers, or gold mine somewhere else in the world because they’ve got skills, they’ve been trained in how to manage people. That’s the legacy we hope to leave behind. As long as people want gold, we’re going to do it better than anybody else.

Mines: This is probably a question you get asked five times a day: What’s your prediction for the price of gold this time next year?

O’Brien: It’s all in timing. First, what do I expect? Very volatile. I can give you some price corridors. We’ve seen more volatility in gold prices here this year than we have for quite some time. As you reach a $1900 [per ounce] gold price, there’s a certain downdraft that comes with that, and we’ve seen some of it. The instability of the economic environment is probably the number one impact on what’s going to happen with gold prices. I think it’s unlikely that we’re going to see gold fall below $1500. Just this week we were below $1600—it’s now started to come back up a little bit.

I do believe that over the next several years, we are going to see gold in that $2250-$2500 range because at some point, the U.S. economy is going to pick up in a more persistent and sustainable way. When it does, all of the money that has been put into the system to charge it up is going to lead to inflation. Gold does very well in times of inflation. Even if Europe doesn’t come along now, it will, because the only way Europe is going to stabilize is for them to inject new currency into the European commodity. I know they’re going for austerity, but austerity is too bitter a pill for politicians to swallow for very long.

The only other way the politicians have successfully figured this out is to raise taxes. We can see in our own country a fine example—maybe not so fine example—of how not to get anything done. Let’s talk about increasing taxes in a responsible way. People won’t hear that. We’ve talked about decreasing taxes in a responsible way. I think that’s absurd at the moment, but combining that with a policy of austerity, that’s a good start, but you still have currency embedded in the system. What could derail that $1500-$2250 range, which admittedly is pretty broad, is a recession in Southeast Asia. If China doesn’t do well, gold does lousy in recessions. With current production costs, I think we probably will not see $300 gold again for decades unless we figure out a new, innovative way to produce it. My point estimate for next year is we’re probably going to be looking at $1800 on a sustainable level, which is still, by the way, below the historical high of $800—if you just inflate it to today, you’re about $2300—so we’re still below the historical high at times when we have more historical embedded growth in currency than we’ve ever had in the world.

To have complied manually would require an operator at each well 24 hours/day, seven days/week, which wasn’t practical. My solution was to construct a system to operate all the wells from a central control room, from which the entire field operation could be conducted, both solely by the computer and/or a 24-hour/day operator. Although this solved the problem, the project went unnecessarily and considerably over budget.

While I was there, we ended up with three separate geothermal fields. It was a relatively dry steam operation at 4,000 to 6,000 feet, with the condensate reinjected to replenish the source reservoir. It was a very clean, reasonably sustainable 24-hour/day operation, and quite profitable. At that time, our first plant was the world’s largest—135,000 kilowatt-hours.

I give Mines much of the credit for my very interesting and enjoyable career, which has included domestic exploration geology; running the development program for the largest oil field (Agua Grande) in Brazil; evaluating global projects for Core Lab; managing Aminoil operations in Indonesia, Ecuador, Iran, the Neutral Zone oil fields between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and Geyser Fields; and a seven-year stint with Boone Pickens running their acquisitions and divestitures, marketing, and the legal department. The requirements at Mines to think deeply and work hard made me enjoy going to work, which I gather these days is getting harder all the time.

- Claude B. Jenkins ’52