Concentration is one thing you would expect of any good scientist. But in the case of Dr. Alan Gillespie, it's just the opposite. "I'm here because of my inability to stay focused." Which is Gillespie's way of saying he's bringing a diverse background and an innovative point of view to his new position as interim executive director of DRIšs Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences.

As a geology professor at the University of Washington and director of the geological remote sensing laboratory there, Gillespie's "lack of focus" led him to research in such Ūelds as glacial geology, tectonics, dating, and archaeology. He has been recruited to help organize one of DRI's new divisions, formed by the merging of the Biological Sciences Center and the Quaternary Sciences Center, and to look for ways to increase interdisciplinary research opportunities both inside and outside the Institute.

Gillespie says he has recognized the need to approach research from multiple angles since his first foray into the scientific workplace. Fresh out of college, Gillespie was hired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to work on the early Mariner space probe missions, which obtained some striking images of the surface of Mars. "I understood that first day, literally within the first hour, the need for interdisciplinary research," he points out. "There was this instrumentation built by a bunch of really bright guys who did not have a clue about how to interpret what they were looking at. And the geologists were brilliant but had no clue about how the instrumentation worked. I saw this big disconnect, and it seemed clear to me that you needed to know something about both sides."

And, he says, that hasn't changed. "Every time you start to tackle a scientiŪc problem, there's another piece of the puzzle to learn, and it's in another discipline." Gillespie cites as an example the sediment core taken from Lake Baikal in Siberia, which researchers want to interpret in terms of past climate change. "But if we donšt know the present geology of the watershed," he says, "we canšt understand the core." With expertise in fields ranging from remote sensing to ecological modeling to geomorphology, Gillespie believes the Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences has the right pool of talent to help address multifaceted environmental questions. One of his goals is to make some of those capabilities more visible to other research institutions with similar interests. "We need to go out and wave the flag. We're a new division, and we've got to let people know what we have."

And thatšs what Gillespie plans to focus on for the next year. - Jackie Allen -

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