Robert Edwards

Growing up in the Appalachian foothills of the Garden State, Rob instinctively knew it made a lot more sense to head over the hill into the fields, forests, lakes, and streams behind his house, rather than down the road to the shopping mall in front of it. The natural world piqued the inherent curiosity in all of us and set his life course based on these questions: how does the world work, and how do we as humans fit into it?   As an undergraduate it was a revelation to Rob that one could get paid to hike through clouds of mosquitoes and berry brambles just to collect a water sample, and by the completion of graduate school he had worked on a variety of ecological research projects from the Southern Appalachians to northeastern Quebec.  

After moving to the western U.S., opportunities included studying the impacts of the oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, crawling through mountain streams to count salmon fry, climbing the Continental Divide to elucidate air pollution effects on mountain ecosystems, and more than a decade working with projects to study the ice and ecology of Antarctica. Currently based in Montana, Rob happily combines work and play to explore interesting places wherever they can be found.