Former 2012 OSM/VISTA Cataia Ives Featured In Wellesley Center for the Environment Newsletter

An article featuring a brief life story about our former Office of Surface Mining – Volunteer In Service To America (OSM/VISTA), Cataia Ives, was published in the Wellesley Center for the Environment December 5, 2016 Newsletter. Along with the picture above, below is the whole featured article.

WCE Person of the Week!

Cataia Ives
Class of 2011

“The summer after 2011, I moved with some Wellesley alums to an apartment in Allston,
where I worked at a pizza shop to fund my unpaid internship for an environmental non-profit.
The free pizza was definitely worth it for the opportunity to thoroughly explore the Charles
River by boat for their volunteer water quality monitoring project. Following that adventurous
summer, I moved back home to Florida whilst job searching. I signed up for a year of
community service through Americorps and was stationed in rural Schuylkill County, PA. My
job was to build volunteer capacity to clean up streams polluted by abandoned mine drainage
(AMD) discharge. This was the first real test of everything I’d learned in ES at Wellesley,
because I had to convince local residents, many of whom didn’t know that their water was
polluted, of their interest in supporting our cause. One success was organizing a clean-up event
in which a local 4×4 off-road group came up with their own rig to help us tow more than 50 old
tires from a dump pit to a recycling plant.
My interest in cleaning up water led me to graduate school for environmental sciences.
Since graduating with my Master’s this August, I work at the US Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) in Research Triangle Park, NC, on a bioinformatics web application for scientists to
better understand health outcomes. Although this year is a time of transition at the EPA, I’m
hopeful about protecting the environment and human health.”

This article and picture is from the December 5, 2016 WCE Newsletter sent to Wellesley College Community (students, faculty, staff, alumnae), or friends, parents, or prospective student interested in environmental issues including: breaking news and announcements, detailed schedules of upcoming events both on and off-campus, and comprehensive lists of internship and job opportunities. Copyright © 2016 Wellesley College Environmental Studies Program, All rights reserved.