Our Alumni

A lot rides on Hallie Katz’s job performance.

Katz, ’14, is a contract employee for the U.S. Department of Energy serving as site lead of the Tuba City, Arizona, Disposal Site, which is a uranium mill tailings site located on the Navajo Reservation.

Katz, whose office is in Grand Junction, Colorado, monitors for uranium, nitrates and other contaminants according to a groundwater action plan for the site, working closely with stakeholders including the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribes, who are downstream from the site.

“I always loved math and science. I grew up in the outdoors camping, fishing and hunting. I wanted to give back to the environment and also use my math and science skills,” Katz said. “With climate change, there’s an ever-growing demand for water resource specialists. This program led the way for stable jobs in the government field for me, and it provides job security and interesting positions where I feel like I’m actually contributing to the ever-increasing issues of water.”

Prior to taking her current job, Katz worked for eight years as a hydrologic technician with the U.S. Geological Survey gauging water levels in rivers across Colorado.

“With climate change there’s an ever-growing demand for water resource specialists and this program led the way for stable jobs in the government field for me,” Katz said. “It provides job security and some interesting positions where I feel like I’m actually contributing to the ever-increasing issues with water.”

Adrienne Marshall has a passion for nature and studied biology as an undergraduate at Scripps College in Claremont, California. While earning a master’s degree in energy and resources from University of California, Berkeley, Marshall was exposed to the science of hydrology. She decided to make water her focus and chose to pursue her doctorate at U of I based on the opportunity to work closely with accomplished faculty, the close access to outdoor recreation and the affordable cost of living in the Moscow area.

“I felt that the water resources program gave me an opportunity to be a part of a program where that interdisciplinary collaboration was really encouraged,” Marshall said. “I still enjoy working with social scientists, economists and legal scholars.”

While at U of I, Marshall, ’19, studied the big-picture impacts of climate change on snowpack in the West. She continues that research as a faculty member with the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.

“As we get more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow and warmer temperatures, we get less snow and snow melting earlier, and that translates into earlier spring runoff,” Marshall said, explaining the change in timing affects hydropower production and the ability of reservoir managers to capture water.

Heather Neace, ’23, has served an important role in the effort to reverse decades of declining eastern Snake Plain Aquifer levels, thereby enabling hundreds of irrigators to continue raising crops. Neace completed her master’s thesis at U of I on how installing artificial beaver dams, known as beaver dam analogs, influences water quality. She’s now devoting her skills toward finding solutions to address one of Idaho’s most pressing natural resource challenges.

Neace works as a contract employee with the Idaho Department of Water Resources, aiding in a program that seeks to use surplus surface water to bolster declining groundwater levels, known as managed aquifer recharge. Her job is monitoring water quality at recharge sites to make certain natural filtration prevents pollutants within surface water from leaching into the aquifer.

“The state is using a multifaceted approach for aquifer stabilization including groundwater and surface water user agreements, irrigation infrastructure for recharge sites and recharge basin/injection wells,” Neace said. “We are currently working to expand recharge sites, but yearly recharge highly depends on available water.”

Neace, of Boise, earned a bachelor’s degree in geology with a hydrology emphasis from Boise State University before spending a year working full time as a consultant with a water engineering firm. She also worked as a lab assistant at the Idaho Water Center in Boise before starting graduate school at U of I in 2018.

“I think people who are looking for a really good, tight-knit community, that is something I hadn’t experienced as an undergraduate that U of I offered,” Neace said.

As an environmental consultant, Bronson Pace has helped author a supplemental environmental impact statement with drastic implications for the water supplies of several western states and Mexico.

Pace, ’21, graduated with a doctorate through the water resources law management and policy track at U of I and now works with Environmental Management and Planning Solutions, Inc., in St. George, Utah.

The Bureau of Reclamation contracted with Pace’s company to draft a supplemental environmental impact statement governing contentious Colorado River water releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead from 2023 through 2026. The agency wasn’t due to update its plan for nearly three more years, but the reservoirs reached historically low levels due to a megadrought, placing them at risk of reaching Deadpool conditions — levels so low that water would no longer pass through hydropower turbines and rising water temperatures would affect fish and aquatic wildlife.

Pace wanted to do something meaningful with his career when he enrolled in the U of I water program. Now he’s at the center of one of the most critical water challenges facing the West.

“We’ll analyze the impacts and we’re going to look at different alternatives to prevent the reservoirs from reaching Deadpool conditions,” Pace said. “It’s special to be part of something this significant — something this controversial and important and meaningful.”

Important projects have been the norm for Pace. He has also worked on the environmental impact statement analyzing proposed alternatives to avert an Endangered Species Act listing for greater sage grouse in Idaho, Utah and several other western states.

Pace completed the water resources program concurrently with U of I’s law program, believing it would broaden his horizons and open doors outside of the courtroom. Few other programs offer that combination. In his role as an environmental planner and consultant, he relishes the opportunity to work with people of diverse backgrounds and to put a variety of different skills to use.

“You really have to understand what’s going on with all of these ecological processes. You have to understand policy, you have to understand law, you have to understand how to communicate science within law and within policy and be able to write it all down and explain it all to somebody who may not understand it as well as you,” Pace said.

Optimizing biochar for the removal of phosphorus from wastewater. The biochar is being designed to be reused as a soil amendment after its use in treatment.

• Major professor is Daniel Strawn, Ph.D.
• B.S., Environmental Geology, Colorado State University
• Associate of Science, Front Range Community College
• Hometown is Fort Collins, Colorado