September 25, 2008
“An incredible thing”: MacArthur-winning researcher surprised, delighted by award
The MacArthur Foundation works so quietly on its genius grants, UW scientist David Montgomery didn’t even know he’d been nominated until he learned of his selection last week.
“You just don’t put it together right away unless you’re sitting there waiting for the call. But I had no idea,” Montgomery said during an extremely busy Tuesday afternoon.
Animated and friendly, he was clearly a man having one of the best days of his life — even though it had been “a nonstop media fest.” And as a reminder that academic duties are not trumped even by major awards, he had spent much of Tuesday in two departmental Ph.D. prelim exams.
Montgomery was in Baltimore Tuesday night last week preparing to give a keynote address at a convention the next day when he got the call. It was also the official first day of his sabbatical. “It’s absolutely the best way to start a sabbatical,” he said.
He had just hung up from talking with a friend when the phone rang. The voice stated, “I’m from the MacArthur Foundation. Heard of us?” The caller assured Montgomery that it wasn’t a joke and even offered a number for him to call back to verify the news. Montgomery said, “The first I heard of it was, ‘This is a done deal. Will you accept? And I was like, ‘Yeah!'”
A UW professor of Earth and space sciences noted for his study of how soil and rivers shape civilizations, Montgomery was named one of 25 fellows for 2008 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The awards each carry an unrestricted grant of $500,000 — $100,000 a year, paid out quarterly, for five years.
Montgomery was honored for contributions to understanding forces that shape our world. His research has ranged from looking at why the Skokomish River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is so prone to flooding to the complex forces at work along the Tsangpo River in Tibet, the highest river in the world. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A statement from the MacArthur Foundation praised his work, saying, “With a scientist’s rigor, a historian’s curiosity and an environmentalist’s passion, Montgomery is leading investigations into the ecological consequences of a wide range of Earth surface processes.”
A dedicated researcher, Montgomery also is a lifelong musician, and plays guitar in a local folk-rock band named, perhaps appropriately, Big Dirt.
“It’s an incredible thing for complete strangers to give you a half-million dollars to do with what you think is important,” he said. “They went through the list of why they give it to the people they give it to — to foster creative endeavors — so I plan to use the money to support the creative things I do, which are research, writing and playing music.”
The money, he said, will help greatly with the writing of his next book. He has written two well -received books that explore different aspects of how rivers and soil have influenced history and human civilization. King of Fish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon was published in 2003 and Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations in 2007.
In King of Fish he describes how vast salmon runs were depleted in England in the early 1700s and again a century later in northeast North America, and argues that history could be repeating itself today in northwest North America. In Dirt he traces the downfall of a number of civilizations to depletion of their soil, and he warns that humans could be on the verge of exhausting Earth’s supply of arable soil unless farming practices are changed.
Montgomery said his next book, to be called Phantom Deluge, will be “a history of geological and theological thought about great floods,” and how the two “cross-pollinated each other, and not just in the classic story of war between science and religion.”
The money, he said, “Could fundamentally change the way I do things and open all kinds of doors in the next five years.” But he added, “I’ll also probably buy a guitar or two.”
Montgomery’s life has been hectic since the news was publicly announced Tuesday, with media calls coming one after the other. He was to meet another television crew minutes later for yet another interview. He said he’d already spoken with the three television network affiliates in Seattle, as well as the Associated Press, The Seattle Times and P-I, Science magazine and several radio shows.
“All the media people have been very nice,” he said. “The story for a lot of them is, ‘What do you do?’ ‘What’s the hell’s a geomorphologist?’ And ‘What will you do with the money?'”
He said the caller who told him of the award said it’s the only direct contact he’ll ever have with the MacArthur Foundation. “They tell you there are no strings attached, and they mean it.”
There was one other condition, Montgomery said: “The one thing they ask is that I tell only one person — ‘Tell your spouse and you don’t tell anyone else for a week.” That was tough, he said. “I almost let the cat out of the bag four or five times! How could I not tell my brother and my parents? I called them five minutes after the embargo.”
Since their inception in 1981, MacArthur fellowships — often popularly called “genius grants” — have been awarded to 781 people in the United States. The awards are intended to allow fellows to accelerate current activities or take their work in new directions.
Montgomery received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1984 and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, the same year he joined the UW faculty.
News of his award brought “a thousand or so” congratulatory and other e-mails, many of which he has yet to sift through. “I got the classic e-mail from someone I haven’t seen since high school,” Montgomery said with a great laugh. “Basically, he said he should have copied his homework from me instead of the guy he did it from.”
Montgomery knows the whirlwind will calm down soon, but he’s enjoying the ride. “Yesterday was crazy and today was crazy, and I think the way these things work is that the media frenzy will be over in a day or two.”
Oh, and he invites one and all to help him celebrate when Big Dirt plays a happy hour show at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, at High Dive, a music venue at 513 N. 36th St. in Seattle.
Still getting used to the idea of a half-million dollars coming his way over the next five years, Montgomery said, “It’s really kind of like winning the lottery.”
