Kristine Moody brings her expertise in molecular ecology and her passion for environmental sustainability to her work using new assessment tools to monitor wildlife near hydropower facilities.
Tell us about your research and its impacts on hydropower.
My research in the hydropower space focuses on understanding the impacts of hydropower on the environment and the organisms that live there. In particular, I use noninvasive molecular tools. I look at environmental DNA, which is genetic information that organisms shed into the water through excreting waste, reproduction, or decay. I sequence this DNA from water samples, and then I can tell you all the organisms that live there, from microbes up to fish, terrestrial mammals, aquatic mammals, and how many are there. This is really a valuable tool that we can add to our toolkit to understand biodiversity in hydropower impacted systems, the effects we're having on organisms, and how we can balance energy needs with biodiversity conservation.
In hydropower, there are regulatory requirements. Conventional methods of surveying biodiversity are expensive, and they're time consuming. Using environmental DNA saves us a lot of time, and it can lower costs.
What keeps you motivated?
What keeps me motivated in research in general is curiosity and creativity. As a scientist, we're always thinking about bizarre things and new ways to answer them. And being at a national lab really provides opportunities to explore those curiosities and come up with innovative methods to answer these hard questions.
What does it mean to you to be a female in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)?
First, for me, it most importantly means being a role model, not just for the future budding scientists of the world, but also for my colleagues. We've come a long way with promoting women in STEM, but we've got a lot more work to do by being an example of how we can promote ourselves and view our self-worth. And making sure that people are seeing us and seeing our science for what it is, is really important.
What would you tell a female student considering a career in water power research and development?
The world of water power research and development is really diverse. There's a lot of different areas you can go into whether it's engineering, biology, or environmental justice. Figure out what you like, what your interests are, and then figure out how that can fit into the hydropower world. Just networking with the right people and talking about ideas and figuring out how they can fit in to hydropower research is important, and why you bring that expertise of what you're interested in. That's my advice for getting into this field.
This research is supported by the Water Power Technologies Office in the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.