NEWS FROM THE STROUD WATER RESEARCH CENTER
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Summer 1999
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Message from the Director
The Stroud Center has become an independent organization with its own financial structure, administration, Board of Directors and even a new logo. Although the Center has taken on a new identity, it remains focused on: (i) pursuing new knowledge about streams, rivers, and their watersheds through basic research; (ii) providing solutions for water resource problems worldwide; and (iii) promoting public understanding of the ecosystem through education programs, conservation leadership, and professional service. To me, the Stroud Water Research Center has been and will continue to be a very special place.
What do I mean when I say that the Stroud Center is special? For me, defining the essence of this place is like trying to describe what makes a fine work of art. A rare combination of things -- some tangible and some intangible -- come together to make a special piece. At the Center, too, simultaneous things occur to make this a special place. But what are these things?
Visitors to the Center first see the tangible things. Most of these are straightforward, and many of them could, and probably do, occur individually elsewhere. But at Stroud, they occur together and often in unusual combinations. For example, our wheel-chair-accessible front walkway is fashioned as a meandering stream and lined with sculptures of large bronze fish. Our state-of-the-art research building incorporates the wall of an 18th-century barn. In laboratories, ultra-modern instrumentation stands beside original paintings ranging from neo-romantic to abstract art. Part of the headwaters of the White Clay Creek, the protected experimental watershed and stream where we perform our long-term research, flows freely through channels inside the research building.
We appreciate all these things, but it is the intangible that is the heart and soul of the institution. Such things as: our determination to pursue the very best science, to communicate our findings to both professional colleagues and the general public, and to create the finest education programs available on the ecology of streams, rivers and their watersheds; the expertise and dedication of our scientific and educational staff and the excitement and enthusiasm they bring to each new project; the team approach, which is based on the conviction that collaboration produces the best science over the long-term.
We believe that there is an art to scientific investigation. Being surrounded by art challenges the scientists with other interpretations of the world around us.
Just as a great painting has an intagible stoke of genius, a breakthrough scientific experiment leads us to never see the world the same again.
The Stroud Center has been and will continue to be a special place where science is art and art facilitates the pursuit of great science.
Bern Sweeney, Director
