Local woman one of 80 worldwide chosen for elite expedition to Antarctica
It’s easy to take water for granted, it is all around us after all, but it holds a special attraction for Sylvia Struck.
“Water is such a fascinating substance,” she said. “There is no alternative for water. It’s imbued with cultural significance, economic significance, we depend on it for life.
“And, unfortunately, conflicts are also happening around water resources, because it is necessary for life.”
Struck is the manager of drinking water safety with the B.C. First Nations Health Authority.
She is also one of 80 women selected worldwide to join the planet’s largest all-female expedition to Antarctica next February, a project called Homeward Bound.
It’s a 10-year program started last year by Fabian Dattner, an Australian entrepreneur, to bring leading women together to network and share ideas.
The goal is to have brought together 1,000 women from what’s known as STEMM — science, technology, engineering, medicine and mathematics — at the end of the decade-long project.
(Homeward Bound slogan: Mother Nature needs her daughters.)
A Homeward Bound spokeswoman said Struck was chosen for her energy and enthusiasm for the environment.
“And her philosophy that health is a basic human right permeates her work.”
According to the group’s website, there were enough applicants to fill multiple ships sailing from the southern tip of Argentina to the ice continent, so Struck feels pretty good she’s one of the few accepted this year.
“Being a woman and being STEMM, I was drawn to Homeward Bound,” she said in her downtown Vancouver office.
“I like the idea of raising the visibility and capacity of women in leadership.
“I think that’s a really important goal. As soon as I heard about Homeward Bound it just ticked so many boxes I’m interested in,” Struck said.
She was one of only two chosen from Canada.
Just that there needs to be such a program to raise the visibility of female leadership is a head-scratcher, given it’s 2017 and not 1917.
Struck’s father came from Germany in the 1950s to help NASA build rockets, so science and education were always important as she grew up in Huntsville, Ala.
She earned her Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, with high honours, at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, then got Masters’ degrees at UBC and Stanford before earning a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a school ranked No. 3 worldwide for social sciences and public health by US News Best Global Universities.
But as Struck ascended the spiral staircase of academia, she noticed something.
“The percentage of female classmates was getting smaller,” said Struck, who is also an adjunct professor at UBC’s school of population and public health.
“And then going into the workforce, there was another decrease in the number of women who actually pursued those disciplines as a career.
“Women were rarely represented at the top ranks.”
Struck has lived in Europe (and speaks three European languages) and Indonesia. She did her doctoral thesis in rural Uganda and once spent a year backpacking around the world.
Antarctica, you could say, ties things together.
“When I was an early engineer, I actually thought about going to Antarctica to do research on ice cores, looking at CO2 levels in ice cores, to measure climate fluctuation over hundreds of thousands of year,” she said.
“I kind of shelved that idea, so it’s interesting that somehow it came back full circle.”