Breadcrumb
Alumni Updates
Brad Ronald Hall
Environmental Resources Engineering, 1981
Brad worked for more than a year with the Humboldt County APCD after graduating in 1981. He was then one of many in a long string of ERE grads who went to Utah State University in 1982. The timing couldn't have been better for a future morphodynamic modeler, as debris flows, avulsing floods on alluvial fans, and an ever-rising Great Salt Lake gave great topics for interesting MS thesis topics. He then started a 13-year Federal hydraulic engineering career with the US Army Corps of Engineers; first with the Seattle District, then with the Math Modeling Branch of the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, MS. Our time in the deep south was broken up with a 1-year research sabbatical at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory (U of Minnesota), researching sedimentation engineering processes. Brad then left Federal service and became a principal hydraulic engineer with the Sacramento office of Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC). He led interesting and challenging projects on tidal marsh and fluvial restoration design, river engineering design, sedimentation engineering expert witness testimony for the California DWR, and morphodynamic modeling of waterways and floodplains. Project locations were mostly in the western USA, but also included the Rio Paraguay, Rio de la Plata, and Rio Madeira in South America; the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh; and the Matanuska River in Alaska. Fun stuff! He's now 95% retired and has emeritus status with NHC and is living with his HSU spouse of 40+ years at the family homestead in Glen Ellen.
Robert A Nisbet
Forestry & Wildland Resources, 1965
Bob Nisbet built on the strong foundation provided in his Forest Management training at HSU to complete an MS in Ecology from San Diego State University in 1969 in Chaparral Ecology and a PhD in Physiological Desert Plant Ecology at Arizona State University in 1972. After many years of research in modeling forest growth under simulated global warming conditions at UC-Santa Barbara (UCSB), he entered the new developing field of Data Mining at AT&T in 1994, focusing on the use of machine learning algorithms to predict customer behavior actions in Telecommunications companies. He retired from Santa Barbara Bank & Trust in 2009 as an Assistant VP of Technical Services, and promptly became bored. He spent the next 10 years teaching Data Science subjects remotely to international students in the UC-Irvine Data Science Certificate Program (a professional certificate comparable to about a half of an MS program). He is retired (finally) in Goleta, CA, near UCSB. He is the coauthor of 3 books in Data Science for Academic Press.
Reginald Jonker
Oceanography, 1980
Reginald Jonker is retired.
Terry Bowyer
Wildlife, 1970
R. Terry Bowyer, B.S. 1970, M.S 1976, is the 2025 recipient of the Aldo Leopold Memorial Award from The Wildlife Society for outstanding contributions to wildlife conservation , the highest honor that the Society bestows.
James David Ackerman
Biological Sciences, 1973, 1976
After graduating with a B.A. (1973) and M.A. (1976) in Biology, James ventured to the Deep South for his Ph.D. at Florida State University in Tallahassee, a cultural challenge without a doubt. With a predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he studied the interactions of orchids and orchid bees in Panama. This was parlayed into a Ph.D. (1981) and a job at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where I have been teaching and studying ever since, making a career primarily of orchid biology and biological invasions. In 2024, the University bestowed upon him the title of Distinguished Professor, a rare honor for which he is grateful to the people of Puerto Rico, and perhaps interrupted the fossilization of an aspiring academic dinosaur.
Paul Sheppard
Forestry & Wildland Resources, 1982
Paul Sheppard ('82 Forestry) representing the Old College Try Barbershop quartet, which formed up at HSU in 1981 and sang on campus for a year or two, would like to share that since graduating from HSU, the quartet has been meeting up every now and then to sing and bird, and reminisce about Humboldt.
They even "met" online in 2020 to sing the Humboldt Alma Mater virtually, the way choirs and ensembles did to wait out the pandemic with music.
They just met up this year in the Mojave Desert, Southern California, and put up a video of their 2025 reunion:
Exactly 10 minutes long.
Joseph Caminiti
Environmental Resources Engineering, 2018
Joseph has been working with CALTRANS District 1 for almost 6 years now, and he highly recommends it for many reasons, such as great benefits, fantastic work-life balance, great staff, multitude of disciplines including planning, safety, hydraulics, electrical, and the list goes on!
Bradley K. Paulson
Oceanography, 1985
After graduation, Brad Paulson joined the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA, as a marine geologist to assist in arctic coastal erosion and diving investigations designed to collect long-term data on ice formation in the Beaufort Sea and to study its effect on sediment transport and shoreline dynamics. In 1988, he was hired by an engineering consulting firm (CH2M HILL) as an oceanographer to support various environmental studies and engineering design projects located around the world. In 1993, he earned an M.S. in Geological Oceanography from the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. He is currently a senior technologist and oceanographer with Jacobs Engineering in the Seattle area. He has a diverse background in coastal and estuarine oceanography, water and sediment quality, contaminant transport, outfall mixing zone/dilution analysis, and engineering design. He specializes in wastewater discharge analyses that include integration of field and modeling programs, outfall design, and NPDES compliance and permitting issues. He also serves as an AAUS-certified scientific diver on the Jacobs dive team.
Michael Edward Kauffmann
Biological Sciences, 2012
Michael just published his sixth book on California Trees. Read more about "Discover California’s Native Trees: A Guide to the Arboreal Wonders of the Golden State."
Aidan Branney
Wildlife, 2018
After earning his bachelor's degree in Wildlife in 2018 and completing a master's in Range and Wildlife Management at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University Kingsville in 2022, he is now pursuing his PhD at the University of Georgia-Athens. His dissertation research will revolve around lion spatial ecology and predator-prey dynamics in Etosha National Park, Namibia. This summer, he will begin data collection and monitor lions via GPS collars and trail cameras in and outside the National Park. The wildlife program at Humboldt set him up in the best possible way to pursue wildlife research across species and the world.