UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This summer, a group of Penn State professor Susan Brantley’s former graduate students organized a special session at the prestigious Goldschmidt Conference in Chicago to honor their mentor.
Students, collaborators and colleagues shared cutting-edge research in areas that Brantley spent her career advancing like water-rock interactions and critical zone science.
But her students distilled Brantley’s impact to a simpler message.
Plastered on conference name tags, shirts and water bottles were stickers that read: Be brave enough to be bad at something new — Be like Sue.
“That’s very congruent with the kinds of things I say, and it really touched me a lot that it is what they remember me for,” said Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences.
Brantley will retire in December after nearly 40 years at Penn State, and during her career she was never afraid to try something new.
Ever experimenting in research and leadership roles alike, Brantley rose to the top of the field of geochemistry while blazing a trail for women in a traditionally male-dominated discipline. And she helped shape Penn State for those who followed through leadership roles, like serving as the longtime director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.
“I have a lot of gratitude,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it without a really good place like Penn State. Our college in particular has been a really good place for me. And you know, I changed our college, but our college changed me.”
A fighter
As a young graduate student at Princeton who had grown fond of her urban surroundings, Brantley wasn’t sure about the idea of moving to central Pennsylvania.
Her adviser, David Crerar, received his doctorate from Penn State, and that connection combined with the University’s lofty reputation in the geosciences were enough to convince her to come for an interview when an assistant professor position opened.
At the time, it was a daunting prospect. Brantley would be the only female faculty member in her department. A senior scientist at another university warned her, “You’ll never make it — they are going to eat you alive.”
“I’ve always kind of been a fighter,” Brantley said. “In college, someone told me that crew was the hardest sport. So, I tried it. If you are going to tell me I can’t do something, I’m going to go do it.”
So, Brantley took the job. And she never left. She said at Penn State she found an environment that allowed her to succeed while becoming a better person, scientist and, most importantly, mentor.
Brantley advised nearly 40 doctoral candidates at Penn State, and more than two-third of them were women.
“When I went to grad school, we had a small incoming class and about half were women,” she said. “But the number of women who actually went all the way through and got their Ph.D. was much smaller. So I am proud of helping people come into the field and then stick in the field.”
Alexis Navarre-Sitchler, one of those graduate students, is now a professor and department head at the Colorado School of Mines and co-chaired the poster session in honor of Brantley.
Navarre-Sitchler said it wasn’t what Brantley did as a mentor, but what she didn’t do. She never let her students believe something was too hard to figure out.
“Sue taught me to be brave when working in the unknowns of science and that serves as a guidepost for me still today,” Navarre-Sitchler said. “She showed us that it is OK to step into a room, speak loudly and say, ‘This is important. I don’t know the answer, but I have ideas for how we should do it and who can help us.’ And then she got to work.”
A laboratory in the critical zone
Brantley earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Princeton, but after taking a geology course she discovered a passion in addressing questions about rock weathering and soil formation. She continued at Princeton earning her master’s and doctorate in geological and geophysical sciences.
She found that measuring how quickly geochemical reactions happen in the lab did not necessarily translate to how quickly they happen in the field.
“Because I was a chemist, the lab part of it made sense to me, but it was a geoscience program and I really wanted to be able to say, ‘If I measure this in the lab it means it’s going to happen this fast in the field,’ Brantley said. “And we could never make that extrapolation. Really, almost my whole career I’ve been looking at that question — how can you measure the rate of something in the lab and then predict it in a field setting?”
Over time, Brantley realized that in the lab you have one mineral reacting with one solution in a flask, but in the field myriad processes all around are engaging with the reaction.
“It became really clear that it was impossible in some ways to make the extrapolation,” she said. “You couldn’t do it in a flask. You had to look at the whole thing.”
That idea was captured by the emerging field of critical zone science, a cross-disciplinary effort to study the thin outer layer of Earth where rock, soil, water, air and living organisms interact and shape the planet’s surface.
Brantley became a driving force in developing critical zone research in the United States. The effort led to a $40 million U.S. National Science Foundation-funded program that established Critical Zone Observatories across the world — including at Penn State.
Critical zone science, for example, has helped scientists better understand the complex interactions that influence weathering, the breakdown of rocks at Earth’s surface that acts as a thermostat that helps control the planet’s temperature.
“That was probably the most fun part of my career,” Brantley said. “It was so interactive. It brought so many students in, and you could feel their excitement. Scientists all around the world were excited. It was a wonderful time.”
A wildcatter
In 2003, Brantley was appointed as director of the Earth Systems Science Center, now named the college’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI), a position formerly held by Eric Barron, Penn State president emeritus and dean emeritus of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
Brantley set out to help researchers address hard and important societal questions related to the sustainability of life on Earth and how to communicate with the public about these issues.
“I always wanted to make scientists’ lives easier to do great science,” Brantley said. “And that’s how I perceived my own job as an administrator. If someone had a problem and they couldn’t get a really cool piece of science done, I viewed my role as finding out what I could do to help them get it done.”
Under Brantley, EESI assembled researchers to address important issues like the environmental and social impacts of the Marcellus Shale gas boom that began in Pennsylvania around 2007.
She began to see her job as director of a small institute within the University through a geology analogy — the wildcatters in the oil and gas industry who seek out high-risk, high-reward drilling opportunities.
“A wildcatter may not have a lot of money compared to the big players, and they are just trying new things,” Brantley said. “They are risk takers, and you know, they might make mistakes. But they also might find a new reservoir. And I thought of EESI as being like that.”
What’s next
Brantley plans to continue conducting research after her retirement. What she’ll miss, though, is the ability of an administrator to help others solve their problems.
“I think that's what I miss the most, really, because I can still do science,” she said. “I love thinking about scientific problems. I can still do that, and I can do more of it now because I have more time.”
Brantley said she and her husband, Andy Nyblade, professor and former head of the Department of Geosciences, will maintain their home in State College. But they will do more traveling, including visiting their daughters, who are both early-career geoscientists. Their daughters also happen to live near some of Brantley’s favorite places to ski and paddle on her kayak — two of her passions.
“I feel very happy about retirement, because I'm really happy with the kinds of things that I have already done, and now I have the freedom to do more of the same, but less of the same,” Brantley said. “And I have a lot more time to be outside.”