Richard A. Kerr Senior Writer, Science
		Richard Kerr received a BA from the College of Wooster (1968), served as liquid cargo officer on a U.S. Navy fleet oiler in the waning days of the Vietnam War, and earned a PhD from GSO (1977) in chemical oceanography. He hikes and, of course, gets back to the sea whenever he can. He is a member of the Metcalf Institute Advisory Board.  Last week, it was desertification in the Sahel. The week before, it was the potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Next, it will be oil and how long the world's supplies will hold out. A career as a science writer who covers all of the earth and planetary sciences never occurred to me when I started a Ph.D. in chemical oceanography at GSO in 1972. For much of the next five years, I would focus on the high-molecular-weight organic matter dissolved in seawater, with an eye on becoming a research oceanographer just like my adviser, Jim Quinn, professor of oceanography. But a week after defending my dissertation, I was at Science magazine in Washington, D.C., sorting through information on the global carbon cycle, Gulf Stream rings, earthquake prediction, and hundreds of other stories. Going from dissolved humic material to earthquakes seems, in hindsight, like a natural enough progression after leaving GSO.      To start, GSO just seemed like a good place to broaden my background--my interests had always been rather eclectic-- and get into the alluring field of oceanography. In college, synthesizing smelly organic compounds was fun enough, but something in the real world seemed like it would be more rewarding. After a few years at GSO, a mid-course re-evaluation led me to consider what one could do with a Ph.D. in oceanography besides research. Turns out quite a lot. Considering an alternative career seemed radical at the time but, in fact, many if not most of my fellow students at GSO sooner or later left research for everything from managing grants to cabinetry.      But which alternative career should I choose, and would I be any good at it? URI came through with night classes in magazine story writing and news reporting that reassured me that writing was not beyond me and could even be enjoyable. With that settled and a freelance story in hand for The Providence Journal-Bulletin on the best grapenut pudding in southern Rhode Island, even before my dissertation was done, I was ready to answer a propitiously timed ad in Science.      Science writing turns out to be the perfect match for someone who came to GSO to broaden his interests and has enormous curiosity. As one senior reporter put it, science writing is a continual graduate education that lets you pick the most exciting subjects and lecturers. URI let me discover that.