In this episode of Discern Earth, I speak with my friend and environmental chemist, Sam Rosolina, about how his faith evolved to the point of finding a church that embraces creation care, his deep love of Southern Appalachia, how witnessing the devastating Kingston coal ash spill catalyzed his entry into environmental chemistry, his work using isotopes to identify how microbes remediate hazardous waste sites, the parallels between microbial and human communities, and finding stability in a career of stewarding the place that he calls home.
David Valerio: Howdy! My name is David Valerio and this is Discern Earth, the podcast where I ask people who work in nature and climate about why they do what they do. Today I have on my friend Sam Rosolina, who's an environmental chemist currently using microbes to remediate environmental hazard sites. He can give you a better explanation of himself than I just did, but Sam it’s great to have you on. Would love to hear a little bit more about your background and we can dig into the conversation.
Sam Rosolina: So excited to be here, David. I loved your topic idea for this podcast when I first read about it, and I'm really honored to have been reached out to by you for one of the first interviews. So yeah, my name is Sam Rosolina. I'm currently the Vice President of Applied Innovation at a lab called Microbial Insights. We're based out of Knoxville, Tennessee, which is in the southern Appalachians, but we do work all over the world. And as you said, David, we focus on bioremediation, which is using microbes to clean up the environment. And so we're a lab, we just look for those microbes. We see if they're there and how many are there and what their capabilities are. It's a big passion for me. Again, kind of back to your topic of this podcast, passion, I think, is such an important thing that isn't addressed very often, especially in the sciences. So I really appreciate that you're focusing on that.
David Valerio: Likewise, when I speak with a lot of scientists, it turns out they're passionate folks, unlike what you might hear otherwise. So I'm glad to have you on to be able to figure out what you're passionate about.
To kick us off, I'd love to sort of just hear about, you know, you mentioned Southern Appalachia. I know you grew up there. Like, what is your history with things like philosophy, faith and religion? And how would you say that that impacts your view of the natural world and relationship to it?
Sam Rosolina: So, in terms of religion, like many folks in Southern Appalachia I grew up in the church. The church that I grew up in was a wonderful community, but interestingly, even though they were based in one of the most beautiful areas in the world in my opinion, they didn't necessarily incorporate that into their faith practices, which I find really interesting. And so my love of nature and of science kind of came separately and it took a while for me to join those things together. I couldn't begin to put a name on any type of philosophy that has impacted me, but just growing up in and around nature in such a beautiful setting and having the ability to explore. Living in the rural area that I grew up in, having woods all around me and a creek to play in heavily impacted my love of nature and my need to care for nature. And now I attend a church here in Knoxville, Tennessee that is very passionate about nature and environmental justice and focuses on that pretty heavily. It's been an interesting kind of full circle for me.
David Valerio: Interesting. Yeah, I'd love for you to expand on that. I didn't know that you were going to a church. That must be such an interesting experience growing up in a church where you don't feel like a big part of yourself is integrated and then coming back to a church that it seems like you do. How has that experience been for you coming back to that?
Sam Rosolina: It just feels very natural, right? I mean, especially for someone who grew up, as I said—in nature and loving it—to kind of have that just be a part of the conversation in conjunction with faith and in conjunction with humanity and society and social justice and all of that. It makes sense, I think, for it to come together. And I think that's fairly biblical too, right? I think most people would agree that all of these things are pretty important topics in biblical terms.
David Valerio: Yeah, I agree. And, you know, I'm a Christian, an Eastern Catholic, and I think that if one takes your biblical theology seriously, you should really be practicing creation care as they like to call it. There's sort of a meme out there, a general vibe, like that Christianity has caused the destruction of the world. I don't know how rigorously that's actually backed up, but there certainly is a connection between modern industrial society in the West and Christianity was back in there. But it seems to me that that's just a flawed way of thinking about the human relationship to the divine and the universe because God created the world and he created it beautiful and good. And surely it's not a good thing just to trash it. I don't know. It seems kind of obvious to me, but it's weird why it's not. you know. And you mentioned that at your church growing up, it wasn't.
Do you think, and maybe this is sort of a tangential question, but I'm also from the South, from Texas. We've got a lot of beautiful stuff around here, but it doesn't seem like people care all that much. Like, what do you chalk that up to?
Sam Rosolina: Oh man, that's a big thing to unpack. I think a lot of it comes down to, frankly, taking it for granted and not necessarily realizing what we have here. And I can understand that. I think, in a lot of ways, it took opportunities for me to leave Southern Appalachia and explore parts of the world before I realized how much I appreciated my home and my place. But I also think in the South, especially in Appalachia, there's a whole history lesson of extractive practices and people kind of being taken advantage of. I think a lot of that has potentially resulted historically—I don't necessarily know if it applies anymore—but I think historically it resulted in people just kind of focusing on surviving in a lot of ways. And so they didn't necessarily have to worry about taking care of the trees in their yard when they could sell those trees for a profit or they could use those trees for a different purpose or they could toss out whatever garbage that they needed to without thinking about it. Because in a lot of situations they were just trying to move forward.
David Valerio: Yeah. I think that last point you made makes a lot of sense. Like in Texas I'm on the edge of the broad southern wood basket. East Texas has a lot of timber extraction and things like that are broadly representative of the South. And the South, historically, has been a pretty impoverished part of the country. So when you're in that state of impoverishment, it's kind of... At least nowadays, it seems like there's certainly a correlation between love and care for nature and sort of economic class. Shouldn't be that way, I think, but you could see how it makes sense.
Another thing in Houston and Texas area is a lot of oil and gas extraction, but also refineries around the area. And in that context it's again, like you're trying to make ends meet. So you're perhaps not looking at the bald cypress outside that's getting destroyed for a refinery and really crying over it when you're trying to support your kids. So that's probably part of it too.
Sam Rosolina: I think some of it can also be somewhat defensive. I mean, despite the extractive practices of coal and how it negatively impacted so many communities in the region, you can still see folks who are proud of their coal mining heritage. Which is very viable and fair. But when their entire industry is attacked by folks who are focusing on environmental practices, they can kind of get more defensive in those situations. And that, in turn, kind of makes them think negatively about all environmental folks. So there's always kind of a balance here and it's never black or white. There's so much gray in that, especially when it comes to the history of Southern Appalachia. I think there are lots of things at play.
David Valerio: Yeah, that defensiveness you note I think is also crucial. It's like you said, same thing in Texas. An oil and gas powered state, it's made us very wealthy. I think it's underrated to what degree people on the “right” do have appreciation for the environment. It may not be framed as environmentalism, but like hunting culture, right? Like going out into the nature. There's an appreciation for it, but because it's become, unfortunately, a politically charged movement... It seems weird that, you know, conservatives are not the ones conserving the environment. I don't know. It's strange how that happened, but I think it's really an unfortunate outgrowth of whatever our modern politics are.
I guess on this note, you know, you've mentioned Southern Appalachia a number of times, and you've mentioned that the role of place is something important. I'd love for you to sort of wax poetic to me about Southern Appalachia, to whatever degree you want to. Because I've not spent a ton of time there, but I know a number of folks who are from there and really love it and have a deep affinity for it. How did growing up there shape your worldview now and the way you think about trying to protect nature?
Sam Rosolina: Oh man, so many things that I could say about that. Yeah, very clearly I love this region. I love Northeast Tennessee. I was born and raised in the hollers of Northeast Tennessee and there's quite a few things that I love about place. I have to say I feel very grateful and privileged to have place. I want to say that first of all because a lot of folks never had the opportunity to connect with a place. So I feel very lucky to have that in my life.
There's so many things. I mean, just in general, the incredible beauty of the region. The biodiversity is striking, I think. If you come to especially East Tennessee or Western North Carolina, right where Great Smoky Mountains National Park is, this whole region is incredibly biodiverse. Especially when you start looking at some of the small things that are around. It's also like there are some wild kind of microclimates here. We have the Smokies, for example—coming back to those beautiful mountains—are rainforest. They're temperate rainforest. So all of the water that it gets greatly increases the biodiversity that's there, among many other things that make that such a special area.
Then also I think, again, kind of going back to the history of Appalachia, especially if you have, if you have relatives and family who have been here for a long time, there's a certain kind of community that I think some folks who aren't from the region may not necessarily see. Especially in media that depicts Appalachia in different ways. But there's this need to rely on one another, this need for a community. In a lot of ways, I grew up with some really strong community. My church was certainly one of those that I am still very grateful for and it made me appreciate people and the safety nets that those people provide as well. So there's lots of reasons that I just love this region and care for it greatly. And nature is really just one of those. There's so many different aspects to it.
David Valerio: Yeah. This idea is interesting. You talked about nature first because I was asking about nature, but then immediately went to community as sort of the second one. And I'm curious how you think about like the connection between the two? Like, as I've become a more devout Christian and I've come to love individual people more strongly and appreciate human community, I feel like that's amplified my appreciation for the natural world and that I feel more connected to it. How do you think about like the relationship between human relationships and relationships with nature?
Sam Rosolina: What a great question, David. There's a lot of different avenues we could probably go down, but I think going back to the safety net where the more true and loving connections that you have in community, the safer you are overall. If you have people you can rely on in community then that's worth more than anything in a lot of ways. It's the same with the stereotypical food web in nature, which is having one piece of that web cut… I don't know if you ever did like the string, the ball of yarn throwing back and forth practice in school where we talked about biodiversity. But, you know, recognizing all the small connections that can occur in even a small area. And if one of those things, even if one fly goes extinct, what that does for the flowers that it pollinates and what that does in turn for what feeds on that plant et cetera. So I think in maybe an obvious analogy that that's what comes to mind first.
David Valerio: No, I don't think that's obvious at all. It's really brilliant. The network of life and the fact that we rely on birds and bees and bugs in order to provide us food and other things as humans, like we rely on this huge network of living creatures that are non-human. But in the same way, within human society, we rely on this extensive network of friends, family, people we've never met, in order to have our needs provided. And so there's something about… maybe it's just like related to the individual versus the community, where individuals are not really individuals, right? We're a nexus of relationships between many different actors, some of whom are human and some of whom are not. I think that makes a ton of sense. I like that analogy a lot. I'll have to steal that.
I have a question, you know, you're a chemist, an environmental chemist. How did you get into that in the first place?
Sam Rosolina: A lot of it came directly from my love of nature, but then I took my first chemistry course and loved that. It just kind of clicked into place. I would say at the time I didn't really understand all the different avenues that someone could take chemistry. So I didn't necessarily put nature, or care of environmental health, in the same basket as chemistry at the time. So I kind of moved forward just knowing that I loved chemistry and assumed that I would stick with it, and I'm glad that I did. When I was in college I went to a small liberal arts college in Kentucky called Berea College. At Berea, my chemistry advisor focused on environmental chemistry and sustainability. I took an environmental chemistry class there and really loved that a lot.
Also while I was in college, the Kingston coal ash spill occurred, which was one of the biggest environmental disasters in the U. S. and it turns out not far from where I would eventually live here in Knoxville. That kind of was one of the things that cinched it for me, where I felt very helpless about that. And again, this all kind of comes back to my connection to Southern Appalachia and place and my care for the region. But seeing that in the news and reading about it and feeling very helpless, understanding what it did to the environment and to the people around it, made me want to do something. And so that's when I got into environmental chemistry and decided that that was kind of my path.
And it was interesting because I would come home sometimes, and when I would come back home people would ask the standard, “What are you studying in college?” And I would say “Chemistry.” And they would say, “Are you doing cancer research?” Which was interestingly the first question that almost everyone asked, “Are you preventing cancer? Are you doing cancer research?” And I eventually realized that I could say, “I'm not doing cancer research, but I am doing preventative work. I am preventing cancer and preventing these things from occurring in the first place. We're preventing them from resulting in these instances where they interact with human health and cause more problems.” So that also kind of cinched it for me too. Like,the recognition that it's not just about nature per se. As we've already noted, human health is so connected to nature and to each other. And so by preventing these things and helping remediate, I can also help human health. So it feels like a win, win, win in a lot of ways.
David Valerio: Yeah, wow, that's remarkable. When you said that they asked you if you were studying cancer, I was like, what are they? Why would you think about cancer immediately upon thinking about chemistry? And maybe something has to do with the history of Southern Appalachia and illness. Like, generally in the South, I think that our cancer incident rates are per capita much higher than many other parts of the country, so maybe that's part of it.1
I'm curious, going back to just like your initial interest in chemistry, likewise when I first took my first serious chemistry class in high school, it just immediately clicked for me and I loved it. What do you think it is about, like, what makes chemistry click for some people and for not? What kind of brain do you think that we have that loves chemistry? I don't think I have a good answer for this, but I wonder if you do.
Sam Rosolina: Oh, I don't think I have a good answer for this either. And one of the reasons I say that is because it takes so many different brains to think about chemistry, which I kind of love. One of the things that did it for me was, and I don't know if this is the case for you David, but I loved working with my hands and I loved kind of thinking. So being able to do a hard science that allowed me to do both was important to me. But then also I loved math, but not too much math. So I loved the amount of math required for most of chemistry. Well just put quantum mechanics aside for a second and thermodynamics aside. I love the kind of, and this is where the different types of brain come into play too, like I had a friend in college. He very artistic and he still is, so he was very good at organic chemistry where you have to rotate these molecules in your brain and understand what they look like at different angles and how symmetrical they are. And so to me there's so many different kinds of brains that can be involved in chemistry and I think it's one of the reasons that I love it, is there's so many kind of different facets to it.
David Valerio: Yeah, I agree. That a good reframe. Chemistry is such a huge thing. Like, a physical chemist is very different from an isotope chemist, right? In terms of the things that they're thinking about and the stuff that they're working on. I think you studied isotopes in your PhD, is that right? Or you worked at an isotope center?
Sam Rosolina: I worked in isotopes. Yeah, I started an isotope lab here at Microbial Insights when I first started here. We were looking at different isotopes of contaminants. And we were using that to prove contaminant degradation, which is really one of the only ways that you can conclusively prove contaminant degradation. We were also doing some source distinction, almost kind of like forensics work.
David Valerio: Interesting. You mentioned that isotopes are like one of the only ways that you can prove that. Could you expand on that?
Sam Rosolina: Yeah. Traditionally what we would look at for, let's say there's groundwater that's contaminated with something. We could look at the concentration and we could see that it's decreasing, for example, but we don't necessarily know if it's being destroyed. It could be volatilizing and moving up through the subsurface and into the air, which has its own problems. It could be sorbing to the soil. Instead what we can do is use isotopic analysis. There's kind of a mechanism where we see an increase in heavy isotopes over time if the contaminant is actually breaking down. So we can measure that over time and show that it's conclusively degrading, as opposed to these physical processes like volatilization or sorption.
David Valerio: Oh, I see. Okay. So like when it's being destroyed, preferentially lighter isotopes are being taken away
Sam Rosolina: Exactly. Yep. That's exactly right. And so the heavier isotopes stick around, which is pretty fascinating.
David Valerio: Why is that true? Why is that mechanistically true? Is it just like lighter isotopes are easier to break off?
Sam Rosolina: The bonds are slightly stronger between the heavier isotopes. And so because those bonds are stronger, that's why the lighter bonds are preferentially broken. So they kind of turn into daughter products or breakdown products. You see that in the breakdown products as well, that when they're initially formed they're lighter, their isotopes are lighter. And then as the breakdown of the parent compound continues, the daughter product becomes sequentially heavier. So they’re pretty fascinating little trends that you can follow in different ways that can pretty straightforwardly show what's happening.
David Valerio: Yeah, this reminds me, I was also an isotope chemist when I was in grad school but applied to like studying photosynthesis rates in the surface ocean. And we see that life preferentially uses lighter isotopes. I think that's another way that being an isotope chemist changes your view of the world. You think of like stocks and flows of things and like the relative characterization of materials based at this very microscopic scale. You can't see it at all, right? The isotopic composition of something. But you're like, hmm, you look at carbon in a tree and carbon… gosh, I'm going to blank on whatever other reservoir, but you can have an intuition that there's something different there that it's interesting to carry that around in my daily life now.
Sam Rosolina: Yeah, absolutely. Before thinking about isotopes, it came down to carbon is carbon like you said. Aside from, you know, we might learn more about radiocarbon in school or something, but the stable isotopes, they don't get enough of a shout out I think.
David Valerio: Nope, they definitely do not. They are underappreciated. Well, there you go. We're both stable isotope geochemists. So we appreciate that.
Going back another step. Could you explain this coal ash incident that you mentioned? Obviously had a very powerful impact on you. And you said it was like the most, the largest environmental disaster in some amount of time. I've never even heard of it before. What happened there? What's the deal?
Sam Rosolina: Yeah. So when, I don't know if you're familiar with coal ash, but a lot of coal comes through these combustion facilities and they combust the coal in different ways. They either combust it directly or they use gasification, and what's left behind is a lot of non-carbon. So there's like partially combusted carbon, of course, but there's a lot of heavy metals, and a lot of radioactive material in a lot of situations because you're taking in so many different elements over a long period of time if you think about the, you know, in terms of millennia that this coal appears. And you're condensing all of the bad stuff into one area because you're combusting all of the carbon. So coal ash is a slurry usually that's kept in these ponds. And they're supposed to have liners in those ponds. And in this situation, a liner broke and it released all of this coal ash into a nearby river that was a tributary to the Tennessee. It still has its impacts today. It was pretty impactful on the region for sure. And it's one of those things I think, again—maybe I'm reading into this—but because it happened in Southern Appalachia, I think it probably didn't get as much air time as it deserved.
David Valerio: Yeah, no, it's a good point to make. And thanks for expanding on that. Particular parts of the country don't necessarily get all the much play. Like I think about this with hurricanes in particular. A couple years ago, Lafayette, Louisiana, got slammed by like two hurricanes in like three months. I think one of them was like a Category Four. The other one was a Category Three. It really did not get talked about very much. But Houston's pretty close to Lafayette. And so I drove through there a couple of times thinking, like, this place is just absolutely demolished. And I know that it's demolished cause I drove through there, but you wouldn't really know that if you were following the news. And so I'm sure it's a similar situation for this coal ash spill where it's like, okay, Southern Appalachia, who really cares?
Sam Rosolina: Yeah. And especially if things like this happen more regularly then people kind of become deaf to it. I just checked the amount and this release was 1. 1 billion gallons of coal ash slurry that went into the river.
David Valerio: Geez.
Sam Rosolina: Yeah. So, a pretty hefty impact on the region.
David Valerio: Wow. So you mentioned this was like sort of a pivotal event for you. And so going forward, how did that change what you ended up studying in your career? Did it influence you to go into your Ph. D. program? To really pursue environmental chemistry?
Sam Rosolina: Yeah, so it definitely impacted my future. When I graduated from Berea, I was pretty sure that I wanted to go to grad school, but quite frankly—just between you and me—I had no idea what I wanted to do next anyway. So grad school seemed like an easy next step, and then I would figure out if that was what I wanted. I was open to going anywhere for grad school, but ended up in Knoxville of all places. Which is nice to only be two hours from home, but I also knew nothing about Knoxville, so I wasn't expecting to want to stick around. So I came to Knoxville, went to the University of Tennessee and joined a lab, the Xue lab, where my advisor, Ben Xue, had an analytical lab that focused mostly on environmental work. And so a lot of his work was in heavy metals, which resonated with me because of this coal ash spill. So I did a lot of electrochemistry work in grad school looking at detection of heavy metals in different types of media. And then also looked at some dangerous gases, coming up with some sensors to detect hydrogen sulfide gas. So it was, I would say that the Kingston coal ash spill was certainly impactful in kind of solidifying what I did next in life.
David Valerio: Yeah. You mentioned going into grad school not really knowing what you want to do. That's what I did as well. I got out of my geology degree in undergrad, didn't want to go shill for an oil and gas company immediately. So I was like, oh, let me try the PhD. And I think this is like something you get pushed to you if you're smart and good at school and you do research stuff. It's like, oh, you should just go get the next checkbox. I definitely got into it for the wrong reasons. I was just like, let's see what goes on. I ended up mastering out.
What made you stay in it given that you'd sort of been ambivalent? Like, it's a really hard thing to do a PhD, and I'm curious. Did you end up just really falling in love with your thesis topic and really wanting to hammer it out? What ended up firming you in that decision to continue down that path?
Sam Rosolina: Oh, that's such a good question. And I will say that I definitely don't think a PhD is for everyone or needed as often as many people suggest. A number of close friends of mine mastered out and were very happy with that decision because it's very taxing and takes a lot of emotional and mental wear. For me, I wish I had a more beautiful answer, but a lot of it was just fear of next steps. And so it was easier for me to dig in and stay longer than for me to look for the next thing. I mean, I definitely resonated with the work that I did and I'm very proud of my grad work and the publications I put out and some of my original research, but I don't know that there's any really great reason of why I stuck around. I just have a hard time with change sometimes, so I was happy to just kind of stay on that track.
David Valerio: Yeah, I can sympathize with that too. I think really the triggering event for me mastering out was COVID happening when I was about a year in. That was a really like, I could have seen myself just continuing to grind it out. Because like you said, part of it, there's like an embarrassment, right? Like, oh, I started this thing. And I don't like considering myself a quitter, right? But I was not happy. And COVID was really just like, I was a laboratory scientist and wasn't in the lab for like six months. So that was like a kind of easy off ramp. Well, it wasn't easy, but it was certainly a kick in the butt to be like, David, you should actually try to do stuff that you really want to do and not just, you know, hang out.
Although that being said, like, I don't... I'm not judging anybody who sticks it out. And I think it's a good thing in a lot of ways. Grad school is such an interesting experience. Even for me now, having mastered out, and I'm sure you know this from your friends, I have that, what is it, mastering out guilt. Which is really strange, where it's like, oh, I didn't get my PhD, man… I feel like scum sometimes. Not really, but.
Sam Rosolina: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, all of my friends that mastered out were very glad to have mastered out and I think that I can't think of any of them that regret not mastering out. So that's unfortunate that you feel that way. And I think there's something truly wrong with how much PhDs are revered. I don't think there's anything particularly special about people who get their PhDs. I think it can make things trickier for you. So if you, for example, were hiring someone who had kind of a broader understanding of chemistry versus someone who had spent, you know, five years specifically focusing on this one very niche thing. There's pros and cons to both of those. I am always a little regretful of how society treats PhDs, or makes people feel guilty for not receiving PhDs. Because there's absolutely a time and a place and a person for all of that. And one of the reasons that I say that is because where I work now at Microbial Insights, we do a lot of research. We don't focus on degrees, and we've seen incredible work come out of employees here who, have varying—no pun intended—degrees of education in certain fields. So this is kind of a microcosm that goes to show that they can matter, but they don't always.
David Valerio: Yeah, it's a good point to make. And I think intellectually I'm very pleased with the choice I made. Like I'm doing very well in my career. There's nothing intellectually where I'm like, oh, I should have stuck it out. It's more of like a gut culture feel. And it's probably related to me being an overachiever my whole life. It feels like me not having that terminal degree and like having the A+ or whatever mentality. It’'ll shine sometimes when I'm on calls with other scientists. Like relative to most other people I'm much more technical, right? But then there are cases where it's like, oh, this guy knows more than me. And so it's probably a pride thing too that comes out. But I'm glad to hear that your friends don't share that regret at times. And I'm not trying to say that it's like that all the time, it's just occasionally it comes out even though I'm like, “No, I don't want to go and get a PhD. That's dumb. Don't do that.”
Sam Rosolina: From me to you, you did the right thing. I mean, you did what was best for you. So I hope you're proud of that.
David Valerio: Definitely. So I want to talk about this transition from academia to where you're at now. You've been at the same company for how long? Seven years after getting out of your out of your program?
Sam Rosolina: Yeah, eight years now.
David Valerio: What was that like? And, you know, coming from this heavy metals chemical analysis background to now you're working with microbes. So I want to explore first, like, just the transition from academia to industry generally, your particular company, and then what it's been like learning more about microbes as you've been doing it at this job.
Sam Rosolina: Yeah, going from academia I taught for a short time, general chemistry, and also learned when in academia that I loved research but that I did not want to do research in academia. Because it was just so political and kind of fraught with, sometimes, ego. I hate to say it, but just a lot of infighting, unnecessary infighting. And so I knew I didn't want to do academia. But doing research, not in academia, is very hard to find unless you go to some of these big pharmaceutical companies which I was not interested in. So I kind of felt at a little disadvantage when leaving academia and looking for my next steps. Finding something that was ideally research, something that was helpful for the environment. In the best possible case scenario, which I was not relying on, still in the region just because of my connection to Southern Appalachia.
And so for me, I got extremely lucky. I mean, I don't think there's any other way to say it, but just extremely lucky to have frankly stumbled upon this job at Microbial Insights, which... I tell people regularly who are in the position of transitioning from grad school to work, to not just look for job postings. Because I emailed Microbial Insights kind of out of the blue and said, I read what you do and I really love it. I think it's very cool that you're not just focused on remediation, but that you're focused on bio-remediation. So that was what led to, as it turned out, that they were looking for a chemist and they hadn't posted it yet. And so I always tell people to do that.
So I've really kind of stumbled into this work. I went from analytical chemistry focusing on heavy metals to being an analytical chemist focusing on isotopes. So I built and ran that isotopic analysis lab that we were talking about before. We offer compound-specific isotope analysis where we were looking at individual contaminants from real sites, and over time determining whether those contaminants were degrading. Or in some situations they had been so degraded that you could just tell from the isotopic fingerprint that they had undergone degradation. So all of this was used by site managers to prove that what they're doing—their strategy for remediating the site, the groundwater, the soil—was working. That connection was pretty straightforward.
Now, I was still kind of on the chemistry side, and at that point the only chemist on staff, but the lab itself was focused on microbiology. And so most of the analysis that occurs here is DNA analysis to look for specific microbes that can degrade these same contaminants. And so those two kind of dovetail together really nicely where they look for the microbes, they show that the microbes are there. I look for the isotopic fingerprints that prove that contaminants are degrading, and so you get kind of a full picture.
David Valerio: Interesting. I didn't know that the shop was mostly eDNA, but that makes a lot of sense. Do you make correlational studies between the particular microbes and their impacts on the minerals? So using the isotopic tracers to see the impact of the specific microbial communities in your work?
Sam Rosolina: It was less about specific microbial communities. It was more about mechanisms. So, for example, a lot of the organisms that… One of our bread and butters here is looking for organisms that degrade chlorinated solvents. So, tetrachloroethylene, or PCE as it might be called, is a compound that's used as a degreaser. It's used in all kinds of manufacturing. It was used primarily for dry cleaners for a very long time and before there was any kind of regulation over it, people would quite literally dump used PCE out the back door of their dry cleaners. Out of sight, out of mind, kind of situation. And so now because of this, there are plumes of PCE. That is, in and of itself, not terrible, but its breakdown products are more and more carcinogenic. So more and more cancer causing, more and more toxic.
There are a class of organisms that can essentially respire, essentially breathe the contaminants, and use the electrons of those contaminants. In doing so they break them down. Through that mechanism, you would get kind of specific shifts in isotopes that you could plot out and say, this correlates with reductive dechlorination, which is what these organisms do. Or this shift correlates with abiotic degradation, which is what occurs when naturally occurring minerals that are in the subsurface have catalytic ways of breaking down these contaminants as well. So pretty fascinating. It can definitely be used in that way to show what exactly is going on in the subsurface, or at least narrow it down.
David Valerio: Yeah, that makes sense. So you're looking at the mechanism, like the chemical reactions that are occurring. Not so much like, oh, these kinds of microbes are conducting this kind of respiration. Although you know that there are microbes doing that, but you're not directly tracking them. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Sam Rosolina: Yeah, that's where the DNA lab comes into play. They, the DNA lab portion of Microbial Insights, they're the ones that then kind of directly track where those microbes are and how many there are.
David Valerio: Gotcha. What has it been like working with a bunch of microbiologists and learning about how they think and view the world?
Sam Rosolina: Eye-opening, I would say. I mean, I was already working in a field where there's not a lot that's directly tangible, right? You have to kind of imagine all of these chemical reactions occurring and playing out and what they result in and the byproducts and all of that. When you add in life to that microscopic element, it gets even wilder because these organisms have their own things going on. I mean, it's fascinating. There's also a lot to learn about... not to kind of wax too poetic, but, uh, about community when it comes to microbes and microbiomes.
So one of the organisms, for example, that we focus on is, is called the Dehalococcoides. It degrades that same compound that I was talking about, PCE, but it also degrades all of the daughter products down to completely harmless ethane gas. I jokingly call it the golden child of reductive dechlorination. It requires B12 in order to do this, but it doesn't produce that itself. It relies on other members of the microbial community to do that. So it's a fascinating kind of lesson in what we can learn from these organisms that we don't necessarily do ourselves. And just to kind of clarify that Dihalococcoides requires these chlorinated compounds to respire. I mean, it's using them solely. So it not only needs those around, but it needs the help of its community members. There's a whole lot to learn about microbiology and it's a pretty fascinating field. There's a lot that can be applied to humans in a lot of ways.
David Valerio: I love that you waxed poetic there because I think about that a lot. One thing I love about learning about microbes is that similar to chemistry, as you mentioned, it's invisible. So you have to really use your imagination. Chemistry itself is hard. And then you got life on top of that. It just makes it even more complex. And I love that we just, in a lot of ways, we just have to throw up our hands and say we don't know what's going on here. And there's something humbling and beautiful about that. Science is generally, you know, where we're trying to really get to the heart of things and apply reductive approaches to things. You realize, wow, no, there's just something mystical here. There's something wild about this. And the analogy you made to how we can view humans, it's related to this networking idea that we talked about earlier, right? Where it's like, microbes are part of communities that exchange different nutrients, hormones, catalysts, in order to enable each other's respiratory pathways, and that's true of us as humans too, right? Like, I have to rely on the farmer growing food somewhere else for me to respire. And it's amazing the way in which these patterns in nature recapitulate themselves at different scales, from that microbial, absolutely small scale, to like the macro, you know? It's crazy.
Sam Rosolina: Absolutely. And it takes specialists, right? I think that's another kind of takeaway. Like you said, there's the farmer, there are the folks who consume the produce that the farmer made, but then there's someone who specializes in woodworking or someone who builds the houses. That's all kind of seen in the microbial community. Even competitors will sometimes work together in the microbial community to make sure that they're both able to survive. It's pretty fascinating.
David Valerio: Yeah, it seems like microbes are getting onto the popular consciousness now, to some degree. Do you agree with me on that? What do you think is sparking that? And what do you think is like, the outcome of that as more people are coming to realize the importance of the small on the way that we live?
Sam Rosolina: I think, like a lot of things with humans, it's very self-centered. And in this case, literally, where I think the kind of discovery of the human microbiome and its importance is what opened a lot of folks’ eyes. How it impacts human health. And when people started to realize just how many microbes we have in our systems—not just in our gut—but on our skin and the roles that they play and their importance, I think that that's probably when folks started to look a little closer at everything.
It's amazing, even in environmental remediation it was not very long ago when people were starting to say... I mean, we're talking like the early 90s when people were saying, “Is bioremediation possible? Is this a thing that we can do?” So it's wild how fast it's taken off and now we're kind of finding ways to harness that and work with microbes in a lot of ways.
David Valerio: Yeah, it's crazy how big the qualitative jump in the ability for us to genetically sequence stuff is. I feel like it's underrated generally just how much more output we can get there. And like the way that the technologies and the things that it's opening us up to be able to do, it's just wild. Like geobiotechnology is becoming a thing, right? You're involved in this to some degree, right? Like, you're seeing that there are people who are talking about like resurrecting extinct species by applying these novel genetic tools.2 And I don't know, it's something that I've never… Coming from a chemistry background, I don't know enough about it, but it seems like it's kind of at the frontier of a lot of how humans are going to be able to either positively or negatively impact the environment. Now that we have this whole new tool suite of genetic modification, or whatever the terms are, right? Like that's just a very different way of changing how the life around us works. I'm curious to see what comes of it, and if it ends up being a good thing. I don't know.
Sam Rosolina: It's a great question and it's a big question, especially when it comes to genetic modification. Like you said, the accessibility of the tools, the cost of the tools… The cost of the first sequencing of the entire human genome, when it first happened is—I wish I had numbers in front of me—but now it's fractions of what it was. Now it's so easy to sequence organisms. So it's, it's definitely playing a role and, and simultaneously as we understand how we can use these organisms to our benefit, it's opening a whole lot of doors.
David Valerio: Yeah. I have sort of a non-sequitur question, but you've emphasized throughout this conversation the importance of place to you. And even in your work now, you're pretty steady here. How do you think about the virtue of stability in like life generally, and the choice of career and place to live? Like, it seems that when I talk to you that that's something that is descriptive of you as a person. You seem like a pretty steady person. How do you think about the virtue of stability in your life?
Sam Rosolina: Oh, that's a great question. I think for me specifically, and fully recognizing that this does not apply to everyone—in fact I would say maybe applies to fewer than most—but for me stability is really important. And a lot of that comes down to community. Community has become important to me for all of the reasons we talked about from the beginning to the end of this podcast, but making those connections is really important. And so uprooting or transitioning in career paths, any of those things kind of shift that community. And it's not to say that community can't still exist remotely or across different industries, but it certainly makes it more difficult. So for me, stability, especially overlaid with my love of this region, has been really helpful for my growth. Now, I know lots of people who, on the flip side, could not thrive in one area. Whether it's one specific area or staying in one place for too long, they thrive by traveling. They thrive by working in different countries or cities. And I see those people thriving and it's really beautiful, but I certainly know for me that that stability is it's really important.
David Valerio: Yeah, it seems to me—and I agree with all the qualifications you're making—but it seems to me like culturally we're very much on the unstable side of things. Like, the unstable is valued more highly than the stable, right? Like, some people might look at you living in southern Appalachia still and say, “Sam, why are you not living in New York City right now?” I grew up in Houston and was blessed to go to really great schools with high achieving people. They were all trying to get out of Houston as fast as possible and go to like New York City, LA, etc. And it seems to me that it's good to share more stories about people who decided to pick a place and a career and stay there. And I say this as somebody who... has a complicated living situation. I live half the year in North Dakota, half the year in Houston. So I'm still in Houston for a good amount of the year.
But in my career… I work in startups and that's just so unstable. And it's not, I don't think it's good for me. But I happened to get into startups the way that I did. And it's like, I want to have more of that stability in career, but it's interesting to think about how you place yourself in the positions in which that's possible. Because for me—at least the way I'm thinking about it—I think I get sort of just bucketed into the startup group of people. Like when somebody talks to me or looks at my resume, I'm high agency, move fast, and I'm used to things moving fast. So it's like harder to sort of, in a way, break into what may be a more stable career because they look at my background and they're like, “This guy's going to leave in a year and a half,” or whatever. But it's like, I just work at a startup, man! I don't know. It's not my problem, it’s not my fault! It is probably my fault in some ways, but...
Sam Rosolina: Well, I recommend getting into research. That's why I love research. I have the stability of place and job and career and industry and all of that, but in research I get to, which is my focus now, think big picture and move constantly. Every day is different. I'm working on a dozen different big projects simultaneously, but also getting to dream and move. And so it has kind of that startup feel, with the added benefit of a stability within the career. So think about it. I feel like folks who do startups have that brain, and that desire, and that passion to constantly be moving that's required for research and development work.
David Valerio: Yeah, that's a good idea. And I've thought about this sometimes in terms of trying to translate my background in carbon markets and that stuff, but like bringing it to a larger institution by saying, “Hey, let me like find some cutting-edge products and stuff for you.” We should talk about that more. I'd be curious to see how you think I could potentially do that.
I also like what you had raised about like, in a sense, your stability is what allows you to engage in this macro-scale, big thinking as well. Like the stability in a lot of other aspects of your life gives you the freedom and enough energy to engage with larger scale wild things in a funny way.
Sam Rosolina: Yeah, absolutely.
David Valerio: One last question, and this is another high level philosophical question. A lot of the work that you do sounds like it's motivated by compliance environmental action, right? Like various 1970s laws around protecting the environment, which are awesome. I work in sort of voluntary environmental action, voluntary markets, things like this. I'm curious if you have a view, just at like a high level, between the relative efficacy of compliance solutions versus voluntary solutions and how you see that balance affecting environmental change going forward. Because it seems like… We haven't had any new environmental laws since the 1970s, but a lot of things have changed obviously. And I'm wondering like where's the next level of really effective care for creation going to come from in society?
Sam Rosolina: That's a really good question. From my vantage point, I would love to say that I believe that everyone could get on board and do the right thing, and reverse some of the damage we've done as a human race to the environment and to species and to each other voluntarily. But I know for a fact that compliance has greatly helped all of those aspects in terms of water quality, air quality, soil quality. I think that there's got to be some kind pf balance. I think a lot of that balance just needs to come from education. And I think that, again, going back to the thinking about PCE that I talked about—the out of sight, out of mind, no one really thought about the fact that it could be carcinogenic or turn into something carcinogenic. There's a lot that needs to be done kind of upfront in educating everyone individually. And recognizing how all of these things impact all of us. Everything that Rachel Carson talked about. How what's happening upstream affects everyone downstream.
David Valerio: Yeah, that's a good point. I think what you said about… As I've been working in voluntary markets—I've never worked directly in compliance environmental action—but the more that I've been doing voluntary work, the more I'm like it really seems like compliance action is where everything has happened and is happening still. Because at the end of the day, voluntary action is voluntary. And the environment is not a positive asset that a corporation can put on its balance sheet and make money from. So it's all really just philanthropy. Whereas the work that you're doing very tangible, right? Like these companies have to go and do things. So I think my views have evolved more into like... there's definitely an education point, right? Like education as a society and at the individual person level to motivate people to affect policy change that then leads to actual action because, I don't know. I’ve become very cynical about voluntary action honestly.
Sam Rosolina: I'm curious, in the voluntary market, how much of the voluntary market is really just kind of an echo of compliance. Like, you know, folks who are concerned that this is something that will show up later. And so they want to get on board now, carbon credits being an example of that.
David Valerio: Yeah, it's a great question. Honestly, at the moment, I would say most of the motivation behind it—making these claims and purchasing offsets and doing things like that… Is more from like a marketing perspective, greenwash—I don't want to necessarily bring up the greenwashing term immediately—but it's more like it looks nice. The more sophisticated operators are like thinking about potential compliance markets emerging. And it really depends on your geography. Like, I wouldn't say most US corporations are thinking that's going to happen anytime soon. We don't even have mandatory greenhouse gas emissions reporting at the federal level. So are we going to get to a compliance carbon market anytime soon? I don't know.
But we're seeing a lot of action in other countries like Colombia and Singapore. Colombia recently implemented a carbon tax on the whole economy. And as part of that you can remove 5 percent of your tax burden by buying voluntary carbon offsets within the country of Columbia.3 So that's very much stimulated the market there. And similar things are happening in Singapore, actually. I think it's also a carbon tax, but they're allowing… I think it's 10%, you can avoid 10 percent of your tax burden by purchasing approved offsets.4 So I guess it really depends on your geography.
I think in the US it's mostly purely for marketing because the prospect for government action on this in the US, I'm very skeptical of. In Europe, obviously, there are a lot of reasons to do that given the even more and harder regulations going on. Likewise in those other countries I mentioned. But yeah, mostly my perspective is from the US. And most of it I would just say is the marketing stuff, but companies globally are sort of operating in anticipation of potential compliance regimes depending on where they are.
Sam Rosolina: That's interesting. And it's interesting that those are kind of a mix of compliance and incentivization.
David Valerio: Yeah. Historically, compliance and voluntary markets have been very separate. Like, I've worked in the voluntary markets all of the three years I've worked, and I've interacted with basically no players in the compliance markets. California has its own offset scheme. I know those projects exist, but I've never met anybody who's worked on them before. However, there is seeming to be a way where countries are trying to figure out how to filter the high-quality projects from the voluntary market and integrate them into their compliance regime in this hybrid approach. Where it's like there are all these existing credits out there, many of which are bad and some of which are good. And so countries are not trying to reinvent the wheel necessarily and identify where, like, what's the lowest lift way we can start working on this? It's a very interesting policy regime. And that's something that I guess, in terms of my own personal impact, startups are fine and cool. They're interesting. But I don't think, in line with voluntary action not being where the actual action's going to come from, I've been thinking a lot about policy entrepreneurship as an idea. Because that really seems, if anything is going to change things, it has to come from that. At least in the way that I'm viewing it.
I do have one final question. Going forward, you know, we've talked about community, we've talked about microbes, chemistry, environmental action, passion for Appalachia. What are you striving to achieve?
Sam Rosolina: Oh, wow. I feel so grateful to have a job that I can hang my hat up at the end of the day and be proud of the work that I've done. I think continuing along that line is very powerful for me and kind of expanding it in little ways over time. I'm very grateful to have a boss who feels similarly and is always kind of willing to help out an organization, for example, or to look a little deeper at something that could benefit folks globally. And that's kind of where my research ends up. Thinking about the bigger picture. How can we make this bigger? How can we make it better?
So I don't know. It's a really good question and I wish I had a nice beautiful bowtie for you at the end of this podcast, but I think kind of continuing along the route that I'm going and reminding myself of the impact. I think that's one of the things that a lot of folks in my industry don't do enough of, is to remind themselves of the good that they're doing. Or step back and look at all of the groundwater that they've cleaned up—in whatever way they do it—whether it's using microbes or not. But, I like to do that every once in a while. Step back, remind myself of everything good that this company is doing and my little, small part within that and continue along that trajectory as long as possible.
David Valerio: I think that's the perfect answer for you. You're in a great place right now and you're going to continue having impact. So why strive for something different than what you already have and just continue going down that path? I think that's excellent.
Well, Sam, thank you very much for coming on. Really enjoyed this conversation, and we'll catch up again soon.
Sam Rosolina: Yeah. Thank you, David. And I always feel like anytime we converse that I have so much to learn from you. So we should definitely have a call offline sometime soon.
David Valerio: Definitely. Alright, talk soon.
Sam Rosolina: Alright, bye.
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