Kara Gadeken, marine ecology
By Jeremy Powers ’24
Most might consider mud a bit of a nuisance—clinging to boots, dirtying cars, getting on clothing. Children might gleefully roll around in it, shape hand-crafted pies for judgment on a baking competition, track it up and down stairs and over carpets. For marine ecologist Kara Gadeken, mud is so much more than its messy presence. For Gadeken, mud presents an ideal opportunity to learn about the past, understand the present, and plan for the future. She's looking forward to bringing students along for this exploration as she steps into the Emily and Mitchell Rales Chair in Ecology at College of the Atlantic.
“There's so much interesting science to be done in Maine. It's such a dynamic place and it's changing so quickly because of climate change. I’m after questions like, How much is there to know? and, How much do we need to know before things change? so we can adapt in time and help prevent some of the less desirable outcomes of that change from happening,” she said.
Her interest in all things marine ecology began as an accident, during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of undergrad at William and Mary. “I started working in seagrass and I didn't even know what seagrass was. I was like, Sure, I'll do this thing for a summer, but going out into these shallow marine ecosystems and experiencing them and exploring them… it just blew my mind. I was hooked.”
After falling in love with seagrass, Gadeken fell in love with teaching. “During my postdoc work at Stony Brook University, I realized that full-time research was not really where my interests or desires lay. I discovered that I really enjoyed teaching, and that I really only liked doing research when it was with students,” she said.
As a teacher, Gadeken finds that students learn best when they’re set loose.“My job is to remove barriers to students becoming their full selves. Teaching, at its best, should be the process of getting as far out of the way as possible of students learning what they need to learn. It should be about the facilitation of their development as scholars, as critical thinkers, as people, letting the roots of that process grow naturally.”
Disillusioned with the traditional, often clunky and bureaucratic structures of higher education, Gadeken was looking for something different. “There's a lot of inbuilt structures in academia that can really stifle creativity,” she said. On the cusp of leaving academia altogether, Gadeken said she found out about COA by chance. “I saw an ad come up for this small, interdisciplinary, community driven, and teaching focused college, and it was just hitting all the notes. I thought, They seem to be doing it the way that I think it should be done.”
Gadeken, who holds a PhD in marine science from the University of South Alabama at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said that she has really enjoyed the tight-knit community feel on campus, and that the community emails that keep students, staff, and faculty in touch with each other have been really grounding. “It’s interesting to hear these little bits and pieces from people's lives and experiences here, as diverse as they are.”
When she’s not teaching or studying seagrass or sediments, Gadeken likes to swim. She hopes to get involved with the YMCA in Bar Harbor to offer swimming lessons and maybe even start a synchronized swim team. “I swim a lot. I was a synchronized swimmer for a very long time.” Chuckling, she added, “Now it's called artistic swimming, but I have opinions about the name change that we don't have to get into.”
Whether it’s in the YMCA pool or in a tidepool, Gadeken is eager to do her part in a place seeing such rapid ecological change. “That's part of what drew me here—and also there's a lot of mud up here, and I really like mud.”
