Jack’s relationship with water started long before he could call it a career. His father was responsible for water and waste water treatment facilities in his hometown. Jack grew up playing in creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes, and by the time he reached Warren Wilson College it had become a course of study. He earned a biology degree there, along with an NC teaching certification, and used his student projects to chase the questions that interested him most: a junior project on killer whale domestication, and a senior project on aquaculture and bioshelters that made its way into the New Alchemy Institute journal — the same New Alchemy lineage that would later shape his wind turbine work in the Peace Corps.
After graduation, that curiosity took him to Forfar Field Station on Andros Island in the Bahamas, near the Tongue of the Ocean and the third-largest coral reef in the world, where he studied green crab territorial behavior and observed barracuda, reef sharks, and octopus in the wild. In the Peace Corps, the focus shifted from observation to application: Chinese and Indian carp culture, work with the endangered Gangetic dolphin and the gharial, and hands-on water purification fieldwork — sanitary wastewater treatment, humanure, biogas, and biosolids, the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps water clean and people healthy. His thesis focused on aquaculture and by integrating renewable energy and aquaculture, raising fish in solar silos, he ended up with a Master’s degree in Solar Aquaculture.
That thread carried through the rest of his academic career. At WVU, he worked on biosolid application and composting, and with the National Environmental Training Center. And from 2001 to 2026, he taught Water/Wastewater and Sustainable Water Technologies at Appalachian State — closing the loop from a childhood spent playing in creeks to a career spent making sure the water everyone depends on is safe and productive.