Mary Brewster is a Senior Research Scientist for the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, located near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The primary mission of PNNL is to support the Environmental Science and Technology Mission of the Department of Energy. Roughly half of the 4000 employees at Hanford are technical staff, and a good fraction of these are Ph.D.'s. Since joining PNNL less than two years ago, Mary has worked within the Energy and Environmental Sciences Division of Battelle and currently spends a portion of her time as technical group leader of the applied mathematics group.
The majority of her time is devoted to two main application areas: probabilistic modeling for waste tank safety analysis, and development of numerical wavelet methods for computational chemistry. "For the first area I work mostly with engineers, statisticians and just recently, decision analysts," says Mary. "It is the sort of work that I really wanted to get involved in when I decided to come to PNNL. It is extremely intense and challenging and in addition to the mathematical challenges involved, demands a thorough understanding of the physics, engineering and oftentimes also the political aspects of the problem. In the second area, numerical wavelet methods, I work with mathematicians, computer scientists and computational chemists and is primarily a basic research activity that would not look out of place in an academic setting. All our projects are heavily oriented towards team work."
Mary has a B.S. in chemistry, from Indiana State University, a M.S. in mathematics, from University of Texas at Arlington, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Battelle, she was an assistant professor at the University of Colorado for four years and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for four years. While attending a workshop a couple years ago, she mentioned her interest in nonacademic employment to a colleague and was given the name of Erik Pearson, who was in the process of building up the applied mathematics capability at PNNL. "I wanted to do work that had immediate impact and to be involved in a wide variety of application areas," she says. "I got what I asked for, to a much greater degree than I ever imagined. I enjoy the variety -- I have a short attention span. One of the things I enjoy most is the people I work with, who are very talented, dedicated and just downright nice people."
She has found the areas of numerical analysis, differential equations (ODE's and PDE's) and asymptotic analysis particularly useful on her job. She also wishes she had taken more statistics and stochastic modeling as a student. Her undergraduate training in chemistry has been valuable and she recommends taking courses in scientific and engineering areas such as chemistry, physics, or fluid and solid mechanics.
Her advice to students interested in nonacademic employment: "Do internships. Period. If you do that, it will become clear to you what skills you need to do the kind of work you like. It will probably be a lot more clear to you than to your academic advisor, unless your advisor has direct industrial experience themselves."
