RE Log - Spring 2020

Explorer and Scholar Kenny Broad ’84 explored his way to the education he now passes on to PhD students at the University of Miami Kenny Broad ’84 treats life like the underwater caves that for years lured him to the deepest and most perilous outposts of the underground world: He explores it. And then he emerges with stories of discovery. Broad’s current job is easily the least dangerous he’s ever held. He is director of the University of Miami Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy and oversees an eclectic team of PhD candidates who refer to themselves as the BROAD (Breakthrough Research On Anything Distressing) Lab. His students benefit from every remnant of their fearless professor’s white-knuckle past. An environmental anthropologist who was the National Geographic Explorer of the Year in 2011, Broad cave-dived to previously unknown depths in Mexico. He collected venomous sea snakes in Vietnam. He drilled coral core samples from the remote Micronesian atoll of Kapingamarangi to reconstruct climate history. He spent weeks working in inner city Jamaica, researching how crack cocaine had spread through its communities. The BROAD Lab website explains that its students “dive headfirst into today’s most convoluted and cryptic environmental problems.” More simply, Broad says, his doctoral candidates take on “wicked problems.” It’s a descriptor for the interdisciplinary environmental enigmas he found himself frequently confronting from his earliest days as a young explorer, back when serious research was the farthest thing from his mind, and all he was seeking were lucrative jobs and adventure. SPRING 2020 Ransom Everglades LOG 7