When Eileen Kladivko began her studies, she knew she wanted to save the world. She just didn’t know quite how.

Kladivko, professor of agronomy, says she’d seen an oil slick burn on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, landfills being treated as dumps and the idea of recycling in its infancy, and knew she had to create change. After looking for opportunities in environmental sciences, Kladivko decided to pursue a degree in the still-young Natural Resources and Environmental Science (NRES) program, which allowed her to tailor her studies.

“Through NRES, I could see there was a way of combining my interest in the outdoors and nature as well math and science,” she says. “But I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab. There weren’t many environmental jobs at that time, so I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.”

While Kladivko didn’t initially picture herself at a university, her passion for soil science and the environment has helped her lead two significant changes in agriculture, says Ron Turco, professor and department head of agronomy: the use of cover crops to reduce field nutrient losses and soil erosion, and the use of soil health to improve our understanding of soil systems management. Fifty years later, her most recent honor is the 2022 Corinne Alexander Spirit of the Land-Grant Mission Award, which recognizes faculty members who excel across all three land-grant mission areas: research, teaching and extension.

The flexibility that NRES offered Kladivko laid her path in soil science, she says — but it’s also paving the way for the next generation of groundbreaking scientists. “Environmental jobs today are much better defined than they were 50 years ago, and we are able to prepare students a little more directly for those jobs,” Kladivko says. “But NRES is a degree that is constantly changing, just as our concerns for the environment are constantly changing.”