Collaborative Champion: Robert Twilley
Robert Twilley is the executive director of Louisiana Sea Grant and a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at LSU, where he heads up the Coastal Systems Ecology Lab. He has published extensively on wetland ecology and global climate change and has been involved in developing ecosystem models coupled with engineering designs to restore the coast and wetlands. In an effort to get researchers from different disciplines to work collaboratively to solve problems, he founded the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio in 2009.
How did you first come to see the value of collaboration?
During my PhD, I studied ecosystems under a famous systems ecologist, H.T. Odum, at the University of Florida. Odum would do these diagrams of ecosystems, and everything was in it: plants, animals, microbes, nutrients, and soil. All of it connected with sunlight, precipitation, and water flow. And people were also part of ecosystems with governance, economics, and religion depicted in the same diagrams. Our job was to put all of these pieces together—and understand how one part of the system impacted another—including interactions between nature and culture. So, if you really want to do systems ecology, you have to collaborate. It’s the nature of systems ecology. You can’t do it any other way.
How has this played out in your own research?
When Hurricane Katrina hit, I started to think about how can we use the wetlands for storm surge reduction; how can we clean nitrates out of the water before it causes hypoxia offshore; and how can we connect all of these pieces together?
Tell me about your favorite collaboration of all time?
The Baton Rouge Area Foundation hired a fellow by the name of Peter Calthorpe from Berkeley, California, a world-famous regional planner and one of the founders of ‘new urbanism’ and sustainable communities. I mean, this guy is world-class. One thing about regional planners is that they’re systems thinkers. Our kindred spirits of using a systems approach to solve complex problems was a hit. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire career, and we put together a report called Louisiana Speaks. We designed this whole landscape where we were going to have wetlands and people.
When we finished the report, Peter said, ‘You know, your challenge now is to build institutional support around the ideas that we have in this vision for the coast. Institutions have to keep these ideas going.’
Later, I was attending a dinner in Washington, D.C., to talk about Louisiana’s needs post-Katrina, representing LSU. There were several executives from oil and gas, including the Gulf of Mexico Vice President for Chevron, Warner Williams. On a napkin, I started explaining a studio design concept to him, and he said, ‘I love it. We’ll fund it. These are the students I want to hire because they know the team concept and know that solving a problem requires collaborative teams.’
With the help of LSU leadership and several deans on campus, along with America’s Wetland Foundation and additional funding from Shell, we built the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio. We’re about to celebrate our 10th anniversary, and we’re well over a million dollars in total sponsorship. People love the idea that if you do a project in the studio, you get all of the expertise that LSU has to offer around a problem. Collaboration, in my experience, is about taking a problem that’s real and putting the pieces together to solve it.
This story was one of the cover features of the 2019-2020 print issue of LSU Research magazine, on the theme of convergence.
Elsa Hahne
LSU Office of Research & Economic Development
225-578-4774
ehahne@lsu.edu