by Matt Hughes
By the time she turned 30, Professor Deborah Sills, civil & environmental engineering, had been many things — a soldier, a backpacker in India, a mom — but a high school graduate wasn’t among them.
Sills dropped out of her school in Israel, where her family relocated from the U.S. when she was 12, amid struggles with anxiety and depression, and a decade later was raising a daughter on her own and working in a natural food co-op in Bozeman, Mont.
When she turned 31, Sills decided she needed a change, passed the GED and enrolled at Montana State. Four years later she was on her way to a Ph.D. at Cornell, and this spring earned tenure as an associate professor at Bucknell, where she studies clean energy and water technologies and has mentored 16 undergraduate researchers.
“Because I had a lot of life experience before I was trained as an engineer, I’m conscious of how engineering interacts with social issues,” Sills says. “I try to bring that consciousness to my students.”
By the time she turned 30, Professor Deborah Sills, civil & environmental engineering, had been many things — a soldier, a backpacker in India, a mom — but a high school graduate wasn’t among them.
Sills dropped out of her school in Israel, where her family relocated from the U.S. when she was 12, amid struggles with anxiety and depression, and a decade later was raising a daughter on her own and working in a natural food co-op in Bozeman, Mont.
When she turned 31, Sills decided she needed a change, passed the GED and enrolled at Montana State. Four years later she was on her way to a Ph.D. at Cornell, and this spring earned tenure as an associate professor at Bucknell, where she studies clean energy and water technologies and has mentored 16 undergraduate researchers.
“Because I had a lot of life experience before I was trained as an engineer, I’m conscious of how engineering interacts with social issues,” Sills says. “I try to bring that consciousness to my students.”