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Technical Support

The Outstanding Staff awards are chosen by nominations received by the Awards Committee from all faculty, staff, and students at VIMS. They are awarded in the categories of Facilities/Safety/Trades, Technical Support, and Administrative Support.

Joy BaberThe winner of the 2019 Outstanding Employee for Technical Support is Joy Baber.

Joy has served VIMS for more than 3 decades; the last 18 years with the Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, where her work ethic, attention to detail, and technical skills have enabled CBNERR to develop and maintain highly respected and well-used environmental monitoring programs.

Joy oversees the continuous sampling stations that form the backbone of state and federal efforts to  monitor water quality in the York River and lower Bay. Her responsibilities include calibrating multi-sensor instruments, processing the grab samples used to verify optical sensors, and supporting a myriad of studies related to harmful algal blooms, submerged aquatic vegetation, ecosystem modeling, coastal acidification, dissolved oxygen dynamics, and Total Maximum Daily Loads. This work has contributed to the collection of more than 2.4 million data points.

As part of CBNERR’s recent restructuring, Joy has assumed a leading role in upgrading the lab facilities used to process water-quality samples. This requires adherence to strict protocols for ensuring that collected data are accurate and shared with users in a timely manner via the Virginia Estuarine and Coastal Observing System and other monitoring programs. VECOS is used by numerous advisory and research-oriented stakeholders, including every VIMS department, the Virginia General Assembly, the Chesapeake Bay Program, and the newly initiated Institutional Water Quality Monitoring and Modeling Initiative. For the many reasons described here, we are delighted to award Joy Baber the 2020 VIMS Technical Service Award.