UWM’s Academic Adventurers Talk — “From Quakes to Wines: My Unusual Path in Academia”

Presented by Brett Ketter, UWM Geosciences.

Life hands you different choices and those choices can lead you to either flounder and fail or to adapt and flourish. According to Brett Ketter, that is his career path in a nutshell. With a background in earthquakes and living in Wisconsin of all places (we don’t get earthquakes here), he needed to adapt to further his career and to fill a hole that the Geosciences Department needed by teaching GIS (Geographic Information System).

Brett now has a career as a GIS analyst/lecturer with a GISP certification and has taught GIS at four different institutions on two different platforms. Not too bad for being self-taught! In his talk for our Academic Adventurer series, he will highlight some of the work he has done in seismology, terroir (i.e. the ecologies of wine), and GIS. These are very different worlds, but he has been able to maintain them in tandem for the past 22 years. The journey he started in 1997 in Saint Louis as a graduate student has been at times both frustrating and amazing, but he has no regrets about his choices. Join us to learn more about his journey!

UWM’s Academic Adventurers is a continuing series of informal Friday afternoon programs held in the American Geographical Society Library, that give members of the UWM community the opportunity to hear of their colleagues’ adventures abroad and afield.