I'm happy to be writing to you for the first time as the Powell Center Interim Director. Fortunately, Jill Baron is still a close advisor to the Center since she retired last March. In addition to seriously enjoying all that goes on at the Powell Center, I take seriously the importance of leading the Powell Center through our always-evolving environment. We’ve experienced a lot of changes over the past year, from staff to meeting procedures, and I thank everyone who has helped the Center to continue on our mission of supporting impactful synthesis science.
Over the years, I have spent time mingling with many different types of Earth scientists (geomorphologists, active tectonicists, sedimentologists, atmospheric chemists, seismologists, geochemists) and I'm ready for more. Early in my career and continuing to this day, I struggled with synthesizing different datasets, assertions, perspectives and effectively communicating them to varied audiences. It was clear to me that going it alone was not a productive strategy. Making the effort to learn from peers, especially those with different skill sets, helped to move things forward much more quickly. As Coordinator of the USGS Community for Data Integration I also am very familiar with the benefits that come from collaborative, data-intensive, integration.
It is exciting that data and software supporting peer-reviewed publications are becoming more accessible, reusable, and citable, with growing numbers in the Powell Center product list. And each time I talk with a new Working Group and learn about their goals, methods, and accomplishments, I learn about new and sobering societal challenges that they are working to solve.
What has been happening at the Powell Center? A lot. In 2025 we hosted 14 meetings at the Powell Center, 9 working groups and 5 workshops. We accepted two new working groups to start this 2026 fiscal year, “A spatially explicit framework to assess the risk of aquatic contaminants to insectivorous birds” and “Operationalizing the use of millennial-scale geologic constraints for testing and improving modern seismic hazard models.” We added 36 new publications to our publication and product list, and the latest count has citations of all publications topping 26,000! Finally, we just received 16 proposals for our next class of working groups.
Our five-year collaboration with the NSF Critical Zone Network CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science) is coming to an end. We jointly supported four outstanding Working Groups. Two of them will hold their final synthesis meetings at the Powell Center this year. Our partnership with CUAHSI has been highly productive; we are sad to have it end.
We're making plans to have more engagement with our community in the future and we hope you will be involved. I welcome you to get in touch with your ideas for the Powell Center, I have a lot to learn and I'm looking forward to it.
Sincerely,
Leslie Hsu
Powell Center Interim Director
