William 'Quin' Robertson '93

Each summer when he was a child, Quin Robertson and his family would sail from their home on the Jersey shore to Cape Cod. One summer, they started their journey late at night. This baffled and intrigued the young sailor. Why couldn’t they leave in the day as they had previously? The answer: the tide. As his father explained, they had to thread their boat through Hell Gate, a narrow passage between Long Island and Manhattan. Only by waiting until long after sunset that year would the tides be favorable for them to reach their anchorage in Long Island Sound on time.

That excursion kicked off a lifelong fascination with the forces governing life on the shoreline—one that has led him to a career as a project scientist for a group that specializes in building beaches.

The need to understand was further fueled for Quin as a teen because he loved to surf. Suddenly there were a lot more than tides to track. “You study wind direction and velocities along with wave direction and periods in order to predict the best time and location for hitting the waves,” he says.

What drew him to Tabor Academy, though, wasn’t water in motion but water frozen solid. Quin played hockey, and Tabor had a strong hockey program. But it was the school’s strong math and science programs that set him up for his future occupation. “My time at Tabor not only provided me with lifelong friends, it also gave me the knowledge I needed to understand coastal processes and to pursue a career linked to the ocean.”

From Tabor, he went to Skidmore College, majoring in geology with a minor in environmental studies. During the summer, he had internships in the Geology and Geomatics Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which reinforced the need for broad scientific knowledge. “Although my boss was a geologist, he did not believe you can understand how coastlines change without a firm foundation of geology, math, physics, chemistry, biology and writing,” Quin says. “My education from Tabor is a primary reason why I have an awesome job working on the world’s coastlines.”

Now he works as a project scientist for APTIM. His field of exploration has moved from New York passageways and New Jersey beaches to the oceans of the world: mapping the seafloor near Mozambique and sand deposits offshore in Florida and flying to Oman to conduct a laser-scanning survey. As a scientific diver, Quin said he “installs gauges to monitor tidal levels, salinity, dissolved oxygen, current speed and direction along with wave height, wave period, and direction.”

The writing aspect of his training has been of particular importance, as he has produced scores of academic papers on topics from the effects of Superstorm Sandy on Fire Island beaches to using LiDAR technology for geomorphic mapping of coastal U.S. national parks. Conveniently enough, his wife, Carolyn, is a scientist as well, working for the International Hurricane Research Center. They recently attended the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans where her group won an award for developing more accurate digital elevation models (DEMs) to predict hurricane induced storm surge for Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Quin’s team had collected the GPS data in the DR, which confirmed that the DEM elevations were correct.

Paradoxically, the forces of nature that stimulated Quin’s initial interest are now, more than ever, being affected by the forces of human activity. Climate change is affecting shorelines globally, which is one of the key drivers for governmental bodies and other organizations contracting with his company. He and his wife are committed to minimizing their own effect by living a sustainable lifestyle, including a hybrid and electric car.

With a bit of dark humor, Quin notes that for him, climate change means “built-in job security. We can’t overcome it, but we can at least make some small contribution to addressing it.”