CC&E Welcomes New Director of Undergraduate Programs

BATON ROUGE - CC&E is excited to welcome Brian Snyder to his new role as Director of Undergraduate Programs. Snyder is replacing Vince Wilson, the program’s longtime head, who has returned to full-time faculty status. Both Snyder and Wilson are faculty in the Department of Environmental Sciences.

“I want to thank Vince Wilson for his many contributions to our college,” said Clint Willson, dean of CC&E. “Our Coastal Environmental Science program wouldn’t be what it is without him. And congratulations to Brian Snyder on his new role. The future looks bright for undergraduates in CC&E!”

Snyder began at LSU as part of the Center for Energy Studies, before joining DES eight years ago. He previously served as Associate Director of Undergraduate Programs. He runs the Carbon Cycle Engineering Lab.

CC&E spoke with Snyder about his research, his teaching and how he views the Coastal Environmental Science program. The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

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You’ve been teaching undergraduate courses in Coastal Environmental Science. What classes will our students know you from?
I teach ENVS 1010, which is kind of our orientation course, and ENVS 4261, which is the upper-level energy and environment course.

Tell us one thing you want students to know about the CES major. 
This major is designed so there are no closed doors to the student. If they want to go and get a PhD in Oceanography they can, if they want to go and get an MD they can. It’s not always easy, but it’s a huge opportunity.  

Your research involves sustainability and climate policy, which you also discuss in class with your students. What do you want them to know about those things? 
The thing I want students to know about both of those is how hard they are. [They] think if we just had this one thing differently, if we just were a little bit better with the cars we drove or made political changes or whatever it is, then we would fix our sustainability problems. And that's just not true… These problems are really intractable and fixing them is close to impossible. But if it is possible, it's going to require some massive changes that affect everybody on the planet in very significant ways.

How do you see CES preparing students for these big changes in the world? 
My hope for the students is that they go out and contribute to some of these solutions. And I think many of them do and in a lot of different ways. As you probably know, we've got a lot of students who go to public health school. Post-COVID, that's a critical issue, and it's a critical environmental issue... We've got other students who end up working for CPRA [Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency]. Again, that's a critical sustainability issue. My hope is that students get interested in some of these things, and then go out and create a world that's better than the one that they that we're passing.

Let’s talk a little more about your research. You’re an energy researcher, but you started off life as an ecologist. How did you make that transition?
A few years into grad school, I realized that energy was critical. All of our sustainability problems or environmental problems might be just energy problems. And then I got really interested in energy supply and climate stuff.

What do you mean by that, that all of our environmental problems are energy problems? 
One way of thinking about our food problem is that it’s an energy problem. Food production is in significant measure made up energy from natural gas and oil... Climate is obviously an energy issue, or water, pollution issues---you can think of them as energy issues as well.  Water treatment requires energy and sometimes the lack of water treatment is because of the lack of energy. We can desalinate water to provide more but that requires energy… So you know, if you had enough energy, the vast majority of our environmental problems would not be problems.