Alumni Impact: Emil Cherrington
Alumni Impact is a social media campaign that recognizes the excellent work being done by FIUTS alumni all around the world. This week, meet Emil Cherrington, featured on Earth Day for his excellent work in earth sciences!
You can support FIUTS programs that prepare students like Emil to make an impact in communities around the world by making a gift to the Impact table at this year’s Virtual Blue Marble Bash.
Seeing the world with different eyes because of FIUTS
Emil Cherrington, FIUTS alumni and Earth Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, standing at the entrance of NASA Headquarters.
These days, I’m an Earth Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), supporting the NASA side of the SERVIR partnership among the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), NASA, and a number of international centers of excellence. Back in 2003-2004, however, I wore multiple hats for the University of Washington (UW)-based Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS).
Wearing my present-day ecologist hat, in commemoration of the 50th celebration of Earth Day on April 22, 2020, I’d like to offer up an insight, which is that my participation in FIUTS instilled in me a profound respect not only for other cultures, but also for the environment. And without meaning to say that FIUTS stimulates a fascination with the environment, FIUTS definitely shaped my personal and professional trajectory, and I am a better person for it.
Emil (center), speaking at a FIUTS event during the 2003-2004 academic year.
About 17 years ago, FIUTS staffers Anita Verna Crofts, Carolyn Ho, and Lori Cook suggested that I apply to join the FIUTS Student Board. Founded at the UW in 1948, not long after the 2nd World War, FIUTS is a registered non-profit organization whose name pretty much outlines its mission. And because FIUTS is a non-profit, it’s run by a Board of Trustees, and there are actual students on that Board (i.e. the Student Board).
It’s hard to compress the year’s worth of FIUTS activities I was involved in, from helping lead trips across Washington State to participating in international students’ day at the UW to helping organize social events to voting in the Board of Trustees meetings. But almost twenty years later, if you ask me what left the most indelible imprint from my time at the UW – when I was pursuing a graduate degree in forest resources – it would have to be the camaraderie I experienced through FIUTS.
Emil (bottom right) with the 2003-2004 FIUTS student board.
Joining FIUTS at age 22, I’d never physically been outside of a handful of countries in North America, but I was able to interact with fellow students from all across the globe, and I came to see that no matter of different walks of life, we were all looking for similar things. That constant interaction with fascinating new people who spoke different languages, ate different foods, and had different faith traditions affected me more than I ever understood. While graduating in June 2004 and leaving the FIUTS orbit made me sad, seeing FIUTS updates over the years, I’ve always thought about how new students are living the great opportunities I once had.
In January 2006 - a year and a half out of FIUTS - I moved to a foreign land to work at the Water Center for the Humid Tropics for Latin America and the Caribbean (CATHALAC, in Spanish), a regional research center and the SERVIR program’s first hub, in Mesoamerica. While my UW degree and geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing coursework I’d done there came in handy, so did my experience with FIUTS. Through the almost eight years I lived and worked in Panama, I worked with team members from across the Americas, and also got to see a bit of the world.
I got married – to an amazing woman from another country and a different culture – and I later won a prestigious Erasmus Mundus fellowship to pursue my Ph.D. in Europe (jointly between AgroParisTech in France, and the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany), and in all the new places I was able to explore – whether it was visiting Prague to present at the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in 2016 or doing field work in French Guiana in 2014 – the experience I’d gained through FIUTS were a pleasant undercurrent.
I was able to see the world a little bit through the eyes of old friends from FIUTS, who had shared with me how they saw the world. In late 2016, I successfully defended my Ph.D. and I also joined UAH, through which I support the NASA side of SERVIR. If you are interested in seeing the world through satellite “eyes,” I would encourage you to check out some of the incredible work that SERVIR is doing across the globe, helping bring space to the village: www.servirglobal.net.
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Support FIUTS programs that prepare students to make an impact in communities around the world by making a gift to the Impact table at this year’s Virtual Blue Marble Bash.
Guest posts on the FIUTS blog represent the experiences and views of individual writers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FIUTS or any organizations or institutions affiliated with our programs.
Alumni Impact is published on the FIUTS blog, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Read past posts by searching for Alumni Impact on our website main page!
Interested in being featured in Alumni Impact? Contact Annie Lewis at annie@fiuts.org.