Government's Sustainability Moment - CGI Initiative for Collaborative ...

“Our mission is fabulous: saving lives andproperty, and really making sure thesetreasures of resources are able to be usedtoday and into the future.”—Mary Glackin, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations, NOAAPHOTO COURTESY OF NOAAwith agency scientists, a climate statistics dashboard,a news feed, maps and other material.Fascinated by WeatherAt a young age, Glackin developed what she calls“an obvious fascination with weather. One of my earliestformative memories has to do with a hurricanethat was not forecast,” she says of a 1962 event nearPhiladelphia. She remembers “being sent to schoolin the morning and released at noon time [because]first-graders shouldn’t be walking home from school”in a hurricane.She came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, whenthe earth sciences movement was in full swing, shesays. The native Pennsylvanian “was raised like a lotof people of my generation—out the front door in themorning . . . raised in the environment.”Her family has owned a home on Long Beach Island,N.J., for decades, “so I’ve always had a connectionto the ocean,” Glackin says. She remembersa family beach trip that ended abruptly in the middleof the night, as her parents packed five kids in the carand fled just ahead of an encroaching storm that theyhadn’t known about only hours earlier.She graduated from the University of Maryland,in 1982, earning a degree in computer science withcoursework in meteorology. “There is a very strongconnection between computer science and meteorology,”she says. “Meteorologists own some of thebiggest, fanciest [mathematical] equations that youneed computers to solve. So I came to work for theNational Weather Service.”‘Science, Service, Stewardship’When Glackin joined NOAA, the agency was less thana decade old. Created by the Nixon administration in1970 as part of the Commerce Department, NOAAbrought together three of the oldest federal agencies:the Coast and Geodetic Survey, formed in 1807; theWeather Bureau, formed in 1870; and the Bureau ofCommercial Fisheries, formed in 1871.Six line organizations create a range of productsand services—including daily weather forecasts, severestorm warnings, climate monitoring, fisheriesmanagement, coastal restoration and the support ofmarine commerce—that affect one-third of the country’sgross domestic product.“Science, service and stewardship underscoreNOAA’s mission,” Glackin says. “All of these piecesinterplay.”Glackin has held top posts in three of NOAA’s sixline offices. The National Weather Service, whichGlackin headed as acting assistant administrator forseveral months in 2007 after running the AWIPS program,provides weather, hydrologic and climate forecastsand warnings to protect life and property andenhance the economy.The National Environmental Satellite, Data and InformationService, where Glackin was deputy assistantadministrator from 1999 to 2002, provides environmentaldata from satellites and other sources. Glackinalso served a term at the Office of Program Planningand Integration as assistant administrator. The officeoversees strategic planning, performance evaluation,program integration and policy integration.S P R I N G 2 0 11 | COLL ABOR ATIVEGOV.ORG/LE AD | Leadership 37