Samantha Joye’s throat was on fire, her face burning from the acid in the air.

Standing aboard the Walton Smith, a research vessel, Joye was haunted by the scene unfolding around her. The Gulf of Mexico was a vision from hell — the air, the water, and the oil were all ablaze. It was not an ideal spot for anyone to be, and certainly not for an asthmatic. But she had work to do.

Professor Samantha Joye worked with scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico last May to investigate the oil plumes following the oil spill which occurred in April. Photo by Frances Micklow

“The images, they’re seared into my memory,” said Joye, a professor in the University’s Department of Marine Science. “I still smell what it smelled like. I have these weird flashbacks sometimes when I sleep and I wake up, and I’m just choking and it’s because I’m having a dream about being out on the water and there’s just oil everywhere.”

Joye joined a team of scientists in the Gulf, investigating oil plumes she discovered following April’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill — plumes the United States government, British Petroleum and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said did not exist. But evidence to the contrary was all around. The Walton Smith’s air conditioning had to be cleared every few days because oil from the surface water clogged the filters. Five miles from the site of the explosion, the thickness of the tar made it difficult to be on deck. Dead jellyfish floated amongst the Gulf’s detritus, and oil-slicked birds and turtles milled everywhere.

“It was just heartbreaking,” Joye said of the May trip. “I think everybody that was out there when it was really nasty has those same images seared into their heads. It certainly makes you think hard about deepwater drilling and whether it’s worth it.”

The plume Joye discovered, a phenomenon to the Deepwater Horizon spill, showed there was more oil in the water than other agencies wanted the public to believe. Her findings made her the poster child for the oil spill response, bringing intense media coverage and scrutiny from businesses and government agencies.

“It’s odd because I’m not comfortable in this role,” she said. “It’s actually quite strange. I think part of it is that I am a very straight shooter type person. I don’t sugarcoat things … I think in the case of this oil spill and through the course of the past 10 months, people really wanted somebody real, somebody who wasn’t sugarcoating or making it better or worse than it actually was, but just looking at the facts in her hands and saying, ‘This is what I see from the data that I have.’”

“It’s not easy to be that lone voice,” said David Lee, the University’s vice president of research. “My hat’s off to Mandy Joye for doing that.”

Always asking why

Joye’s desire for answers is nothing new — it’s a lifelong habit.

“I was one of those kids when the ‘why’ phase didn’t last between ages 2 and 4,” she said. “It just perpetuated into forever.”

Growing up in the Carolinas both on the beach and her family’s farm, much of Joye’s career goals and work ethic can be traced to age 11. It was then that she sat atop a stack of phone books so she could drive a tractor through her father’s tobacco, corn, soybean and cotton fields.

“You grow up on a farm, you get up with the sun and you go in to eat when the sun goes down,” she said. “I was used to working hard.”

When she wasn’t working on the farm or playing with her sister — who would grow up to become a geologist — Joye could be found in a darkroom studying microorganisms such as “euglenoids and ciliates” under her microscope, or fishing in one of the mini ponds on the farm.

“I wasn’t really allowed to watch television,” she said. “My parents pushed me to read. I read and read and couldn’t get enough. I spent a lot of time outside. I spent a lot of time working the earth with my hands.”

During the summer, Joye’s family traveled to Myrtle Beach, a much different place then than it is today.

Before high-rise hotels and gift shops lined the seashore, Myrtle Beach was a place of discovery.

“We would go fishing. We would canoe in the tidal creeks,” Joye said. “I used to do the craziest things — I would get in the ocean and swim so far off shore that the people on the beach were just specks. My mother would always have heart attacks because she was convinced I was going to get eaten by a shark.”

Joye swam into deep waters with pods of dolphins and schools of fish, becoming part of the ecosystems she would later study.

“I always just wanted to get in the water and explore. I had my cheapo snorkel and I would go down and watch the fish,” she said. “I would always see [my mother] on the beach waving her arms, and I know she was going, ‘Get back in here!’ But I couldn’t hear what she was saying, so it was convenient to be that far offshore.”

Joye’s blood “runneth blue” for something besides a Tar Heels’ love of North Carolina basketball — the deep blue sea. She headed off to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to be a heart surgeon, but changed her career goals after an oceanography elective class.

“I pretty much decided I was going to be an oceanographer between the time of my junior and senior years,” she said. “I didn’t tell my mother until I was basically going to grad school because I was afraid she would disown me. She thought it was a very bad idea because it was not anything she had considered to be a ‘safe’ career, and by ‘safe’ I mean ‘have steady employment doing.’ When I had this realization that I wanted to be an oceanographer, it was like somebody had just took the world off my shoulders. It was almost like I knew it in the back of my head all the time, but I just never thought I could do that as a career.”

But for Joye, oceanography was a “safe” idea.

“I look back and I can’t imagine myself in a hospital 18 hours a day,” Joye continued. “I do 36-hour shifts on ships all the time, but it’s different being out on the water versus being inside. I love being out on the water — there’s just something about it that makes you feel alive.”

Joye obtained her undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. at UNC, heading off to San Francisco State University and Texas A&M before coming to the University in 1997 as an assistant professor in marine biology.

Athens was one of the top three places she wanted to go for a faculty position, and not just for the marine science.

“When I was in school in Chapel Hill, the B-52s and R.E.M. were just becoming famous … so there were road trips to Athens to hear music, so I knew the campus and I knew a lot about the University just from hanging around. What really made me come to UGA was when they started this department,” she said. “I went to a basketball school so I’ve learned a lot about football being here, and I actually like football now. I’m a big Lady Dogs fan too.”

A Gulf expert

When a crisis struck the Gulf of Mexico, there was little doubt in Lee’s mind who people would seek to ask for expert advice. Joye’s research of the Gulf suited her for the role.

Lee

“Mandy’s career has been spent understanding those chemical cycles, how microorganisms affect them … and how they’re affected by disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill,” he said. “She is one of those people who makes sure we have all the facts and are not just accepting bland statements.”

“If I could do anything, it would be to map out all the cold seeps in the Gulf of Mexico,” Joye said of her passion for the Gulf. “Every single one of them, and visit them in a submarine and figure out why they’re different. There’s thousands of them. I’ll never get to all of them, but I’m going to do my darndest to get to as many of them as I can.”

The University’s involvement in the oil spill response effort came quickly after Joye got involved, Lee said. But contrary to popular belief, Joye and her colleagues didn’t work in the Gulf for monetary gain.

“It never would have been my goal to be that person, it just sort of happened to be dumped in my lap,” she said. “I have nothing to gain from this. I love the Gulf of Mexico … I want to understand the impact it’s had and the impact it’s continuing to have on the ecosystem. That’s my vested interest — I care. I don’t get paid by anybody to care, I just do.”

It is Joye’s zeal for her work which has found supporters in high places.

“I have the highest regard for Samantha Joye as a brilliant scientist with integrity and the courage to speak openly about her observations and research,” wrote Sylvia Earle, explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society, in an e-mail to The Red & Black. “She embodies the essence of what true scientists are — individuals who observe carefully and report honestly what they discover. She should be rewarded, respected, honored and held in high esteem for standing by these principles.”

Earle

Bess Ward, a professor of geosciences and biological oceanography at Princeton University, whom Joye worked with during her post-doctoral period, called her a “top notch” scientist.

“There’s been some really exciting work that she’s been involved in,” Ward said. “She’s the right person … It’s a pleasure to work with Mandy Joye.”

Recently, Joye played a main role in continuing the oil spill discussion during the Building Bridges in Crisis: Gulf Oil Spill Symposium hosted on campus in January. The three-day symposium brought scientists, government officials, media and the public together to decipher what the communication problems were and how they can be resolved for the future, should another disaster occur.

“The whole point of it was to achieve something constructive in the disaster,” Lee said. “I think we all agree the communication didn’t occur as it should have.”

“This is an oil spill, but it sort of brought into focus the whole importance of the health of the ocean,” Joye said. “The oil spill has given us an opportunity to talk about these problems … some of which are much more serious and worrisome than the oil spill, frankly.”

Going forward

Though the Deepwater Horizon spill has many unanswered questions in terms of how oil and its components are affecting the Gulf ecosystems, Joye contends there are more pressing questions about humanity and the welfare of the planet that beg answering.

“That oil spill happened because some engineers lost control of the drilling platform,” Joye said. “But why were they drilling there? They were drilling there because the U.S. consumes most of the oil and gas that’s consumed on this planet by human beings, and that includes everyone here at UGA — including me. And as much as we might like to deny it, each one of us is responsible for that blowout.”

Joye said it’s a mindset, a habit that keeps America’s appetite for oil growing. But habits and mindsets can change.

“When I was in graduate school, we walked, we rode our bikes. Nobody drove to school,” she continued. “Oil is a finite resource. And at some point, we’re going to have to switch gears and go green. I think this blowout was a call to green power and green energy and green everything for a lot of people.”

It is with this belief that she moves ahead, trying to best teach her students, and her daughter, about the importance the ocean has on lives.

“My favorite, favorite part of my job is being out on the water,” Joye said. “That used to be my absolute favorite part of my job, but now I hate in a way being out on the water because I have a little kid. I really miss my daughter — I miss my husband too! — when I’m out on the water. I really love teaching people about the ocean and about environmental conservation and sustainability. I think that’s really what I was put here to do, is to inspire people to take conservation seriously and sustainability seriously.”

For Joye, the work in the Gulf, the work to achieve green energy and gain independence from oil never ends. She has stuck with the practice that has remained with her since she was a toddler — never stop asking “why.”

“The biggest concern that I had when I was a student wasn’t that I was going to be unsuccessful, but that I was going to run out of ideas,” she said. “Then I learn later that every experiment you do teaches you something you don’t know. The questions sort of self-propagate. Every question you ask leads to 10 more questions you don’t know the answer to.”