Interview: Margie Turrin, Director of Educational Field Programs at LDEO's Hudson River Field Station

Margie Turrin is the Director of Educational Field Programs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Hudson River Field Station. Over a career spanning more than 20 years, the award-winning environmental educator and scientist has designed, managed, and delivered diverse science education and public outreach projects.

She coordinates and leads field-based educational initiatives across K-12, undergraduate, and formal teacher professional development levels.

She works closely with LDEO's Polar Geophysics Group, focusing on communicating complex environmental and polar science to the general public regarding climate change impacts, polar science education, biodiversity, mapping, and human-environment interactions.

She oversees the summer internship program designed for youth to learn about and communicate critical climate shifts happening in the Arctic and Antarctic. And manages community science resources and professional learning workshops for educators to bridge classroom science with real-world field methods like the annual Great Hudson River Fish Count.

1. Tell us about your journey to become the Director of Educational Field Programs and Director of  LDEO's Hudson River Field Station.

My background is in ecology and I have always found that nature is our best teacher so I look for opportunities to connect people to the outdoors, strengthening their relationship with their local environment through hands-on experiences. One of my early projects at Lamont-Doherty involved developing educational resources around The Hudson River Benthic Mapping Project, a New York State funded project to map and categorize the bottom habitats of the Hudson River estuary. That launched my over 25 years of teaching through the Hudson. Lamont-Doherty has a lengthy history on the Hudson rooted in our many years of launching our research vessels out of Piermont Pier. I have been fortunate to continue that legacy through LDEO’s Hudson River Field Station. More broadly, I have worked on projects in Greenland, the broader Arctic, and Antarctica. As Director of Educational Field Programs I look for every opportunity to broaden the public’s understanding of our intricate connection to the natural world around us. 

2.   Did you have any role models?

I have many role models and I continue to add new ones through the various stages of my career. Instead of one main role model I tend to identify specific traits in colleagues, people I meet and those whose works I read, and I find inspiration there. I feel I have moved through many stages and experiences in my life and career and as I learn and grow so does my assortment of role models. I think this is especially true in my work with different communities and groups around the world. Working in the Arctic I have learned a lot from the people there and have tried to bring some of their practices and way of thinking into my life.

3. Running parallel to the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 81), Climate Week NYC September 20–27, 2026, is the largest annual climate event of its kind, bringing together over 900 events and activities across the city – in person, hybrid and online. Each year, business leaders, political change makers, local decision takers, and civil society representatives of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the world, gather to drive the transition, speed up progress, and champion change that is already happening.

The core focus of CWNYC is transitioning away from fossil fuels, climate justice, and mitigating super pollutants like industrial nitrous oxide (N₂O). Do you have any programming prepared for this event?

Climate Week NYC is an incredible event that has such momentum, concentrating so much energy and so many voices into essential conversations about how to create the change that is needed to provide a livable future on our planet. Lamont-Doherty and Columbia’s Climate School have a significant programming investment in the weeks scheduled events and so I have thought long and hard about how to add value through my work. The event falls during an active time of year for our education programming at the Field Station, with scheduled school visits during the week, and community events on Saturdays, so we fold the event into our programming. We provide information on how our local environment is responding to our warming climate as we focus on building climate literacy. During the year we incorporate climate into all of our conversations and programs, and during Climate Week NYC we enhance our messaging to build larger connections. 

4.  In July 2026, New York City experienced its second-most severe wildfire smoke event in modern history, driven by dense smoke drifting from active Canadian wildfires. The historic event blanketed the five boroughs in a thick, hazy plume from July 15 through July 19, 2026, pushing the city's air quality to its worst levels in over three years. Do you have any programming prepared for this event?

Our high school summer internships provide us an opportunity to go a bit more in-depth in the topic of climate impacts. This past summer our programs were operating during this historic situation. Our interns are used to being outside sampling every day, yet the fire canceled our outdoor field time and the students felt a very direct impact. For K12 students, events that happen during their lifetime carry stronger meaning than events from the past, this includes events that have happened just prior to their birth. We have learned to build every negative event we experience together into a ‘teachable moment’ for our youth programs. We do not do this to focus on the negative and enhance climate anxiety, but rather to provide a lived experience that they can use as a reference point and a catalyst for moving us forward. 

5.  The environmental and community impact of data centers in New York centers primarily on energy grid strain, localized air pollution, massive water consumption, and noise pollution. In response to a projected 12 gigawatts of new industrial power demand—largely driven by generative AI—Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a one-year statewide construction moratorium, first of its kind in the USA,  on new hyperscale data centers utilizing 50 megawatts (MW) or more.  Do you have any programming prepared for this event?

Data Centers and AI have flooded into our lives! Our student interns this summer spent several days reading articles about Data Centers and their impact on local communities, meeting with professionals involved in researching the topic and discussing how to address the challenge in an equitable manner for the communities housing these centers. The cost to local communities in resource use is significant, and the majority of data users for these centers are not local. This is an emerging topic that will not be easily resolved, and we will continue to provide programming around Data Centers, and the larger issue of understanding the ethical uses along with the abuses of AI. 

6. The New York State Board of Regents officially approved a historic mandate requiring K-12 climate education in public schools.  Tell us about this historic mandate and how it impacted your programming.

For many years, I have been teaching high school classes on the climate system, how the polar regions influence Earth’s climate, and incorporating this topic into larger sustainability instruction. I introduce the IPCC report and the National Climate Report as sources of data, and the United Nations COP as a platform for discussions and creating solutions at an international level. I hold up New York State as a state leader on many environmental issues, including climate. However, without the students having regular instruction on climate to build foundational understanding, it has been a challenge to do this meaningfully in the time I have with the students.

The addition of climate education to NYS K-12 public schools is a significant win for us all! It isn’t perfect as the mandate came without any new funding or teacher instruction, but it is still an incredible move forward. This new instruction will begin next school year for middle and high school students and move into elementary school the following year, with curriculum designed to cover the drivers, impacts, and solutions for climate change. We already include these topics in much of the work that we do and I see this as an opportunity to build new partnerships with the schools where we can support their teaching with a range of materials and field visits. 

7. Which environmental days do you celebrate with programming?

We put our focus on a couple of environmental days for our programming, including Earth Day, World Oceans Day, and even Antarctic Day! One of our favorite days to celebrate is National Estuaries Week! For almost 25 years, we have partnered with NYS’s Hudson River Estuary Program and the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve to run a large outdoor program that spans the full Hudson estuary called ‘A Day in the Life of the Hudson and Harbor’. This is our favorite school focused program, as it brings school groups of all ages from K-16 out to the estuary, each to their own local waterfront, to study the Hudson as a full system, the physical, biological, chemical and built environment and how they all connect. Close to 5000 participants a year learn about the estuary from the Hudson directly through this event! 

8. Tell us about the annual Great Hudson River Fish Count.

We celebrate two large summer events around the fish in the Hudson River, both are partnership events, where we collaborate across different locations in the Hudson to learn about overall fish diversity and abundance. The first, World Fish Migration Day, Lamont-Doherty organizes annually in late spring with support from the NYS Hudson River Estuary Program. It focuses on the role of the Hudson as a nursery for migratory fish species. The Hudson is recognized as one of the most important fish nurseries on the Atlantic seaboard, welcoming a range of marine migratory species who move into the estuary only to spawn. They leave the juvenile fish behind to feed and mature over their first season before moving on to the ocean.

The Great Hudson River Fish Count is organized by the Hudson River Estuary Program and held at the end of the summer to sample fish species across the Hudson. We have been a strong partner each year in this project. Together, these two large, spatially distributed events give us a wonderful look at the dynamic nature of the Hudson, which is only possible with the broad participation of sampling groups along the Hudson. Each year something new emerges from the data, and as we look across the years we are able to see some patterns and trends.

9. Do you implement Science  & Art projects?  After all, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement of landscape painters celebrating the untamed natural beauty and national identity, often with early environmentalist warnings against industrial growth.

Yes, we do implement Science and Art projects. Art plays a central role in our Field Station! The outside of our Field Station showcases two expansive murals designed by James Kimak, a local artist from Piermont. One mural focuses on the geologic history and one on the environmental history of New York State and our local area. These are wonderful educational pieces that engage people daily as they spend time at the pier.

We have also invited artists in to work with us on different projects over the year, for example, Betsy Franco-Feeney a local Piermont artist and children’s book author and illustrator has participate through City of Water Day in creating art with diatoms with our visitors. She also spent time with our student interns to teach them about how to do science storytelling through art. And, our summer intern group explored your art piece that is currently on display at Lamont-Doherty using it to discuss how art can be used as an invitation to explore further the science that inspired it.

10.  Anything else you would like to add.

Climate change is a significant challenge, and yet we can still create the changes necessary to avoid some of the most extreme predictions, but we need to act now. Normalizing communications about climate and focusing on solutions is important. I have been fortunate to spend time in the polar regions seeing how these amazing places, and the people who live there, are being affected by climate change. This encouraged me to start our summer Polar Climate Ambassadors Program internships in order to inspire, inform and activate youth to join in sharing the challenges being faced in these regions. I believe in youth, and I think through working with them, and providing consistent educational opportunities for all ages, we can create a the changes needed for our future. 

11. How can people reach you and find out about your educational programming?

The best way to reach me is via email mkt@ldeo.columbia.edu. We have many wonderful resources about our programs. I have linked many here, in addition we have many others on the Lamont-Doherty Hudson River Field Station website and on our Polar Science Resources page.