Over the past 18 years, biologist Dawn Ford has been leading undergraduate research trips from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to San Salvador, Bahamas. A small-town girl raised in rural Horse Branch, Kentucky, Ford never imagined that her lifelong passion for the environment would one day open up the world for others.
Her father was a coal miner and her family owned a tobacco farm. As a girl, when Ford wasn’t in school or tending to outdoor chores, she was furiously scribbling letters to her congressman about ammonia contamination from a nearby stone quarry and how it might affect local wildlife.
Ford is a lifelong environmentalist.
After high school, she studied biology at Western Kentucky University. Then, she pursued a master’s degree in botany at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Prior to graduate school, Ford says, “I’d never been anywhere. I almost quit during my first semester because I was so homesick.”
She’d never been on airplane – let alone out of the country – until 1993, when her graduate professor Hardy Eshbaugh invited her to join a research trip to Andros, a small undeveloped island in the Bahamas. The plane seated only six. Ford remembers sitting directly behind the pilot.