Val Klump receives Lifetime Achievement Award

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 16, 2022

Contacts: Awards Committee Co-chairs Susan Daniel and Neil Rooney, [email protected]

ANN ARBOR, MI — J. Val Klump, former dean and a professor emeritus of the School of Freshwater Sciences at UW-Milwaukee, received the IAGLR Lifetime Achievement Award—the association's highest accolade—yesterday at its annual award ceremony. Klump is best known for his pioneering work on Great Lakes biogeochemistry, with a focus on how nutrients and carbon are cycled in lakes.

"This is a terrific and unexpected honor," Klump said upon receiving the award yesterday. "It’s a Lifetime Achievement Award, but I have to say it’s not just my lifetime that led to this. It's the lifetimes of lots of people." He went on to acknowledge the countless friends, colleagues, students, and the staff at the university, where he started his career in 1980. "Everyone from the ship's crew, the office staff, the facilities and custodial folks. "Without them, there is no way that I could have been able to have this career."

Klump's research has taken him on, around, and into the lakes he has studied. He was the first person to reach the deepest points of both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan aboard a research submersible in the mid '80s. "I was collecting mud, of course," he explained. And he was on the first team of western scientists to visit eastern Siberia and circumnavigate Lake Baikal, the world's deepest and oldest lake.

In addition to Klump's research contributions and career-long use of innovative technologies, colleagues note his commitment to educating future Great Lakes research, management, and policy leaders. Klump played a leading role in transforming the former UW-Milwaukee Great Lakes WATER Institute into the School of Freshwater Sciences, with an annual enrollment of more than 50 graduate students.

One of those was Shelby Brunner, now with the Great Lakes Observing System. She notes of her former doctoral research advisor, “Val has helped many people, myself included, grow into their potentials by supporting their strengths, giving them his confidence, and unassumingly teaching them valuable skill sets. He is an ideal image of how to lead well and not just manage.”

Klump's commitment to future generations is reflected in his closing remarks, when he stated of his Great Lakes research career, "This has been the love of my life for sure, exceeded only by the love for my family. I'm truly grateful that I've had this opportunity, and I hope and trust that others will have the same opportunity because there can be no greater gift than that."

The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes important and continued contributions to Great Lakes research over a period of 20 years or more.