Innovation Lessons Shared at Umass Boston Convocation

University of Massachusetts Boston

School for the Environment

Convocation Keynote, May 27, 2025

So I’m in my early 20’s, just received my undergrad degree, and I’m at a floating restaurant just outside Marblehead, about 45 minutes from here, in the middle of the harbor, and I’m staring at a group of people throwing french fries at these giant fish. 

I was still very new to marine science and was watching striped bass that had developed a taste for french fries. Not just french fries, but all manner of pub food. Steak tips, hamburger buns, pickles…you name it. They’d become regulars at this floating restaurant, where tourists tossed them snacks like they were ducks in a pond. I started to wonder—if these fish were staying put for an easy meal, was this affecting their health, did they have higher cholesterol from eating pub food, was it impacting their migration? So I ordered a few tags and launched what can only be described as seat-of-the-pants science.

Soon, experienced researchers and fishermen from all over were asking me about the data and all sorts of interesting questions were coming up. 

That project didn’t start in a lab or with a big grant—it started with curiosity, community, and a basket of fries. 

And that’s been the 1st innovation insight in my career: real innovation is not about resources—it’s about resourcefulness.

And today, I’d like to share a couple of stories—and some innovation insights I’ve picked up along the way—because, as graduates in the School for the Environment, we’re not just studying problems. We’re being asked to solve them.

Whether it's restoring ecosystems, building climate resilience, shaping policy, or figuring out how to make cities more livable, we’re facing challenges that don’t have neat answers. And that’s where innovation comes in.

Tackling these challenges doesn’t just require knowledge—it requires creativity.

It requires breaking the rules, listening to the unexpected voices, and being willing to try that out-of-the-box idea.

That moment at the floating restaurant stuck with me—not just because it led to a decent dataset, but because it cracked something open for me.

It was one of the first times I felt like, maybe this is what science actually looks like.

Not fancy. Not formal. Just curiosity, observation, and the guts to follow a weird idea wherever it led.

And it made me wonder—maybe I wasn’t doing this whole science thing “wrong.”

Maybe I was just wired to approach it differently.

As a kid in school, I loved asking questions. Sometimes annoyingly persistent ones. I loved designing things. I loved chasing ideas that didn’t come with instructions.

But my grades didn’t reflect any of that. I had a hard time focusing. I couldn’t sit still. I got labeled as the kid who didn’t apply himself, who was always off chasing some tangent.

So for a long time, I thought I wasn’t cut out for science.
I thought science was about perfectly submitted homework with neat handwriting, timed exams, and following protocol step-by-step.

I thought my brain just didn’t fit.

It wasn’t until years later, after tagging sea turtles in tropical downpours, or building my own equipment, and running experiments in some of the most unpredictable and inhospitable field conditions imaginable, that I realized:

My brain wasn’t broken.
It just wasn’t built for conformity.
It was built for creativity.

And that’s when everything shifted.
I stopped trying to be the kind of scientist who fits in—and started being the kind who builds new ways forward. The kind who sees “we can’t do that” or ‘you shouldn’t do that’ as a challenge, not a dead end.

That’s become the theme of my work ever since.
Not a straight path. Not a polished plan.
Just a series of stubborn questions, improvised solutions, and a whole lot of scrappy, brilliant chaos.

A few years ago, I had the chance to do something people laughed at, but I couldn’t resist. 

Because it was actually a test: could we fly drones with extreme precision in extreme environments?

This is me flying a hot dog over an active volcano in Iceland. There I was, after hiking for an hour to the top of a volcano, surrounded by a few hundred tourists from around the world, many of whom spoke no English, watching me attempt to fly deli meat over 1,900-degree molten lava.  At the time, it felt ridiculous—like a stunt, but important applied science was happening in my brain. 

You see, understanding the fine-scale movement of large whales is critical to protecting these endangered animals and we do that using tags with sampling rates many times a second, and that need to be recovered for analysis. 

Here’s a video of the old way of tagging whales. You can see how the whale reacts. And that reaction can bias our results, not to mention having a 30-some-ton animal flick its fluke can be dangerous to anyone trying to get close to it.

That test led to a path of thinking that eventually led directly led to this done by my friend Dave at SBNMS—footage of a drone delicately placing a digital tag onto a sei whale without any visible disturbance.   Between 1995 and 2020, there were one hour of Sei whale behavioral data collected.  Between 2021 and 2023, that grew exponentially because we could now keep up with fast-moving sei whales. 

Same mission, but with way less stress for the animal and researchers. And that means better science.

Which lead me to my second innovation insight: 

The line between the absurd and a breakthrough is often hindsight.

This same fine-scale information is vital for other species too, like the oceanic manta ray.

Manta Rays are an endangered species that get entangled in fishing gear or hit by boats, even entangled in the down lines of commercial divers working on oil rigs.   We could really use that fine-scale data to better understand and protect them.

Manta rays are unlike most other marine animals we tag with suction cup tags. They have slippery bodies where existing methods just don’t hold. Researchers had tried various contraptions, but most failed within minutes. 

When I first started thinking about fine-scale manta ray behavior—how they navigate sand shoals, how they forage—I turned to one of the most well-known tools out there: the National Geographic Crittercam.  

When I reached out to use it, I hit a wall:
You have to be an employee or grantee of National Geographic.

The message was clear: if you're not inside the system, you're outside the innovation.

That didn’t sit well with me.

So I did what anyone would do when stuck: I called a few friends, my pal Chad, a grad student at Georgia Tech working on smart dog toys for bomb sniffing dogs at DHS, and my friends at the Georgia Aquarium that take care of Manta, And I asked, “Can we work together to build a new kind of suction cup tag?”

Their answer? Come on down! That got us started. 

We got to work and over several iterations and many failures, produced a tag able to attach safely to these endangered species. This is all made possible though the amazing developments in additive manufacturing, like 3d printing, having access to maker spaces with CNC routers and waterjets meant that the tools we needed were easily accessible.

Anyone with a 3D printer can build it. That opens the door for researchers in places like Indonesia, Mexico, and the Maldives to start gathering fine-scale behavioral data, enabling us to understand and ultimately protect these endangered species like never before. 

Here’s what this taught me: Innovation isn’t about tech, but tenacity. It’s about rethinking the problem, pulling in unlikely collaborators, and being willing to try things that sound a little crazy. 

In hindsight, being told 'no' was the best thing that could’ve happened. It forced us to think differently—not just about the tool, but about access. Open-source design wasn’t just a technical choice—it was a values choice. And now, no one needs permission to study these animals from one organization with the right tool.

Which brings me to my fourth and final insight

But first, let’s take a moment to zoom out.

You’ve now seen three of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my studies and career so far:

• First, real innovation is not about resources—it’s about resourcefulness.

• Second, with the flying hot dog, innovative ideas might seem absurd, right before they are a breakthrough.

• Third, innovation doesn’t have to be high-tech—it has to be high tenacity.  Refused to accept no, and built our own—open source, low-cost, and available to everyone. tags

Innovation isn’t about having the right credentials or the right connections.

It’s about asking better questions, staying relentlessly curious, and building unlikely bridges between worlds that don’t usually talk to each other.

And I’d like to leave you with one parting lesson…oddly enough, about rum. 

A number of years ago, a friend of mine, a gentleman by the name of Errol Harris, had a stroke.  Errol and his wife, Marcella, founded the Dominica Sea Turtle Conservation Organization.  A small grassroots group of farmers and fishermen are the front lines of protecting these endangered species.  Errol was an amazing guy. In his 70’s he was taking on poachers armed with machetes on the beach at night.  Errol was a naturalist in every sense of the word, no phd, just a wonderfully curious and friendly person, a fantastic scientist, who shared his passion for nature with anyone willing to listen, and even those unwilling too.  

However, on an island with low literacy, Errol was the sole person who raised money for this team of people by writing grants.  At one point, he was even funding the organization through his pension.  When Errol passed, the organization needed someone to write grants and organize the scientific data, not wanting to let my friends organization fail, I started volunteering to help. 

Except the island is so small, with a tiny sea turtle population, it isn’t exactly a funding priority for many foundations out there.  Dominica is so small that more people commute on the Redline during rush hour daily.  

Our small team was constantly struggling with unreliable funding sources—we simply weren't enough to support comprehensive conservation efforts.   Then things got more complicated.

Hurricane Maria destroyed nearly everything in Dominica—homes, vehicles, boats, how do we even come back from this?

What if we made a product…. that could be sold at a premium, to support communities, employ our patrollers and farmers, and support our conservation, research, and education efforts?

The answer was obvious: We would create the world's first non-profit rum distillery.

I don't even drink.

Together with our team from around Dominica and volunteers from around the world, set about creating the world's first conservation rum distillery as a long-term community resource to buffer against the threat of climate change.

So our small  non-profit organization started Rosalie Bay Distilling—a "farm-to-glass" operation that distills sugar cane grown by our own network of local farmers into premium craft rum. 

We started out in a bathtub of a hotel, still closed from Hurricane Maria 

And have grown into a facility that employs eight full-time staff and nearly 80 farmers across the country. 

This isn't just about funding conservation—it's about creating a self-sustaining system that empowers people to care for the ocean life they share their home with.

Just like the French fry-eating bass taught us about resourcefulness, the manta ray tag showed us the power of tenacity, or the drone tagging taught about not taking ourselves to seriously,

This rum distillery teaches us that the most powerful innovations can work together to solve lifes biggest challenges.  

These stories may seem worlds apart, but they’re all part of the same truth:

Real innovation doesn’t just solve problems—it creates new possibilities.

Every one of these stories started with failure.
A broken plan. A missing piece. A “no” that forced us to ask a better question.

Innovation doesn’t always look like genius.
Sometimes it looks like duct tape and a well-timed “what if?”

We live in a time when everything feels divided—politically, socially, and environmentally. You can’t scroll through the news without feeling like the world is cracking into a million pieces.

But science?
Science is still one of the rare places where people come together to build something bigger than themselves.
It’s one of the last holdouts of shared curiosity.

And I think that’s what science offers us.
Not just facts and findings—but a way to stay in the room together, even when the world outside is pulling us apart.

Because science—real science—isn’t about certainty.
It’s about humility.
It’s about asking questions, and being willing to be wrong, and trying again.
And right now, that mindset might be one of the most radical, hopeful things we have.

So here’s what I hope you carry with you:

Stay curious.
Ask the question no one else is asking.
Build the thing no one else is building.
And if the system doesn’t work for you—don’t shrink yourself to fit it.
Rebuild it.

Because some of the best science isn’t done in ivory towers.
It’s done in garages. On boats. In small island distilleries. In communities where the stakes are real and the outcomes matter.

I’m proud of you.
And I’m excited for the world you're about to shape.

Let go science.