By Lindsay Key

A five-year career with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) as well as a graduate degree from Virginia Tech helped Master of Natural Resources (Online) alum Daniel Patton ’20 land his dream job at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. The Huntsville, Alabama facility is one of the U.S. government’s largest NASA centers and home to its civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research programs.

Patton started his position as environmental protection specialist there in August of 2021. In this role, he manages the hazardous materials program and the natural resources program. He also supports the air compliance, sustainability, and building inspection programs. His responsibilities include making sure the center is in compliance with permit and regulatory requirements, reporting to local and federal agencies, and assessing recycling activity on site. 

“In my position with DEQ, I was on the regulator side, and with NASA, I’m on the regulated side,” he says with a laugh. Prior to joining NASA, Daniel was a compliance inspector and then a permit writer for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Based in Roanoke, VA, he traveled to sites around the region—including quarries, landfills, and dump sites—to evaluate whether companies and individuals were following state regulations surrounding air and water pollution. 

Leveraging multi-level government experience
In his new role at NASA, he is responsible for reporting on his unit’s activities to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which monitors all federal agencies. Switching from a “state” job to a “federal” job has helped Patton gain a broader understanding of how environmental quality is regulated as a whole. And his experience in Virginia Tech’s MNR program instilled in him the importance of “big picture thinking” when it comes to sustainability. 

Patton weighing a bag of trash as a part of a waste audit
Patton weighing a bag of trash as a part of a waste audit

“The program really encouraged the critical thinking that these types of jobs require,” Daniel says. He recalls one example, in particular, when he was new to NASA’s sustainability group and learning about the recycling program. The group had previously measured success by looking at the divergence rate, or, how much waste is not going into the trash, says Daniel. Through his coursework, Daniel learned that this rate can be deceiving: just because waste goes to recycling does not mean it will be recycled. Once the product makes it to a recycling facility, it can still be turned away if not sorted or cleaned properly. As a result, Daniel suggested a more sophisticated waste audit at NASA, to ensure that the products designated for recycling were actually recycled. “It was a good feeling to be able to contribute to the conversation in this way, based on the training I had received in my graduate program,” he says.

Learning from a community of experienced practitioners
In general, getting a master’s degree is a passport into higher-ranking jobs, especially at the federal level, says Daniel, who received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in environmental sciences with a minor in global sustainability in 2016. But at Virginia Tech, the professional experience of the instructors and students in the MNR program really set it apart from other graduate programs. “In the MNR program I learned from both my classmates and professors; both carry not only their academic experience but also years of real-world, professional experience,” he explains. “You’re learning from people who have twenty years of experience in the sustainability sector, and that really makes a difference.”