Julia Pryde

Before leaving her hometown in suburban New Jersey, Pryde graduated from Middletown High School North in 2001, where she was a voracious athlete. She was notably active on her school's swim team.

"She was a tremendous athlete," Ken Sedlak, the school's swim coach told her hometown newspaper, the Star-Ledger. "She had a great personality."

Leaving her comfort zone for the enormous Virginia Tech campus didn't faze Pryde, and she jumped right into one of it's most difficult majors, biological systems engineering. Unlike most college undergraduates, Pryde wasn't shy about speaking out and working to enact a positive change in her environment. Instead of rushing a sorority or joining a sports team, she began working right away to improve the world around her.

"(Julia) was a very passionate person in terms of what she believed in," said her undergraduate and graduate advisor, Mary Leigh Wolfe, who is also a professor in the BSE program. "She was a person to not just talk about things but to actually do something."

Though she was seriously dedicated to her beliefs, Pryde was a lighthearted person at heart. Few will forget her distinct laugh, which resonated long after Pryde had left a room.

"She smiled a lot, had a wonderful laugh," chuckled Wolfe. "She was very interested in the work she was doing, but knew how to have fun too."

As an undergraduate, Pryde dedicated herself to a research project she devised and presented to the Virginia Tech administration. She was interested in improving some of the environment practices that Tech was involved in.

"One was related to the composting of food waste," Wolfe recalls. Pryde believed that the dining halls could enact a composting program in order to dispose of food waste in a more useful and less environmentally harmful way than just dumping into landfills. She worked on each part of the project personally to make sure it was just the way she imagined. "She conducted the feasibility study to determine if Tech could even really do that, both economically and environmentally."

That proposal has now been taken up by a student organization on campus, and is still going through the system.

"Hopefully something more will come of that," Wolfe said.

Pryde was very excited to see the wheels of change turning, and would continuously send Wolfe e-mails updating her on the progress of the proposal.

Not one to ever waste a useful moment, in addition to her studies and her work for the environment, Pryde had a desire to share her passion and knowledge. She joined the non-profit organization SEEDS (Seek Education, Explore, Discover) that is based in Blacksburg. She worked with the group on a variety of projects, and was especially enthusiastic about the work they conducted with local schools, working with children and teaching them about their environment.

After Pryde received her bachelor's degree in the spring of 2006, she decided to stay in Blacksburg and continued working with the BSE department right away the next fall.

She was elected as an officer of the Virginia Tech chapter of SEEDS in 2005. In addition to her master's work, she had already taken one trip with several people, including her mentor, Wolfe.

"We traveled to Ecuador and Peru last summer," Wolfe said, "she was working on a project with me and a lot of other people as well, that is taking place in Ecuador and Bolivia."

The trip was to study watersheds in those impoverished parts of the world, to look for ways to improve the quality of the towns' water.

"She was planning to ultimately work first in South America, then probably in Africa." Wolfe said. "She wanted to really improve the lives of people there by really improving their water quality and the environmental quality of where they lived as well."