 I'm Dr. Caitlin Proctor and I'm a Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellow here in the College of Engineering. I was in Europe doing my PhD and I really wanted to come back to the States to build up my United States Network and produce one of the best engineering schools. I had already followed Dr. Welton online, saw that he had a project in this Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowship. In a postdoc you have all of the freedom to do whatever research you want. You can focus on building up your CV with publications, with great writing experience and you have more of a leadership role than you were able to do during graduate school but you don't have all of the responsibilities that new faculty have. So Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunity was really designed so that Dr. Proctor could expand her expertise to study things that she was really interested in studying into gain expertise in areas that she's never been before and she's really had the world at her fingertips while she's been a Purdue. It's really nice to have the freedom in this postdoc. I looked at other postdocs where I'd be tied to a specific project and here I could do what I needed to do for my own professional development as well as work on some really cool projects with some really cool people. A postdoctoral position is meant to be temporary. It is meant to be an opportunity for individuals to expand their expertise, to meet new peoples, to find new collaborators. Dr. Proctor brought knowledge and expertise that we didn't have. She worked with multiple faculty in different schools. She brought that to the students and other postdocs here that didn't have that expertise and she brought that infusion into the projects that we had ongoing. You need a project to start with for this fellowship, right, that the faculty put forward and the project really appealed to what I wanted to learn. In 2018 there was the campfire in Paradise, California and after this fire they found volatile organic compound contaminations in the water. Dr. Walton was called in for this project and we've been working on public assistance, working with the state agencies on how their response process was going. Homeowners are left largely without advice when disasters happen. So my other research in biology and building plumbing, people don't understand what's going on in their own plumbing, they don't know how to manage their plumbing, but they're responsible for it. So part of my goal is to get homeowners to that point where they're aware and can make better decisions for their own plumbing and their own safety. It borrowed from some of my expertise before I was working in building plumbing before I came here and then the project described was building plumbing but learning about the chemistry aspects and the material science that I didn't know yet. So I thought there was some really great potential for synergy there, you know, that only has to be some of my time. The other parts of my time I really had a lot of freedom to explore, learn new skills from all of these great advisors that I didn't have before contribute to their projects with my own skills. I just thought it would be a really great fit and really great opportunity to expand. I have the time to teach so I've been guest lecturing and co-teaching. I've also been writing grants, advising PhD students, so I've really gotten to do a large variety of projects here. And so she's been a true asset to Purdue to everybody who's had contact with her and that's been a remarkable part of the William Gilbert postdoctoral program.