Sam Brody ’92 has been featured on many media outlets in recent weeks talking about the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey. As director of Texas A&M University’s Center for Beaches and Shores, he’s one of the nation’s leading flood experts. But as he told the Portland Press Herald’s Mary Pols in a recent interview, he had quite a different idea for his future when he arrived at Bowdoin nearly thirty years ago.

“[H]e arrived at Bowdoin College in 1988 thinking maybe he’d be the next great American novelist,” wrote Pols. “But the very first class he walked into changed his life.” That class was an introduction to environmental studies given by professor Ed Laine.  “Ed was an oceanographer and was teaching, essentially, systems planning,” Brody told the newspaper. “That first day I was like, ‘Wow, this is what I want to do.’ ”

Brody majored in environmental studies and anthropology at Bowdoin, wrote Pols, and got his doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “where he focused on city and regional planning.” For the last fifteen years, Brody has been at Texas A&M, where he specializes in coastal marine issues, particularly how smart human development can create natural barriers against flooding.

Brody also described how he and his family stayed dry inside their Houston home during the flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. Read the Portland Press Herald’s profile of Sam Brody ’92.