By land or by sea

W&M scientist always goes the extra mile in the water and out

By Michael Hines

Daily Press

April 15, 2002


When Cindy Van Dover was a child, she wanted to have a life exciting enough to impress her children when she grew up.

She went on to be the only woman trained to pilot the submersible that found the wreck of the ocean liner Titanic. She's also been involved with some of the most prestigious scientific expeditions into the ocean and met CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, as well as then-President Bill Clinton.

"I wanted to go have adventures, so I could tell my kids about it," she said. "The thing was, I got so busy that I didn't have the kids."

Van Dover is an assistant professor of biology at the College of William and Mary. She boasts a career that's spanned several years and countless miles. Whether hitchhiking from Maine to Florida or helping guide research expeditions thousands of feet into the ocean, the admittedly reserved "nerd" has made a habit of hitting the trail.

That hunger for adventure has paid off, with Van Dover becoming the only woman trained to pilot ALVIN, a submarine-style vehicle that's done deep-ocean research since the 1960s. She's also become one of the country's most renowned authorities on undersea invertebrates that live near hydrothermal vents rifts in the sea floor surrounded by superheated water.

More than anything, she's lived a life that's exciting enough for her.

Van Dover was born May 16, 1954, in Red Bank, N.J., a few miles from the Atlantic coastline. Her father was an electrical technician who worked for the government, and his technical know-how influenced Van Dover, as well as her two older brothers. Just as important, he instilled a sense of independence in his children.

And he commanded respect.

"He had a voice that I just didn't want to disappoint my dad and hear that tone," she said. "That was affective all through my life."

While Van Dover's father was mechanically oriented, her mother was a nature lover who would point out creatures during family trips to the beach. That was really about all her mom did, though, and Van Dover said that bothered her as a child.

That isn't to say that Van Dover herself was a wild child.

Reserved as a youth, Van Dover continues to display a quiet, subdued demeanor. She said she was your basic good student who took to science early and even got upset when her brother got to take a marine-science class because he was in high school and she wasn't. She got into marine science as the family visited the nearby beach.

What really sealed things was the construction of ALVIN in 1964. Crafted to plumb ocean depths, the submersible had Van Dover seeing stars.

"That, to me, was like going on a rocket ship ... just the idea of going to the bottom of the ocean," she said.

And once she realized that doing well in school could translate into getting out of the house, Van Dover was set. It was the 1960s, and roles for women had begun to change. With growing fervor about women having careers, her mother's stay-at-home lifestyle just wasn't appealing.

"The big thing was to get out of the house and do something," Van Dover said. "I'd heard enough about 'careers' that I wanted one."

By the time she entered Monmouth Regional High School in New Jersey, she had volunteered to be a lab technician for the science class. She took care of the lab animals, like mice, horseshoe crabs and cockroaches.

"It was me being a nerd," she said.

Van Dover's acumen meant taking advanced science courses in a college-oriented curriculum. It also meant joining mostly all-boy classes a situation that really didn't bother her.

"I liked all the boys in the class," she said. "I had crushes on all of them."

While in high school, she earned a summer internship at the Rutgers University marine lab to study how clams washed pollutants out of their systems. When the time came to pick a college, she opted for what she knew and what she'd enjoyed.

"If that was what scientists were like, then I wanted to be one," she said.

She was in the first co-ed class admitted to Rutgers, and she bugged a professor enough to finally get a job as a lab technician in a field station on Delaware Bay. A year later, she got involved in one of the most influential experiences of her life.

A position opened up at a marine lab in Woods Hole, Mass., where ALVIN was housed. Woods Hole is a small town populated mostly by scientists. The research exposed Van Dover to some of the leading marine scientists in the world, an experience that she relished.

"Woods Hole was Mecca," she said jokingly.

The post was only for a month. But after earning her master's degree from the University of California in Los Angeles, she would eventually gain her doctorate from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program in 1989.

First, Van Dover had an ache for adventure.

Hoping to hike the Appalachian Mountains, she went to Maine only to be turned away because regulations wouldn't allow her to take her dog along. So she started a hike down the East Coast and ran into some eccentric folk, like a man who approached her with a shotgun. After convincing the potential assailant that she wasn't a threat to him, the stranger invited her to visit his home. She declined.

She traveled with some friends to Florida, where she ended up at the Fort Pierce Bureau of the Smithsonian Institution, studying the larval ecology of crabs. She followed her then-boyfriend to a job in New York but found an opportunity of her own.

She'd had a budding interest in the growing work involving hydrothermal vents and heard about a trip to study deep-sea biology near the underwater openings. It was the second such cruise and involved several leading researchers. CBS News' Walter Cronkite even visited the ship.

Van Dover came aboard just by asking.

"It was my first cruise, and I was the unemployed girlfriend of a visiting professor," she said. "Nobody knew me from Adam. It still amazes me that I got on that cruise."

She even shook hands with Cronkite.

"That was cool," she said. "That was very cool."

That drive eventually landed her at the Woods Hole/MIT program, where she continued studying the vents.

The big draw for Van Dover was the newness of the hot spots.

"It's cutting-edge science, so it's exciting," she said. "It's like seeing life on another planet. It's just amazing and so beautiful."

Areas near the vents once were thought to be inhospitable to life because of toxic chemicals, high pressures, total darkness and temperatures that can reach 400 degrees Celsius near the vent and 2 degrees just an inch away.

But life was found in 1977, when researchers discovered creatures near vents off the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Several communities have since been found at several hundred hot spots around the world.

One such creature was a crab with large, modified eyes on its back. That hinted that the vents were giving off very dim light that scientists hadn't seen. Van Dover helped verify that the vents were giving off infrared light and that the crab did, indeed, have eyes.

She put out 10 publications in three years involving the vents pretty good, considering that many researchers put out about two in six years but findings were hard to get because scientists had little control over the diving vehicle, ALVIN.

Van Dover decided that she needed to be a pilot.

For three months, she showed the ALVIN managers that she was serious by helping to put together a manual outlining operating procedures. That document had never existed before and was essential for ALVIN to continue.

Her help was convincing, and the day after she earned her doctorate, she began training as a pilot.

The decision wasn't a welcome one to ALVIN engineers. Aspiring pilots usually come in with extensive technical expertise or mechanical training. Van Dover was a biologist who was "just an absolute disaster in math" during high school.

"The training is done by existing pilots. A new person starts as the low man on the totem pole, who has to claw their way to the top," said Barrie Walden, manager of operations and scientific services for ALVIN. "Cindy was at a disadvantage, in that regard. She had to prove everything from scratch."

The nine months of training included learning every electrical component, as well as diving about a mile and a half into the sea with trainers intentionally mucking up operations to ensure that she could handle emergencies. When it was over, Van Dover had become a pilot and was able to see hydrothermal vents all over the world, as she piloted other researchers to their study sites for two years.

She spent a short stint in Alaska for undersea studies. But a desire for a more permanent position and less remote surroundings spurred a new search.

"I was ready to get back into the lower 48," she said.

The assistant-professor position opened up at William and Mary, and Van Dover opted for it.

Her research has since earned her several awards and honors, including a meeting with Clinton. The Clinton administration was conducting a series of talks covering various topics and, during a meeting with space and ocean scientists, Van Dover was one of fewer than a dozen ocean scientists invited. She was even briefly introduced to the president.

Now, Van Dover spends about half her time teaching and half in research. She went on four cruises in 2001. She also teaches two courses and is a mentor to about 13 students.

More than anything, she said, she's found a place where she isn't itching to jaunt off to some new adventure.

"I've never been in any one place for a big amount of time. Four years here is pretty remarkable for me," she said. "I don't feel anxious about moving on."
