Gary L Rowe, Jr., PhD

Gary Rowe began his career with the USGS in the Ohio Water Science Center in 1991 and has over 31 years of experience leading multidisciplinary water-quality projects at local to national scales. Early in his career he oversaw basic water-quality assessments at the field to watershed scale and participated in regional groundwater studies that applied isotopic and environmental tracer techniques to age-date groundwater. In 1997 he was selected as the study chief of the Great and Little Miami River Basins study for the USGS National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program, which featured an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to assessing surface and groundwater quality in the basins and relating observed water quality to stream health. In 2003, Gary was named a NAWQA Regional Program Officer where he oversaw NAWQA water-quality studies in the central United States based in Lakewood, Colorado.

He led the NAWQA Cycle 3 planning effort and was the USGS co-chair of the National Water-Quality Monitoring Council under the Advisory Council for Water Information from 2016 to 2019. In 2017 he was named Program Coordinator of the USGS National Water Quality Program whose major components include NAWQA, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, the USGS-National Park Service Water Quality Partnership, the Urban Waters Federal Partnership, and water-quality projects funded with NWQP cooperative matching funds. From November 2019 to April 2021, he led a team responsible for planning EarthMAP while on detail to the USGS Director’s Office. In May 2021, he returned to the Water Mission Area to become the acting Chief Operating Officer for Water.