 |
Speeding is her way of life
by Rachel Jackson
 |
Kate Maher (M.S.’01 CEE), front, has won five individual national championships in women's collegiate cycling. She wants to train for the Olympics after she finishes her doctorate in earth and planetary science.
PHOTO COURTESY OF KATE MAHER
|
Kate Maher (M.S. '01 CEE) races her bike at one speed: faster. Her favorite type of cycling race, the criterium, consists of many laps around a short course. In these races she exceeds 30 mph, flashing by onlookers, brushing handlebars with competitors, and leaning into the never-ending corners that make up the racecourse loop.
Usually, there are crashes. Last summer she broke two ribs but still seems unfazed by the dangers inherent in her sport.
"I like the aggressiveness and risk-taking," she says. "As soon as the gun goes off, you go as fast as you can."
Maher's racing provides a dramatic counterbalance to the slow, careful rhythm of science, which has been her life for the last several years at Berkeley. She first worked on environmental fluid mechanics for her environmental engineering master's and now studies reactive transport modeling of uranium and strontium in groundwater for a doctorate in earth and planetary science.
Maher was an alpine ski racer when she was younger and began cycling at age 12, when her mom took her mountain biking in the hills behind their Ashland, Oregon, home. By the time she entered Dartmouth College as an undergraduate, she was competing in 20-mile cross-country mountain bike races. She turned professional in her junior year, only to lose her sponsorship in 1998 due to budget cuts.
The experience put graduate school into focus, and she came to Berkeley in 1999, she says, primarily because of its outstanding teachers and focus on applications. She concentrated on her research for the first year and a half until, in 2001, some friends convinced her to join the Cal women’s cycling team. She made the switch to road racing and managed to find time between classes and research to earn five individual national championships in a range of events (including criterium and road race), boosting the Cal team to first place finishes in the Road Nationals in both 2002 and 2003.
“I like to win, but I'm not obsessive or malicious about it,” she says. “It’s for fun.” Many engineers are involved in cycling, Maher adds, possibly because of their fascination with the mechanics of a bike.
These days, Maher has scaled back her cycling, but she still manages the occasional 7 a.m. ride with girlfriends. And she hasn’t relaxed the urge to win. After she completes her Ph.D., she may start training for the Olympics. “I’m getting stronger every year.”
|
|
FOREFRONT takes you into the
labs, classrooms, and lives of professors, students, and alumni
for an intimate look at the innovative research, teaching, and
campus life that define the College of Engineering at the University
of California, Berkeley.
Published three times a year by the Engineering Public Affairs
Office. Have a comment about Forefront? E-mail
your letter to the editor. Click here
to learn more about the magazine. |
|
