Sydney Laudenslager: Water Resource Engineer,pe.
Mechanical Engineer
Sydney was born and raised in a small woodsy farm town outside of Hershey, Pennsylvania. She grew up among Sugar Maples, and smelly Dogwoods, summer garden vegetables, and Hershey chocolate bars. Her love for water started as an 8-year-old in the swimming pool lanes where she took an affinity for floating on her back, holding her breath, diving backward, and feeling natural. Little did she know, the same water droplets that pooled together for lap swimming would be the life-long binding force for friendships, knowledge, passions, exploration, and inspiration for her future.
Sydney discovered the Golden Ratio, realized a love for biomimicry went on to study Water Resource Engineering at Penn State University. Through the College of Agriculture, her passion grew for water’s impact on our food and land resources. Researching nitrogen fixation for healthy soils, designing PSU’s wastewater facility for healthy streams, and harvesting local garden digs for summer BBQ’s were the crux of her water world in college.
In 2014, Sydney moved to California to be at the forefront of water resource management during the driest years of the recent drought. She landed in the San Francisco Bay Area, became a licensed Mechanical and Plumbing Engineer (glamorous!) where she designed plumbing and water reuse systems and for commercial buildings and campuses. Far from her passions and heart’s home in the natural world, Sydney is now stoked to be working (swimming, kayaking, paddling, snorkeling, hot-springing, surfing) with Watershed Progressive where once again water has brought her to the intersection of built environments, native landscapes, wonderful people, and vast ecological diversities of California.
What I love About Water:
Among lots of reasons: Water is weird! Something is usually classified as “weird” when it’s unusual or peculiar or breaks the norm or is unpopular. Well, water is more than normal, it’s very popular, and yet it’s still weird! Water is a non-Newtonian fluid which means that it falls outside the constructs which humans built to understand it. Yet, it is so integral in the creation of everyday life it can’t possibly be an anomaly? A true paradox that continues to stump, amaze, and fascinate me. Water comes and goes in so many different forms and is always changing, absorbing, adsorbing, and yet whether it’s a drop in the ocean, vapor in the clouds or woven into your swimsuit fabric, the same volume remains constant on the planet. It’s such a great role model for allowing us to move in waves, recreate and regenerate, freeze and steam, perspire and cascade with the motions of life.