Finding creative solutions and protecting the environment

Eighteen years ago, Jonathan Kimchi ’10 was a first-year Cornell student who knew he wanted to make an impact on the environment by combining his passions for water resources and engineering. These days, he is realizing that goal as the Senior Director of Compliance for Vail Resorts and is responsible for ensuring that the company’s resorts adhere to local, state, and national environmental laws.

In discussing his path from majoring in the Science of Earth Systems (SES) at Cornell to helping manage the very complex operations of a large resort company with 7,200 employees and 42 ski areas, Kimchi repeatedly mentions the interdisciplinary nature of his undergraduate studies.

“What was so enticing when I first started at Cornell stayed true to the end,” Kimchi said. “The SES major is very interdisciplinary. And as a result it gave me the training and the flexibility to think about problems from multiple perspectives and with lots of room for creativity. Once I moved into my career, having such a diverse knowledge base and skill set gave me a valuable foundation for everything I learned after as a professional.”

To illustrate the point, Kimchi mentioned that he was involved in several research projects throughout his undergraduate career. He worked for four years with EAS Senior Research Associate Michelle Goman on a paleoecology project. He also did a senior thesis project with Associate Professor Rebecca Schneider from the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. This thesis project was focused on watershed engineering and roadside ditches.

After graduating, he was hired by EA Engineering, Science, and Technology, Inc, PBC. and selected to be part of their leadership development program. Kimchi credits the things he learned in the classroom at Cornell and the experiences he had doing research with Goman and Schneider as key factors in his selection for this program. “Talking about research was one of the most important components in the interview process,” Kimchi said. “My ability to talk about my research helped me demonstrate to the technical scientists and engineers in the company that I could do water resource engineering and wetland science and wastewater treatment—that I had the interdisciplinary skills needed.”

Kimchi spent eight years with that firm. For the first five years he worked out of their Baltimore office and gathered a broad set of skills and experiences, including water withdrawal permitting for a nuclear power plant, hydropower licensing projects, modeling the thermal plume for coal-fired power plant effluent, stormwater engineering, and stream and coastal restoration. “I got to do a great variety of things in Baltimore and I feel very lucky to have had those experiences,” Kimchi said. Additionally, while he was in Baltimore EA funded Kimchi’s Master’s in Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins.

He then spent three more years with EA in Colorado, where he focused on site characterization, remediation, and environmental compliance. He says those three years rounded out his environmental engineering and consulting skills into a complete package.

After eight years in consulting, Kimchi decided he wanted to see what life was like on the other side of the table. “I had all of this experience approaching problems from a consulting perspective, but I really wanted to understand things from the corporate side of these environmental compliance challenges,” Kimchi said.

Vail Resorts was searching for a Senior Manager of Environmental Compliance and Kimchi applied. He got the job and, seven years later, he is still with Vail Resorts, though now his title is Senior Director of Compliance. “I had the opportunity to help Vail Resorts redevelop and strengthen its environmental compliance program for global scalability,” Kimchi said, “and it felt like the perfect position for me to use all of my previous experiences to build something that could have a real impact.”

Kimchi says these have been some of the most professionally challenging years of his career—in the best way. “Not only do I get to apply all of my technical skills and experience, but I also get to manage and lead people,” Kimchi said. “As a consultant my job was to lay out a plan for people and advise them on how to apply it. As a leader, it is much more complicated and rewarding. In this position it is essential that I understand people and what they need so I can help them grow and develop.”

As Kimchi describes what he likes about his job with Vail Resorts, there are strong echoes of what he has said he found so appealing about his time at Cornell. “The problems I am faced with are complex and they require a broad grounding in many different areas of expertise. Ski resorts are in many ways like small cities with complicated systems underlying everything,” Kimchi said. “Ensuring these systems all mesh together and work efficiently while complying with environmental requirements allows me to take everything I know and to get creative in finding solutions.”

Kimchi stresses that these solutions are the result of collaborations involving management, vendors, and, most crucially, employees. “Without learning from the people who work on all of these systems at our resorts, I could not possibly understand the challenges they face,” Kimchi said. “Their perspective is a key ingredient in formulating any solution.”

“Interdisciplinary” and “creative” seem to be the two key descriptors in Jonathan Kimchi’s academic and professional life. They led him to the SES major at Cornell and continue to shape his work to this very day.