Conducting research in the field comes naturally for associate professor Tim Beach. A specialist in geoarchaeology, soil research and environmental change, he is fascinated by the historical study of the earth.

"[The earth] is the greatest puzzle in the world," he says. "It's a mirror for us and likely to produce tremendous amounts of information."

Beach is a scientist, but many of his students are not. He's an associate professor in the Science, Technology and International Affairs program -- part of the Walsh School of Foreign Service -- so his students tend to be more comfortable with policy than parasites.

SFS student Allison Shapiro (F'07), for example, studied international relations at the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to Georgetown. She says the professor has an innate ability to break down complex scientific ideas into lay terms, and also reach students who have extensive knowledge of environmental issues.

For Beach, studying the interactions between human civilization and the environment over time provides information about what the earth was once like -- information that is key to understanding the world today.

As the focus on global warming, water problems, loss of biodiversity and other eco-challenges intensifies, linking environmental research with policy is paramount, and Beach is always on the lookout for practical applications of his work.

"Having been in the School of Foreign Service for 13 years, I'm interested in trying to take some kind of policy implications out of something," he says. "My students and colleagues drive me in that direction."

One those long-time research colleagues is SFS associate professor Scott Redford, director of Georgetown's study-abroad program at the McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies in Alanya, Turkey. Beach is teaching an environmental course on the Mediterranean at the McGhee Center this spring semester.

"With Tim, when [the students] study environmental issues, they study pollution and go out and sample water in the bay of Alanya, visit a dam, talk to hydraulic engineers," Redford says. "It's great to have him take students to places like dams and fish farms, so they have interaction with the issues they are learning about."

On an eight-day trip into eastern Turkey, Beach and his students examined the "GAP" Project, a large-scale dam project aimed at harnessing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for sustainable development in the region through means such as irrigation and hydroelectricity.

"We look at the dam project from an environmental science perspective," Beach says. "All the cost benefits, all the environmental impacts, all potential areas for development as well. We want to look at how we can help people, as well as produce long term sustainability."

Another focus of Beach's research, for which he has received numerous awards and grants, is on the relationship between ancient Maya civilization and the tropical forest environment in which they lived. By examining the soils, water and environmental chemistry of Mesoamerica, Beach seeks to explore modern questions about the sustainability of civilization and culture.

Kevin Anchukaitis (F'98) spent a summer studying the interaction between Mayan civilization and the environment with Beach in the Yucatan. He saw firsthand how environments change over time and how water issues, earthquakes and volcanoes interact with civilization.

"These things have had and will continue to have an influence on human populations," says Anchukaitis, who is finishing a Ph.D. in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona.

For Beach, continued research of how the earth evolved can produce critical information relevant to the world today.

"Ultimately, what I think we're interested in doing is to paint that broad picture of the environment over time because we're interested in the past, in what different places were like," he says, "partly for our own interest, and it always has some kind of importance for our own future."

George Vrtis (G'06), a historian by training, credits Beach with getting him out into the field to collect data and studying environmental matters "in a completely different way."

"Historians are trained to spend a lot of time in libraries and dusty archives," Vrtis says. "Here I was getting to [do research] in the Gulf of Mexico, in the savannah of the Yucatan or the tropical rain forests of Belize … it was intellectually incredibly stimulating."