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By Catherine Brown
In July 2025, Chris Gough, Ph.D., then biology professor and graduate program director in VCU’s School of Life Sciences and Sustainability, took on a new role: executive director of the VCU Rice Rivers Center. Located in Charles City County, less than 25 miles from the Monroe Park Campus, the Rice Rivers Center provides students, faculty and researchers the resources to explore climate science, wildlife conservation, wetlands restoration and more.
Gough spoke with us about a notable first-year accomplishment, goals for the coming year and the ongoing need for donor support.
You recently finished your first year as director of the Rice Rivers Center. What are you most excited about?
One of our initiatives was to develop coordinated course offerings for the 2026 summer session. Some courses were already taking place on the main campus and were brought to Rice Rivers Center to be taught in an immersive field environment. The Mapping With Drones course could only be taught at the Rice Rivers Center, where there’s open airspace students can use to learn to fly drones.
The students participating in these classes collected useful data and developed skills that will help them throughout their careers. In the Field Experiences in Anthropology class, for instance, the students extracted core samples from the marsh that dated back more than 1,000 years. The students were able to reconstruct indigenous diets based on the pollen and the environmental DNA that was trapped in the different sediment layers.
That’s pretty cool. What are your goals for the Rice Rivers Center for the coming year?
We’re thinking about how to grow and scale these course offerings to offer them to more students. We also want to continue building relationships with community partners. I can imagine Rice Rivers Center providing drone training, for instance, for our regional workforce. People in real estate, business, architecture or engineering all use drones or UAVs to collect data and information. We could provide the flight space and the training expertise through our faculty.
Our research status is also important. I’d like for us to engage more with partners like The Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA. We have huge amounts of data that are being collected and can be leveraged to inform on-the-ground decision-making and land management.
Ultimately, we want to be a place where we’re breaking down silos and integrating disciplines because the most pressing science questions are interdisciplinary. We’d like to be a model for that kind of science.
How can donor support help the Rice Rivers Center move forward?
Right now, we have more students who want to engage in research than we can support. If we’re doing a study and have opportunities for students to participate, we want to support them. We want to develop and enhance our infrastructure to make that possible. A little bit of support can go a really long way because the Rice Rivers Center already has the world-class facilities to conduct the highest quality science.
Sunday, Sept. 27, is World Rivers Day. Support the Rice Rivers Center to help students do research that protects the James River and surrounding wetlands.