Caroline Irwin has a deep-rooted connection to the water and a family legacy of stewardship and sportfishing. Raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, she grew up in a family that valued time on the water and conservation. Her father, Clay, and grandfather, Arthur Smith, founded and operated a sportfishing tournament series from the 1970s through the 1990s, instilling in her an early appreciation for coastal environments.

Caroline moved to Charleston in 2012 for a startup opportunity, where she quickly became involved with Charleston Waterkeeper as a member of the Development Committee. She has remained actively engaged for over a decade and now serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors, supporting efforts to protect and preserve the region’s waterways.

Professionally, Caroline is a sales leader with BD Bard Peripheral Vascular, focused on improving outcomes for patients with arterial disease. She previously held roles with Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson, building a career in medical device sales leadership.

Caroline is married to local fishing captain John Irwin, who introduced her to fly fishing and further deepened her connection to the Lowcountry ecosystem. Together, they are raising two children who learned to fish almost as soon as they could walk, continuing a family tradition centered on conservation and life on the water.

Alys grew up on a farm in Maryland where she early became aware of the importance of protecting clean water when a local landfill polluted nearby wells. She was inspired to seek a career in environmental policy and spent a decade in Washington DC serving as Legislative Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She also served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. House and Senate, handling climate change and other issues before the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Alys is a founding principal of Engage Strategies, a policy and strategic consulting firm based in Mount Pleasant, SC. She leads assessments for prominent foundations, nonprofit organizations, and businesses that guide major federal and state-level investments to achieve policy change in diverse fields such as juvenile justice, marine plastics reduction, prescription drug abuse, education, food safety, asset inequality and state procurement. Alys also helped create and lead the External Affairs department of the Center for American Progress, a nationally influential think tank, managed corporate partnerships at the National Audubon Society, reviewed and recommended environmental grants at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and worked on congressional political campaigns. Alys holds degrees with honors from Wesleyan University and New York University. Locally, she serves as a volunteer Guardian Ad Litem for abused and neglected children. 

Dr. Vijay Vulava is an environmental geochemist with the Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences at the College of Charleston and is also a faculty member within the college’s Masters of Environmental Studies Program.

Dr. Vulava has a broad education in environmental engineering and sciences from three different continents: (i) B.S., Civil Engineering, J.N. Tech. University, Hyderabad, India, (ii) M.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, USA, and (iii) Ph.D., Environmental Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland.

Dr. Vulava’s courses focus on the environmental aspects of earth’s surface environments. The primary focus is on environmental geochemistry and pollutant dynamics in the environment. Several of these courses involve hand-on lab and field activities to give students more feel for various applications of the core environmental sciences.
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Stuart McCluer grew up exploring the waterways of both Virginia and Maine. For high school, he went out west and spent four years at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, which was founded on tenets of an “out of door life and study” and afforded students ample opportunities to access wilderness. During summers, he traveled and volunteered for both Oregon Trout, in Portland, Oregon, and the Center for Wooden Boats, in Seattle, Washington. College and law school were at The University of Virginia and The Washington & Lee School University School of Law, respectively, both of which afforded regular opportunities to return to the Goshen Pass section of the Maury River for fishing, kayaking, and general merriment. Between college and law school he spent two years in Manhattan, which included occasional saltwater fishing junkets via the A train.

After law school and a clerkship with a federal district court judge, Stuart and his wife Lane moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he was in general practice at first, occasionally serving as the City Attorney for Oxford, before starting his own plaintiffs-focused firm in 2007 with partner Bryant McCulley. While in Oxford, he joined the Board of the then-nascent Mississippi Innocence Project, which assists innocent prisoners seeking exoneration and release from prison on the basis of DNA evidence. He also served on the vestry of the local Episcopal church and as the president of the ABA’s local Young Lawyers chapter.

Since 2015, Stuart has lived on Sullivan’s Island with his wife and their three children and continued his practice of representing plaintiffs in multi-district litigation in courts around the country.

The major decisions in Walker Brock’s life have been driven by his lifelong desire to be near recreational water. Walker spent his early life in New York City and on the east end of Long Island, where he spent high school and college summers teaching surf kayaking and leading sea kayaking day trips. Walker completed an Outward Board course in coastal Maine and the following year, the National Outdoor Leadership School’s Instructors Course for kayaking in British Columbia, deepening his passion for and relationship with coastal environments at an early age.

As an undergraduate at The University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Walker became exposed to the then-emerging sport of kiteboarding. He found a kite and taught himself, and subsequently many others, to kitesurf in the North Sea off the beach at St. Andrews. After graduating with an M.A. in Philosophy, Walker returned home to Long Island and launched SkyWalk Kiteboarding, now the oldest kiteboarding school in the Northeast. Although he still overseas the business 25 years later, Walker left the beach to start a career in real estate development, ultimately departing his role as Director of Development at Hirscheld Properties in New York City to move full time to Charleston to start his own firm. Since 2009, Walker has been the Managing Partner of the Canongate Companies, a diversified investment and asset management company with real estate and small business holdings in the South Carolina Lowcountry, New York and the Caribbean.

Walker is a former board Chair of Charleston Waterkeeper, a former Board Member of the national non-profit River Network, and a former Board Member of the Charleston Horticultural Society. He has served in multiple capacities with the Coastal Conservation League and Historic Charleston Foundation, and is a 2018 Fellow of the Riley Institute’s Diversity Leaders Initiative at Furman University. He is involved with the NY chapter of Surfrider Foundation and lifetime member of the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society. Walker is a private pilot, a certified Health and Wellness Coach, and an amateur painter.

After living in Charleston in the 1990s as a student at the College of Charleston, Walker Layne moved back in 2015 following a six-year stint in New York City working in the financial services industry.

Walker returned to Charleston with a newfound perspective on how fortunate we are to have such a pristine coastal environment, how fragile the area is, and how important it is that we have strong organizations in place to ensure that the health of Charleston waterways is preserved for future generations.

He believes that with the proper amount of education, every resident of Charleston can see the need for protecting the health of our waterways and that Charleston Waterkeeper works tirelessly to provide the oversight, stewardship, and guidance needed to accomplish this mission.

Walker is currently a Senior Director in Capital Markets at Walker and Dunlop. His favorite way to enjoy Charleston’s local waterways is stalking redfish through the marsh on a full moon tide.