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.

Kent grew up in Florida and developed a strong affinity for paddling, sailing, fishing and generally being on or in the fresh and salt waters across the state – particularly the St. Johns River and its tributaries.

After attending Wake Forest University, Kent started his career in public accounting. He later received an M.B.A. from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and worked as an investment banker for JPMorgan and Raymond James in New York, San Francisco and Tampa, FL focused on real estate and corporate finance. Most recently, Kent served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of Biomed Realty Trust Inc., a publicly traded real estate investment trust based in San Diego, CA.

Kent moved to Mount Pleasant with his wife and two children in 2014, partially drawn to the area by the unique water resources of the larger Charleston community. Kent is committed to accessible, clean waterways for all of our community achieved through grassroots advocacy at the local level.

The major decisions in Walker Brock’s life have been driven by proximity and access to recreational water. Devoting his adolescent years to teaching surf and sea kayaking and a graduate of a NOLS Instructor Course, Brock realized his passion for this natural resource at an early age.

However, it was in 2000, while studying at The University of St. Andrews in Scotland, that Walker’s water journey would truly begin. There, he became immersed in the sport of kiteboarding, a passion that would ultimately lead him back home to Long Island, where he would launch SkyWalk Kiteboarding. And although he no longer spends his workdays on the beach, Walker still oversees the retail business and the school, which teaches hundreds of new students each year.

At the request of a former kiteboarding student, Walker left his laid-back life on the coast to begin a career in real estate development at Hirschfeld Properties, a diversified real estate development and management company headquartered in New York. After six years, Walker left his job in the city as Hirschfeld’s Director of Development and decided to relocate full time to Charleston – to be nearer the water.

Walker is the founding principal of Canongate Capital, a diversified investment and asset management company with real estate and small business holdings in the Lowcountry, a place he and his wife, Olivia, now call home.

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.