: .
• 11 honors and awards she received
• Eight graduate committees on which she served for Master’s and Ph.D.
students in Finland, Canada and the United States
• Two boards on which she served: the Pennypack Ecological Restoration
Trust and the Atlantic Estuarine Research Society
And as part of the system of peer review, she reviewed 28 articles by
others for a variety of professional journals, 12 grant or book proposals for
publishers, including National Geographic and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and one White House committee
report on environment and natural resources.
And even this list doesn’t do justice to her impact; she did figuratively
and literally groundbreaking work taking core samples in estuarine sediment
– areas so richly diverse that other scholars generally avoided them as too
complex. The work she did has already become scientific bedrock on which
much other work has been done around the world.
If we picture the land as a wedge coming to a point from left to right, and
the ocean as a wedge coming to a point from right to left, the intersecting point
of balance would be the estuaries in which she was studying – some of the
richest and most diverse areas on earth.
Yet all that was to her just one element of her life, albeit a very significant
one; that was her work. To strive for balance, it should not be allowed to
overwhelm everything else in her life. She worked to have it balanced with a
home life, with family and friends. These connections of the heart were very
important to her.
If I may be so bold, you, dear friends who are gathered here today, are a
diverse group, are you not, with a fairly even representation of science and of
faith (in fact, of several different faiths. And also widely different approaches
to the same faiths). And you are all connected, in one way or another, with
Sherri; and she valued you and your role in her life.
So let’s look for a moment at her life story among her loved ones.
She was born on January 28, 1956, to Ralph and Shirley Haynes Rumer,
a couple who had met at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina – an
institution that figures largely in Sherri’s story later on. Sherri was the first
of four girls. She was followed by Sue, Sandy and Sarah. Although her sisters
were blond-haired and blue-eyed, Sherri was dark-haired and had dark, rather
exotic eyes. She told me once that because of this she thought of herself in
childhood as the “China baby” and always felt an affinity for things Chinese.
Her sisters admired her greatly for her excellence in school and for being
a “model citizen.” Hardworking, intelligent and fun – she was, they say, “a hard
act to follow”!
27