Bill Teng, 71, is a Third Act-Maryland member from Burtonsville, currently serving on the Steering and Communications committees. He was part of the “3.21.23 National Day of Action to Stop Dirty Banks” in Washington, D.C., one of many protests against the four biggest banks that continue to invest in new fossil fuel projects.
Coming to the United States from Taiwan at age nine, Bill grew up in the diverse neighborhood of Bronx, N.Y. His parents had left China for Taiwan just before the Communist takeover in 1949. His father, a civil engineer, worked in Taiwan for a few years before coming to the U.S. to work and attend graduate school. In 1961, Bill and his family also immigrated to the U.S., after navigating through the immigration policy that at the time set national quotas for certain countries. Living in the multi-ethnic Bronx largely spared Bill from overt discrimination, though he remembers being barred from staying at a motel with his family on a trip through New England in the 1960s.
Lure of science
Bill was always drawn to science. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, and studied Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Cornell University. With his interests in photography and geology, he decided to continue at Cornell, which was a pioneer in the new research area of remote sensing, for his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees, also in CEE.
After working as a post doctorate at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, he went on to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he analyzed remote sensing data to monitor crop development and conditions.
But it was at NASA that Bill really found his home in 1989, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. He conducted remote sensing research on soil moisture and led the Science Group at Goddard’s Earth Sciences Data Center in managing the voluminous climate-related data from NASA missions.
As he neared retirement in early 2022, Bill was looking for ways to continue his NASA work via other means. Then he found Third Act. Driven by a desire to leave a more livable planet for future generations – as well as for his almost-100-year young mother – he has purposefully moved from science research to something he thinks is more important: advocacy.
“Imagine a house on fire,” Bill explains. “At NASA, scientists would be studying fire spread models and tipping points for the collapse of the house. At Third Act, we are trying to put the damn fire out. Scientists ought to be out there doing that, too.”
Bill loves the outdoors. He is a runner of marathons and other long-distance races, and an alumnus of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. Both have led to his current research into the relationship between modern society’s disconnect with nature and climate crisis communication that motivates people to act. Toward that end, he and others are working to create short videos on the effects of a warming climate on what matters in people’s daily lives, like coffee production and outdoor activities.
As Bill says, “sooner or later, a warming climate will come for what matters to you.”