Sightings | Alumni Profile
A Delaware Yankee in Tony Blair’s Embassy p.2
A Delaware connection and a love of the coast
Until his employment at the embassy, Reilly had been associated almost
exclusively with Delaware. Born in Texas on Delaware Day (Dec. 7), he
moved with his parents to the state about a year later. At age 8, he began
attending YMCA Camp Tockwogh on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
He worked at the camp every summer while attending the University of Delaware,
where he received a bachelor of science in plant science, and then served
as the camp’s assistant director for five years afterwards.
Reilly’s years at Camp Tockwogh imbued in him a passion for sailing and a love of the Chesapeake Bay. In efforts to protect the bay, he saw a disconnect between scientists and policymakers, and he went looking for a graduate program that would help him to bridge that gap. That search brought him to the Nicholas School, where he concentrated in coastal environmental management and spent a year studying at the Marine Lab. “There’s no better place to go to graduate school,” Reilly says. “I could look out my office window and see the shrimp boats going by, and I could sail across to Shackleford Banks. And North Carolina has all of the coastal management issues.”
One of those issues is the intersection of development and shellfish safety, and for his master’s project, Reilly studied an oyster bed at the mouth of a creek near Beaufort that had been shut down due to high bacteria levels. Reilly sampled the creek in various locations, mapping bacteria counts using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, identified the source of the problem as neighborhood dogs and other animals using the creek as a toilet, and developed a management plan for the residents to consider. William Kirby-Smith, an ecologist at the Marine Lab and Reilly’s project advisor, says that Reilly’s management plan is cited frequently by the Shellfish Sanitation Section of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources in discussions of how to approach the problem. “It’s a national problem,” says Kirby-Smith, “but the causes are always local and the solutions have to be done locally.”
Reilly took a year off from his master’s program in 1997 to be a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow, working in the U.S. Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He drafted coastal policy legislation, advised the Senate’s policy response to a pfiesteria outbreak in the Chesapeake Bay, and participated in oversight of the Coast Guard and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1999, he met Delaware Gov. Tom Carper, who was then preparing to run for the U.S. Senate. That meeting led to an offer to work in fundraising for Carper’s campaign. “It’s a job I’m thrilled I did once,” says Reilly. “It taught me about a rarely seen but fundamental piece of the political process. The work was eyeopening, but I wouldn’t want to make a career of it.”