This week, we’re celebrating two members of the Polaris team and recognizing their years of dedication, expertise, and hard work.
Travis Scott joined Polaris during the Deepwater Horizon response, where he spent more than 4 years based in Gulf Shores, AL and New Orleans, LA supporting shoreline assessment, data management and GIS mapping along the Gulf Coast. With a background in GIS and restoration ecology, he quickly became our resident GIS guru and is the ultimate team player, supporting just about every Vessel Grounding and SCAT-related role imaginable over the years.
Travis has represented Polaris on projects across North and Central America and over the Pacific to Micronesia, The Solomons, Indonesia, and beyond, and even spent six weeks aboard a salvage vessel in New Caledonia on one particularly memorable response. Today, he continues to create beautiful maps and spatial tools that support our work and has contributed to nearly every response Polaris has been involved in over the past 16 years.
We’re also celebrating Samantha Iliff and her 3-year anniversary as a full-time employee with Polaris.
Samantha joined us with a background in quantitative ecology, focused on understanding human impacts to coastal ecosystems. She was a natural fit for our NRDA work, where she now serves as one of our in-house statistical and technical analysis leads.
While initially new to the response world, Samantha has since participated in more than 25 responses and drills becoming a top tier SCAT Team Lead and now regularly works on spills as a SCAT Coordinator and SCAT-OPS liaison. These days, she continues to expand her ICS experience and has been working hard helping advance spill science and response capabilities through innovative work with industry partners particularly on drone-based SCAT applications.
Thank you both for everything you bring to Polaris. Your dedication, adaptability, and expertise make our team stronger every day, and we’re excited to see what’s ahead.
Please join us in congratulating Travis on 16 years and Samantha on 3 years with Polaris!
