Today’s groundwater professionals face complex challenges, but workforce development stands as the chief one.
Seth Kellogg, PG, will tackle this ongoing, industry-wide problem as the National Ground Water Association’s 2026 Board of Directors president and first woman to serve in the role. She will receive the president’s gavel in December at Groundwater Week 2025.
“Each membership section faces different challenges with the type of skills needed, who we compete with for that talent, and what those competitive pressures are,” said Kellogg, a senior principal geologist at Geosyntec Consultants Inc. in Pennington, New Jersey.
“Our members have developed strategies and best practices for addressing workforce development, including ways to communicate how critical and personally rewarding the groundwater industry is. My priority is to identify measurable actions that NGWA can take to impact workforce development and work with Association leadership on a clear strategy.”
As NGWA Board Director, Kellogg has worked with NGWA’s Workforce Development Task Force in recent years on tools, ideas, and strategies to recruit and retain individuals working in the industry. While the Task Force has lately discussed what the lifecycle of a groundwater career looks like, Kellogg envisions a five-year workforce development plan with measurable goals so her presidential successors can track progress.
“We want to make sure we’re good stewards of the Association’s resources,” said the 53-year-old who will be NGWA’s 75th president.
Like in 2024, a record 4.2 million Americans were set to turn 65 in 2025 and each year through 2027, according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income’s Retirement Income Institute. Some of these retirees work in the groundwater industry, creating employee turnover that Kellogg and NGWA’s Workforce Development Task Force are closely monitoring.
Kellogg, who will preside over nearly 10,200 NGWA members, is no stranger to speaking about careers in the groundwater industry:
- Spoken at middle school and high school science classes and career days in New Jersey.
- Regularly speaks to students, faculty, and community members as part of the Environmental
Studies Speaker Series at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, and coordinates with the university’s
career center. She is a 1994 alum with degrees in geology and environmental studies. - Served on the East Amwell Township Environmental Commission and led community education and
outreach.
“I find that a lot of younger people have a vision of environmental work as saving the whales, so the idea of consulting isn’t immediately appealing to them,” observes Kellogg who earned her master’s degree in geology in 2003 from Indiana University.
Kellogg has more than 31 years of experience assisting government, industrial, aviation, and water supply clients in managing, characterizing, and remediating their environmental liabilities, with the most recent chapter of her career focusing on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) liabilities for Geosyntec Consultants.
Since first learning about PFAS in 2014, Kellogg quickly immersed herself in understanding the class of substances and became an industry leader in evaluating and managing PFAS by:
- Co-authoring the first best practices guidance for NGWA in 2017 (Groundwater and PFAS: State of
Knowledge and Practice) and facilitating the first NGWA “PFAS in Groundwater” workshop in 2018 - Authoring or co-authoring peer-reviewed articles or conference presentations on PFAS characterization and remediation
- Frequently educating regulators and industry professionals on the unique challenges of characterizing and remediating PFAS
- Briefing congressional and state staff on PFAS science and policy
- Distilling technical information to the media for the public to understand.
Click here to read the full profile of Kellogg in November's 2025 issue of Water Well Journal®.