Alycia Overbo received her MS in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. In 2015 she was appointed as a research fellow at the University of North Carolina, conducting a systematic literature review on sanitation policy and programming for development of the World Health Organization Guidelines for Sanitation and Health. She joined the PhD program in water resources science at the University of Minnesota in 2016, where she worked on a huge environmental challenge for the State of Minnesota: the fact that we are polluting our streams and lakes with chloride by using road salt, water softener salt, and—Alycia discovered—chloride salts in agricultural applications. Alycia developed a chloride budget for the State of Minnesota through compiling and analyzing various spatial, monitoring, sales, and survey data to estimate contributions of point and nonpoint chloride sources to Minnesota surface waters and groundwater. She then interpreted her findings to identify best management practices for salt use and recommendations for monitoring, research, and policy.
Alycia’s research has become an important part of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s chloride reduction and education practices. It has helped Minnesota better understand on a state level all the sources of chloride impacting our water resources, and revealed that fertilizer and livestock facilities are a much more significant source than was previously known. This prompted the MPCA to develop new resources to address this particular source of chloride. Her work is referenced and highlighted regularly in MPCA’s reports and presentations and has encouraged related research at the University of Minnesota.
In February 2019, Alycia was offered and took a job at the Minnesota Department of Health as the Strategic Initiatives and Communications Planner in the Source Water Protection Unit, and has already been promoted to a supervisor position in the Drinking Water Protection Section, leading special projects on the dissemination of information on complex topics, such as PFAS and contaminants of emerging concern. As a supervisor in this role, she is already providing leadership as the Communications and Strategic Initiatives program expands.