Seth Kellogg, PG, Champion for Opportunities in the Groundwater Industry

NGWA’s first female president will focus Association leadership on developing a clear workforce development strategy in 2026.

By Mike Price

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.

Seth Kellogg, PG

“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,” says 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,” says 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.

NGWA’s guidance document, divided into eight sections, details how the potentially hazardous compounds interact with groundwater and soil. Among the topics covered are human and ecological impact, fate and transport, field sampling and analysis, legal and regulatory issues, risk communication, and remediation and treatment.

Kellogg was one of 36 volunteers who dedicated 1100 hours over a 12-month period to develop this document.

“Seth has demonstrated industry-wide leadership with her work on NGWA’s PFAS Task Force,” says 2023 NGWA President Jason House, LG, PG. “She is also a frequent attendee to the Fly-In and consistently represents NGWA in the best way possible. She has a long history of working with all the NGWA sections in a thoughtful and thorough manner.”

Drawing Out the Best in the Groundwater Industry

Kellogg with her husband, Chris, daughter Elizabeth, and son Daniel.

Kellogg has seen the groundwater industry evolve since 1999 when she first became involved with NGWA. She co-presented findings from a Superfund cleanup site at the then-Groundwater Summit and was immediately impressed by the welcoming nature of the Association.

“It’s one of the few groups that everybody wants everyone to be better all the time,” she shares. “I’ve never felt a level of competition. I’ve never felt anyone really try to make me feel dumb. We all do different things, and everything we do is complicated.

“But it’s that whole better together mantra. We really want to bring out the best in our industry and encourage each other to be the best groundwater professionals we can be.”

Just the second NGWA president from New Jersey, Kellogg’s desire for the groundwater industry to excel has fueled her service on NGWA’s Board of Directors the past six years and on the Scientists and Engineers Section Board since 2017.

“As the first woman, the thing I desperately want is to not be the last, so I think there’s a level of pressure to make sure that I’m opening up doors for others.”

“We all come at things from very different perspectives [on the Board of Directors]. With the really big personalities, it’s a fun group to be around. We work together as a cohesive unit, and the fact they trust me and have faith I’ll be a good leader for the Association means a lot,” Kellogg says of being selected as 2026 NGWA president.

Kellogg with Bruno Pigott, assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water, at the 2024 Smart Water Policies Fly-In.

“As the first woman, the thing I desperately want is to not be the last, so I think there’s a level of pressure to make sure that I’m opening up doors for others.”

Kellogg found her place in the close-knit industry in 1999 with Robert Schreiber, PE, BCEE, D.WRE, past chair of NGWA’s Scientists and Engineers Section Board and former work colleague at CDM Smith.

Schreiber, the 2023 recipient of NGWA’s Robert Storm Intersectional Cooperation Award, informed her of the Association’s work in the industry and connected her with volunteers and opportunities to serve on committees.

Kellogg, who is an advocate for Superfund reform, jumped at opportunities that she is passionate about, including serving on NGWA’s Superfund Committee. She volunteered on other committees before finding herself involved in the Association’s government affairs work.

Another connection in the industry, David Lipson, Ph.D., PG, vice chair of NGWA’s Scientists and Engineers Section (SES) Board, encouraged Kellogg in 2017 to run for the SES Board. House, the 2023 NGWA president, subsequently nudged her to run for NGWA’s Board of Directors in 2019.

“I witnessed directly her dedication to solving pressing environmental and public health problems as well as her growing involvement as a NGWA volunteer,” recalls Schreiber, now retired.

“Seth is a consummate professional and a true people person who combines strong groundwater-related technical skills—both in the field and the office—with the ability to balance this with her family life.

“Her people skills help her shine as a NGWA leader as she interacts with colleagues from each of the NGWA sections. I’m fully confident that she will succeed marvelously as NGWA’s president in 2026.”

2025 NGWA President Eric Macias, the first to serve in the role from the Association’s Manufacturers Section, says Kellogg provides great feedback. The easy-going Kellogg provides a technically sound, realistic viewpoint.

“I think that gives our board a lot of strength moving forward—to have that leadership with a different perspective,” he says, “and I think hopefully it sets the standard that we have more female involvement in the Association and push that forward.”

PFAS Contamination and Treatment

Kellogg, who presented a workshop on PFAS contamination at the 2025 South Atlantic Jubilee in July, can speak on the topic all day. She supports a scientifically based PFAS regulatory approach.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is currently regulating six PFAS compounds but gathering information on 12,000 of them. The drinking water standard on the six PFAS compounds doesn’t pertain to residential water wells, but NGWA recommends water well owners test and treat their water well systems for PFAS.

PFAS:

• Resist water, heat, and grease, and reduce friction
• They are hydrophobic (water-hating) and lipophobic (oil-hating): properties that are desirable additions to industrial and chemical processes and consumer products
• About 20% of human exposure of PFAS comes from drinking water
• At least 20 states have established drinking water standards for at least one PFAS
• According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are 57,000 PFAS sites.

Treatment technology is rapidly evolving: It used to be primarily carbon and ion exchange and reverse osmosis (essentially all ex situ) and lacking in destructive technology options.

Kellogg began her involvement with NGWA in 1999. As NGWA president in 2026, she wants to be remembered for creating possibilities and opportunities for the industry. She points to the industry’s creativity that will be necessary to find unique solutions to the challenges that lie ahead.

However, more treatment trains are now reducing PFAS into a high concentration solution and applying high energy destructive technology. This will put a dent in the amount of PFAS in the environment instead of remaining in the landfill cycle.

“It’s not your typical environmental contaminant,” says Kellogg, who spent the first 20 years of her career focused on evaluating and remediating sites impacted primarily by chlorinated solvents and metals.

Kellogg educated herself and got involved in projects that helped her be on the cutting edge of PFAS. Her work has grown from understanding how to get good data, which sampling techniques to use, and best ways to install wells to evaluating PFAS in processes and products and assessing business risk.

“It’s not how toxic it is, but what is the environmental liability that you have related to using these products,” she says, “whether that’s reputational liability, whether that’s an actual environmental cleanup kind of liability.”

Her workload currently consists of traditional hydrogeology contaminant-type PFAS projects, litigation projects for PFAS, and projects looking at where PFAS was used and how trace amounts are in processing or water.

“It’s been really fascinating,” she says. “I’m curious. I like to learn new things. It’s been a really fun part of my career.”

Kellogg relishes starting a new site project and what comes with it: Determining how to devise a plan to figure out what’s there. She gets to think outside of the box and is known for her relentless pursuit of a project’s completion. Her boss loves the phrase, “Plan, do, check, adjust,” which Kellogg often finds true.

“Nothing ever works out the way you think it’s going to the first time,” she says. “Yep, we’re going to plan, we’re going to see what kind of data we’re going to get, we’re going to figure out where we were wrong, and we’re going to fix it, and adjust the plan from there.

“As a geologist, you always get something you didn’t expect. Well, that wasn’t supposed to be there, or it was supposed to be there and it’s not, and now, okay, we gotta figure out why.”

At the 2024 Smart Water Policies Fly-In, Kellogg presented on “The Impacts of Evolving PFAS Regulations” following the EPA finalizing the first National Primary Drinking Water Regulation for six PFAS. She met with Bruno Pigott, assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water.

In speaking with congressional and state staff on PFAS, Kellogg hears their questions and learns what information they want. She finds it difficult though to provide simple answers.

“You want to explain to them that this specific PFAS compound causes cancer and that’s a problem, and they’re saying so all PFAS are bad,” she says. “It’s challenging to have them understand that yes, there are a handful of these that are a problem or at least we know are a problem right now, and we need to do something about it.

“But that doesn’t mean that all the others that are critical for industrial uses are necessarily harmful.”

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Kellogg has benefited from numerous mentors over the course of her career. Now she is suddenly viewed as a mentor by others in the groundwater industry, and it feels odd to her. Nevertheless, she accepts it and wants to do her part.

“I was the only woman when I joined the board,” she recalls, “and I’m the only one when I’m leaving it. I know there are qualified and passionate women in this industry and would love to see them step up into the leadership of NGWA.”

As NGWA president, Kellogg wants to be remembered for creating possibilities and opportunities. She points to the creativity the industry possesses that will be necessary to find unique solutions to the challenges that lie ahead such as smart methods to cool artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, water quality challenges, and groundwater sustainability.

“Having NGWA continue to be a place where people can bring those innovative ideas and solve problems together—that legacy,” she says, “is much bigger than I am, but if I can have a small part in it, I will be forever grateful.”

Mike Price is the senior editor of Water Well Journal. In addition to his WWJ responsibilities, Price contributes to the Association’s scientific publications. He can be reached at mprice@ngwa.org, or at (800) 551-7379, ext. 1541.