The environment is in his genes: Leo Kerz performs research in Massachusetts
- Sarah Barr
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
by Sarah Barr
Staff Writer
Photos courtesy Clark University
When Rocky Hill resident Leo Kerz was awarded a college internship with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, no one should have been surprised. Working at a place like the DEP is in his DNA.
His maternal grandfather, Livio Dottor, managed movie theaters and drive-ins across Connecticut for decades. But he also served on the board of directors for the Mattabassett District, serving the wastewater needs of New Britain and Berlin for more than 40 years.
His mother Leslie Kerz was a member of the Rocky Hill Open Space and Conservation Commission for four years.
“My mom would be at home reading a 70-page proposal to build a shopping mall next to wetlands. She’d explain it to me. I was like 14 years-old,” said the 2022 Rocky Hill High School graduate. “Mom would take me to a big official review, a public walk-through or visit, and I’d learn what animals live there, what plants are there.”
“Even as a small boy, Leo’s curiosity went beyond playing with toys. He enjoyed cars, trains and trucks like any kid, but he was just as fascinated by how they fit into the world around them,” Kerz said.
“We remember watching him place a toy dump truck on a mound of snow, then step back and examine it from different angles, as if he were studying the whole scene rather than just the toy. Looking back, his curiosity was never really about play, it was about relationships, patterns and perspectives.”
No wonder he went off to Clark University in Worcester, Mass., to major in geography with a minor in audio engineering. He applied for the aforementioned unpaid internship on a whim, securing it in his last semester before graduation a few months ago.
“It was an interesting final project,” he said of the “cool opportunity” to work for “the primary stewards and protectors of my favorite places in Massachusetts like ponds, wetlands, and places to hike and appreciate nature.”
This internship was not about fetching coffee. It was the real thing. For 20 hours a week he collected real data, did real research, got hands-on experience and had a real impact in real time.
He built a data base to house information on every lake and pond in the Bay State in relation to the Clean Water Act.
“I’d study characteristics from how warm the water is to nitrogen and phosphorus levels. Scientists use this to predict the health of fresh water. I would then write code in this programming language called ‘R’,” Leo said.
“I never did this before. It was a huge learning curve. I’m not a data science student,” he added.
That analytical point of view served him well on his senior thesis entitled “Acoustic Monitoring in Restored Cranberry Bogs: Soundscape Relationships to Restoration Age and Landscape Context in Plymouth, Massachusetts.” He refined it when he wasn’t working on his internship.
With that year-and-a-half lab project, he utilized the sound skills passed down from his grandfather. He placed audio devices on trees in restored cranberry bogs and made thousands of recordings of nature to assess the bogs’ health and the impact of human interference.
Leo received the 2026 National Council for Geographic Education Excellence in Scholarship Award and presented his findings at ClarkFEST. He takes pride in being a skilled communicator and served as the managing editor of the university’s student newspaper.
He believes that he has a knack for taking a complex subject and not only boiling it down but making it relatable so people understand how what he does empowers their daily lives. With the internship that meant how everything correlates with clean ground, well and drinking water.
At his current job – an internship at an engineering firm in Hartford called BETA Group, Inc., – it means thinking big picture and explaining potential cost savings to customers.
“I’m doing a tree inventory in Bloomfield. We’re mapping the town-owned trees and their health. People stop to talk to me when they see me measuring trees,” he said.
“They look at it as the town is paying me to count trees. I convert that into what it means to people. I enjoy telling them what I’m doing and why it is important. It might mean that we need to plant more trees to provide more shade and that could mean their electricity bill could go down in a few years.”
As for what he will be doing a few years down the road, he suggested something in natural resources.
“Very loosely, I’m a scientist of some kind. A geographic scientist or maybe environmental scientist,” he said, searching for a proper title.
“But I also care a lot about communication. Especially in the environmental industry. To be able to communicate the impact of certain work and why it is important. I can understand the abstract for the average taxpayer.”
None of this surprises his mother and his father Tony.
“That same way of looking at the world carried him all the way to his research today. What strikes us most isn't just what Leo has accomplished, but why he does it. He has always wanted others to experience the beauty of nature the way he has and that's stayed true from childhood through to today,” his mother said. RHL