ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Tobias Schwoerer
Nordic Skiing and Cross Country, 2000-03
BA, Economics, UAA, 2003; MS, Resource Management, Simon Fraser University, 2007; PHD, Socio-Bioeconomics, UAF, 2017
Hometown: Lenzkirch, Germany

Then…
*Five-time All-American in skiing and first Seawolf to earn All-American in cross country
*First back-to-back UAA Bill MacKay Athlete of the Year
*2003 NCAA West Region champion in 15K classical
*First Team Academic All-American and 2001-02 GNAC Scholar-Athlete of the Year
*2002-03 Dresser Cup winner as UAA Athletics’ top overall academic performer

Now…
*Asst. Research Professor of Natural Resource Economics at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center
*Former researcher at UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (2008-20)
*Lives in Anchorage with wife, former Dimond High School cross country running star Darcy Dugan, and their two sons, Kai (5) and Suvan (8). 

Thinking back now 20 years, what drew you halfway across the world to come to UAA?
“The skiing definitely was the draw – the skiing and the mountains and the wilderness, and the incredible trails. I mean, Anchorage is such an outdoor town. It just offers unparalleled activities and adventures, just like Alaska as a whole, that was the big draw, for sure. And I’m sure that’s the big draw for a lot of Europeans. You just don’t have that big landscape, that low population density, that access to unparalleled wilderness, and with it, winter. So, as somebody who’s just been so engaged in and loves winter sports, it’s an amazing place to be.

What were your impressions of Anchorage when you got here?
“I came a year early (before starting at UAA) in ’99. I got this rental car, and I was driving up International (Airport Road) and just trying to find my way around town, and I was thinking ‘Oh my gosh, what did I do?’ This was my first time in the U.S., and I just could not orient myself. I looked at the street signs, and they were all pointing somewhere, and it did not make sense to me at all. ‘How am I going to get from A to B?’ Because in Germany, street signs usually have arrows that lead in certain directions and say ‘Here is the way to Girdwood, here is the way to Anchorage.’ And I just wound up driving through Anchorage for like an hour and a half.

“But once I got oriented, I ended up spending that summer in Alaska. I had some friends come over and we did some really cool trips, and I just fell in love with Alaska and said ‘I don’t want to go any other place.’ During that time, I looked at UAA and connected with the coaches back then, Bill Spencer and Greg Cress. Greg took me out to Kincaid during the summer and we biked the Lekisch (Trails), and I thought, ‘Wow, what incredible trails they’ve got here.’ And Greg said, ‘Well, this is not the only thing. You can basically ski all throughout town, and then you can go up to the Hillside and ski another 30 kilometers – and you haven’t skied anything twice yet.’ I was just blown away by the amount of possibilities that you had in an urban setting, and you haven’t even touched the surface of what’s out there (beyond Anchorage). And once I hiked up a mountain in the Chugach and looked over everything – just endless – I thought, ‘That’s the place for me.’ “

You grew up skiing competitively, but had you run competitively before you came to UAA? What did it mean to you to excel at both collegiately?
“It was really an opportunity that I didn’t realize existed when I first came over. I’d always loved running, and I’d never run competitively up to that point when I joined UAA. Having the option of doing another sport gives you just another opportunity to explore and try something new, which is always something that I really strived towards. There are some athletes who do one sport and they try really, really hard to get as good as they can at that sport. Well, I already knew I loved cross country skiing, but then I also discovered this other talent and this other joy of running. To go to UAA and have a coach – just for running – was terrific. Running together as a pack, it was so exhilarating. You can go out and run by yourself in the woods, but running on a course in a race … I mean, I can still remember that mile that we ran together at super-high speed where we won the regional championship. We finally broke all these barriers. Seawolf running, in those years it was kind of born. I mean, we were the first to go to the NCAA Championships as a team. I can go back to that minute in my mind where the individual sport became a team sport, and that made it so much more powerful. I would not exchange anything in the world for that feeling. It kind of brings tears to my eyes.”

Which teammates and coaches had a special impact on you?
“Well Coach (Michael) Friess and I didn’t get along at first, to tell you the truth, but I really came to appreciate him. You’ve got to realize, when German unification happened, two worlds crashed into each other. It was the East German world of drill, drill, drill. ‘We’re going to drill you to get fast,’ along with the shots and doping and everything else. And then there was the Western attitude that I grew up in, that was like, ‘No, we’re going to do fair sports. We’re going to go without doping, and we’re going to try to get as fast as possible doing it the right way.’ These two systems just collided and I was caught in the middle in my teenage years. I ended up with East German coaches who were not very good leaders, who were like ‘Drill, drill, drill, and if you don’t keep up with us, you’re out of here.’ That mentality rubbed on me, and when I came over in 2000, I’d been through some pretty rough times in that colliding system. And it took me some time to really get (competition) to be fun again. And I credit it to Friess for really getting me into the right mindset – the right team mindset. That’s really a very critical part of who I am right now, too, just as an individual contributing to society.”

“As a skier, Trond (Flagstad) was just as critical. Both as a coach and a training partner, Trond has such an enthusiastic attitude about sports, and about skiing especially. Back then he was a running coach as well as a skiing coach, which was essential (for me) as a successful dual athlete. And (teammates) Andy Elvester and Eric Strabel, we were all dual athletes, so it made for a strong ski team and a strong running team at the same time.

“Coach Friess was kind of like ‘The Coach,’ you know, the authority figure who would get you on the right track. But then once you’re on the right track, you need a partner who pushes you along and watches out for you in terms of that dual-sport mentality. Once you’re done with running season, you always wanted to ski fast, which was pretty tricky. So there’s tradeoffs along the way and you’re balancing it with school, obviously. That balancing act, Trond was just incredible and always with the right attitude.”

Was there a particular professor or class that inspired you to greater heights?
“Gunnar Knapp has always had a real strong influence on me, and Steve Colt, bringing his expertise on ecology and environmental sciences, maybe even stronger. Matt Berman, as well, was someone who was very supportive from the beginning, and always very cheerful about my path. Those three economics professors certainly made an impact that lasted all the way to my current professional life. In fact, I’m currently writing a big $3 million NSF proposal with Steve, and I’m on another almost $3 NSF project proposal with Matt that’s looking at climate-change adaptation in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Whitehorse. We’re looking at three different hazards – wildfire, rain and winter (weather) events, and permafrost degradation, which is especially an issue in Fairbanks.

“They really had a strong influence. Steve and Matt are not as hardcore theoretic economists; they’re more interdisciplinarians. That gave me a good base to start my own research in an interdisciplinary realm, which has resulted in a really successful track record in terms of getting funding. Everything now is so solution-oriented. Steve was really influential on getting me onto a track of research that looks at sustainable systems.”

You seem to be doing some very important research in your role these days at UAF. Explain what you do at the International Arctic Research Center.
“At the IARC, their focus is really about climate change and asking ‘How do we respond to climate change in the arctic? What are the environmental risks that are coming and that we’re having to deal with?’ That coastal communities, for example, have to deal with. With coastal erosion, with big storms moving in, more extreme weather events that are increasing in likelihood. How do we really respond to those issues like coastal flooding and permafrost degradation, for our infrastructure that’s out there in rural communities especially? How do we plan long term? What are people’s preferences when it comes to relocating communities? I mean, those are really existential life questions. If you’re living a subsistence lifestyle you know where the resources are that you’re harvesting throughout the year, and all of a sudden your home is being swept into the ocean simply because the coastal erosion is taking a hundred feet of the coastline every single year.

“In Point Lay, the water infrastructure that was put in four years ago – costing over $30 million – is no longer functioning because of a cascading series of events with the permafrost. For the state and the North Slope Borough and other boroughs that are pouring millions of dollars into infrastructure, these are really important issues, especially when it comes to health. What are we doing from here on out with water and sewage treatments in these communities if the infrastructure we put in four years ago is no longer functioning? What are the new technologies and how can we improve those so that most people actually adopt it? These are the interesting things I want to find out. How do people really think or how may they behave if they face new technologies that actually can solve some major issues but do have tradeoffs?

“We’ve been working with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power on a proposal for the electrification of the transportation sector in those small communities. A few years ago I looked at how much gasoline do people really use when they do subsistence activities. Nobody had ever looked at this, but now we have a rough estimate of how much they need – thousands of gallons of gasoline for some households, especially those that are really specializing in hunting. With the fluctuating gas prices we had from 2008-10, those households were really hurting, paying six or eight bucks per gallon of gas, with thousands of gallons being used by some households for hunting. I mean, that’s a real impact. And at the same time you have theses communities who are putting in these huge wind turbines, who are now even heating with wind, which is really exciting. Now we’re even seeing electric snow machines on the market. So you can go to these communities and actually charge them with wind. And what happens then? All of those thousands of dollars you spent on fuel – that left the community – all stay in the community. These are the kinds of issues that these communities have struggled with for decades and all of a sudden you have technology there on the shelf, and you can put it into these communities, and they can actually have their own sustainable energy system. This is just so groundbreaking. In the 1940s or ‘50s, if you would’ve said to somebody that they could run their (vehicles) or heat their home with their own electricity that they generated on-site, I mean, it’s like a dream.

“This is sustainability happening, and it’s not going to have the carbon footprint that it used to. It’s so exciting to me to be right in that research arm, to help out communities, to work with them, to figure out these problems. And UAF is not only working at the solution to climate change, but also looking at what does that change actually look like. What are the predictions? What are landscape changes actually going to look like – like that tree line that’s moving up north, or those rivers that are going to break up sooner? What does that mean to (rural) travel and the costs of travel? What does it mean to access for resources? All those questions are where the social system meets with the ecological system. It’s fertile research ground and very fascinating and interesting. Just to be a part of that is really gratifying.”

How did you and your wife meet, and are your boys into skiing now?
“I met my wife at ISER (UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research). She grew up in Girdwood as a runner and a skier. I met her at ISER, but it took us a few years. We were friends for six years and our paths just crossed again. We started dating seriously when I graduated from grad school at Simon Fraser, when I came back and started working as an economist at McDowell Group, the consulting firm in Juneau. She was in Juneau working as a legislative aide, and we started dating, but then she went to the East Coast to get her master’s degree, so it was a little rough going for a few years, having it be long distance. But I got lucky – she’s awesome. And our two boys – Kai is five and Suvan is eight – they’re on skis almost every day, especially in a winter like this. It’s just super awesome to get them on skis and see how fast they start gliding. They really enjoy it and really thrive. In another couple years, I’ll probably convert to being a coach and doing more teaching.”