#1 - Dustin Gardner

Land surveying in scripture and folklore. Also, vampires! Dustin Gardner is a 4th-generation land surveyor licensed in three western states and currently employed as Principal Survey Analyst at Rick Engineering. Despite the family history, Dustin's path to surveying as a career was anything but conventional and followed the attainment of degrees in literature, criminal justice, and mathematics. And before settling on that degree path, he seriously considered the pursuit of a PhD in religious studies, with the aim of becoming a professor of folklore and mythology. Well, academia's loss is land surveying's gain: Dustin published a very interesting essay on the importance of boundary location and land surveyors. In his article, titled "Sacred Boundaries," Dustin was able to firmly connect the profession of land surveying to the surprisingly extensive folklore and mythology of vampires, also known as 'revenants' and that is an interesting aspect of the noblest of trades that certainly never occurred to me.