
Waterborne Living Legend: From Tiny Watermelons to the Andes Mountains, Amy Ritter’s Unexpected Career
“I didn’t start my career in chemical fate and transport modeling. I was previously working as a Civil Engineer modeling municipal water distribution systems and designing wastewater treatment plants when I joined Waterborne Environmental as a temporary favor to Marty Williams. More than 30 years later, my time with the firm has taken me around the world and working on exposure modeling for 6 continents.”
Renowned worldwide for her investigative and modeling expertise, Amy Ritter, Waterborne’s Principal and Manager, Environmental Modeling and Risk Assessment, has had a career most can only dream about. It has seen her tramping through banana plantations in Costa Rica to rice paddies in China. Through it all, she’s recorded her findings and used them to develop scenarios and models employed by regulatory agencies and universities around the world.
Born in Sacramento, California to Minnesota transplant parents, Amy developed an appreciation for nature at an early age. “My grandmothers were very into bird watching, which is where I first picked it up,” she says of her lifelong hobby. “I’ve always loved to be immersed in nature and spent most of my summers at lakes in Minnesota and early years going to the beach in Carmel, California. I try to spend as little time as possible indoors. Growing up, my family loved to go hiking and birdwatching around our home in California and later Pennsylvania, and many of our vacations incorporated nature outings.”
A degree in Civil Engineering with an emphasis on Hydraulics from Purdue University led to Amy’s first job at Camp Dresser McKee (CDM Smith today). That’s where she first met Marty, one of Waterborne’s co-founders. “I worked on water system master plans in Northern Virginia and wastewater treatment design.” After she earned her Professional Engineer’s (P.E.) license, she went to Colorado State University to secure her master’s degree in civil engineering with an emphasis on Water Resources Planning and Management. Once she finished her master’s degree, she learned that Marty had started Waterborne and she agreed to a temporary job that has since turned into a decades-long career focused heavily on chemical fate and transport modeling and risk assessment.
“We worked on developing crop scenarios for regulatory modeling before EPA had official crop scenarios. Marty Williams developed a rice model, RICEWQ, before EPA had a rice model. RICEWQ is currently used for higher tier modeling in Europe, Colombia, Peru, and other countries. Creating models and scenarios has been a recurring theme in Amy’s career. Brazil… China… Japan… She’s performed modeling work all over the world. Noteworthy projects include working with Mark Cheplick by creating the crop scenarios and/or testing the platforms that he developed such as the Andean Pesticide Exposure Simulation Tool (ANDES), Norway’s WISPE Model, and the PRAESS Model for Nanjing Institute of Environmental Science in China. She’s updated the CropLife International Ecotoxicology Screening Tool for Assessment of Pesticides spreadsheet model for use in Africa and the Andean countries and modeled bananas in Costa Rica for the “Banana Task Force” as well as countless models on clients’ behalf.
In Waterborne’s early days, Amy was also tasked with different roles. “Originally, I worked on both modeling and surface water field monitoring. I’d spend part of my days out on a boat taking samples and readings that I’d later use to develop site specific scenarios. Our Modeling Team did the surface water monitoring until the EPA stopped requiring groundwater field studies. After that, our Field Team took over the surface water monitoring and I continued with modeling and risk assessments. As much as I miss the outdoors, I don’t really miss the alligators in Florida or the snakes in the rice fields in Louisiana.”
Much of her work has taken Amy around the globe, which has suited her exactly. “I’ve been fortunate to travel around the world on client projects, conferences, or workshops. I’ve been to China and Europe many times for projects. In addition to her client work, Amy has been a sought-after presenter, teacher, and collaborator. For a few years, she had taught RIVWQ modeling at a Rice Workshop in Piacenza, Italy. She has participated in IUPAC risk assessment workshops in China, Colombia, Chile, and Costa Rica. I’ve worked on modeling projects for Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, and South and North America - every continent but Antarctica.”
One of her fondest memories—now—hails from a time she spent working with Bayer on a project in China. As luck would have it, she was in the country for a family vacation when she found out that her client contact was staying at the same Shanghai hotel. He invited her to tour the rice paddies she had modeled, a journey that is forever seared into her memory. “The cab driver was a terrible, crazy driver who wove in and out of traffic at breakneck speeds. He also had all of the windows firmly shut, which didn’t help the air quality created by his chain smoking while the client was showing a presentation of my work on a laptop computer that had been translated into Chinese. By the time we arrived, I was thoroughly car sick.”
Arrive they did and she vividly recalls the warm welcome by the Ag Extension office that conducted a tour of the rice paddies along with paddies that were converted to watermelon patches. “There were fields of tiny watermelons. This was before we had single-serving watermelons in the States, and I was intrigued by these itty-bitty watermelons that were a little bigger than a coconut. The Chinese labeled them ‘family-sized.’ They were very sweet and delicious.” The scientist in Amy was equally intrigued by the field setup. “The rice paddies would drain into ditches that were used for irrigation for shrimp and crab ponds downstream. It was great to see in real life the field-ditch-pond setup that I had modeled. It was surreal."
Amy has continued her love of nature and sports into adulthood. She’s been a member of volleyball teams, women’s golf leagues, and is a member of a recently crowned champion curling team. An avid gardener, Rotarian, PEO, and book reader—she’s a member of not one but two book clubs—Amy stays busy. Travel is a big part of her life and when she’s not heading to destinations unknown for clients, she’s packing her bags for trips with family and friends. Somehow, she also finds time to participate in local wildlife organizations, including leading annual butterfly counts.
In 2024, Amy was named an American Chemical Society AGRO Division Fellow.
Amy Ritter, a living legend indeed!

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