Tom Hinton is no white-coated lab nerd. He may have a Ph.D. attached to his name (the first in his family) but scratch the surface of this scientist and you find the soul of an adventurer.

Hinton is a scientist at UGA’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. Hinton’s work focuses on the environmental transport of radioactive contaminants, with the goal of being able to make better predictions of their long-term fate. Because the culmination of radiological research is in the prediction of effects on humans and the environment, part of Hinton’s research program is directed toward human and ecological risk analyses. That’s not how Hinton started his career, however.

His undergraduate degree in wildlife biology was meant to land him an outdoor job as a conservation officer. The job market didn’t cooperate, and instead he found himself doing temporary jobs such as species surveys at coal and uranium mines in New Mexico and Wyoming. There he met Ward Whicker, a professor of radiation ecology at Colorado State University. That meeting, more than 20 years ago, changed Hinton’s life, and formed a collaboration that is still going strong today (as evidenced by their co-authored paper in Science last month).

“Ward is such a phenomenal person,” Hinton says. “He liked my work at the mine, told me to get a graduate degree and from there we became colleagues and best friends.”

Hinton and Whicker became life-long adventure buddies. The two like physical challenges and take an annual bike trek that Hinton admits can be both challenging and a bit risky. Last summer they did a seven-day mountain bike trek from Telluride, Colo., to Moab, Utah. Hinton’s hankering for adventure gets most satisfied, he says, in their mountain climbing escapades up Washington’s Mt. Rainer, Wyoming’s Grand Teton, and Japan’s Mt. Fuji.

“Climbing often requires total concentration on something as simple as where to place your foot or hand,” he says, “with dire consequences if mistakes are made. It’s a huge contrast to the multi-tasking, multi-interruptions typical of most days in my science life.”

Hinton also holds adjunct associate professorships in the College of Engineering and Science at Clemson University and the department of radiological sciences at Colorado State. He is a member of an International Atomic Energy Agency forum tasked with providing an overview of the environmental consequences of the Chernobyl accident.

Hinton is also one of eight international scientists, and the only one from North America, who participated in a November review of two laboratories associated with the French enhvirhom research program, which was established to study the effects of chronic low-level radiation on humans and the environment.

Hinton’s office is located on a remote part of the SRS, overlooking a wild and beautiful man-made lake that contains contaminated sediments and yet supports healthy, thriving wildlife populations. Near it is his low-dose-rate irradiation research facility that he hopes can produce the kind of scientific findings that will convince decision-makers to remediate such sites with time and careful monitoring, rather than with the environmentally destructive methods used in the past.

At heart, this scientist hopes his work can help preserve the wildness he loves so well.