Valerie Ann Barber
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announces with great sorrow the death of former employee Valerie Ann Barber on October 20, 2024.
Val was born in Winter Haven, Florida, in 1956, the second of four daughters of Russell and Marilyn Barber. She grew up in southern Vermont in a ski lodge turned into a year-round resort by her parents. After high school in Vermont, she went to the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) and received an undergraduate degree in Oceanography. It was in Florida that she started rowing, eventually becoming part of the 1980 US Olympic Rowing Team. Val was inducted into the FIT Hall of Fame in 2013.
When the US didn’t go to the Olympics in 1980, Val pursued her passion for oceanography and landed a position at WHOI in 1981. While at WHOI, she was an integral part of the Warm Core Rings Project, studying the ecology of these very important North Atlantic phenomena. She left WHOI in 1987 and started teaching computer science and coaching basketball, rowing, and cross-country skiing at Cape Cod Academy.
In 1990 she went to Alaska to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), and she honed the baking skills she learned in Vermont by baking part-time for the Alaska Coffee Roasting Company in Fairbanks while in graduate school. After getting her Ph.D., she worked for the School of Natural Resources and Extension at UAF as a forest resource specialist and was the forest products program director until retiring in 2015. She was the author or co-author of more than 30 scientific papers. Between 2004 and 2006, she worked in Sitka to build a new direction for SE Alaska Forest products businesses. Later, she started teaching classes for the Cooperative Extension in Palmer, including log cabin building, birch sap collection and syrup making, collecting wild, edible and medicinal plants, and making salves and tinctures. She was one of the teachers on the One Tree team where they used every part of one tree to harvest birch bark and make baskets and ornaments, carve spoons and create art and sculpture.
In 2008, Val contracted breast cancer and had a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation. In 2013 she earned an MBA from UAF. In 2018, the cancer had metastasized to her bones and was treated with radiation. In spite of the cancer, Val never slowed down and never changed her goals and plans. She operated a food truck, dip-netted for salmon, camped and hiked and maintained a house, garden, dogs, and a significant other. In 2024 she married her long-time partner David Amuktoolik, Jr. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her sisters, Lorraine, Darlene, and Christina, and her beloved nieces and nephews. She was magic and embraced new friends at every single opportunity. From coast to coast and continent to continent, she leaves more friends and family that loved her than there is space to write.
In lieu of flowers, Val suggested donations be sent to Breast Cancer Research or The Democratic Party.
There will be a potluck and Celebration of Life at the UAF Farm in Palmer, AK, on November 9, 2024. A Celebration of Life in Woods Hole will take place on November 23, 2024, from 11 am – 2 pm at the Parish and Community Center of the Church of the Messiah.
Information for this obituary is from Val’s family