The Unfinished Sentence

Science as covenant — and what it means to rend it

In the summer of 1997, lightning struck me near the summit of a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado.

I don’t remember the strike. I remember the mountain. I remember the sky going wrong. And then I remember a voice — not from below, not from beside me, but from above — the voice of my colleague and mentor Soroosh Sorooshian, speaking to me with the urgency of someone who had something important to say before time ran out.

Lisa. If you want climate change research at the University of Arizona to be truly impactful, you must—

And then I was fully awake. Alive. On the mountain.

He never finished the sentence.

—

I had recently received tenure. I was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona — a campus-wide effort to build something that didn’t yet exist: a world-class, integrated climate change research program. Soroosh was one of two senior faculty who had championed that effort, who had believed it was possible, who had believed, specifically, in me.

When you are a young woman scientist trying to build something new in a field that was not built for you, the people who simply ‘show up’ — who use their standing to say, ‘this person, this work, this matters’ — those people become part of how you understand what science is for.

I carried the unfinished sentence for years. Decades, really.

I told Soroosh about it. I’ve told the story in professional settings and personal ones. It became something between us — a kind of running joke and a kind of sacred text. What were you going to say? What was the sentence? We laughed. We never resolved it. The best sentences, maybe, are the ones that stay open.

But I kept trying to complete it on my own. ‘If you want your work to be truly impactful, you must… publish in the right journals. Secure the right funding. Build the right coalitions. Train the right students.’ All of those answers fit. None of them felt like what the dream was reaching for.

—

People think of science as engineering. Lab benches, instruments, protocols, peer review. The machinery of knowing. And it is those things — I have spent a career inside those things, and I do not diminish them.

But I have also stood at the edge of what we know and felt something else entirely. The places where a question opens into a larger question. Where the boundary between what I understand and what I am being asked to become starts to thin.

Thin places, in Celtic spiritual tradition, are where the distance between the human and the holy collapses to almost nothing. I have found them in old-growth forests, at the foot of receding subalpine glaciers, in the faces of students the moment something shifts. I have found them in science — in the particular quality of attention that genuine inquiry requires, the willingness to be changed by what you find.

This is not how we usually talk about science. But it is, I would argue, how science actually works at its highest register.

There is a difference between a research contract and a research collaboration. A contract says: ‘I will retrieve sediment cores from Site X and deliver data by December.’ A collaboration says: ‘We will selflessly pursue a new understanding of the ocean — and we don’t yet know what it will ask of us.’ The first is about deliverables. The second is about covenant. Both are necessary. Only one is transformative.

The word ‘covenant’ is old. It carries weight I mean to carry. A covenant is not an agreement between parties who remain unchanged by its terms. A covenant is a mutual binding — to a question, to each other, to something larger than either party. You enter a covenant not knowing exactly where it will take you. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

—

In December 2025, at the AGU Annual Meeting, I sat in the front row as Soroosh Sorooshian received the William Bowie Medal — the highest honor the American Geophysical Union bestows. I was past president. Brandon Jones, our president, was on the stage. I was in the audience, watching.

I have sat in that room many times. I know the ceremony. But I did not know how it would feel to watch ‘this’ man walk to that stage.

I could see his face. I have known Soroosh for nearly thirty years. I know what his emotions look like when they move through him. And watching him receive that medal — this man who had spoken to me from above a mountain, who had given me an unfinished sentence to live inside, who had shown up for so many women in our field with the simple, radical act of saying ‘you belong here and your work matters’ — something in me went very quiet.

The Bowie Medal’s citation describes what it honors: ‘unselfish collaboration in research.’

I have been sitting with those four words ever since.

‘Unselfish collaboration in research.’ Not productivity. Not impact metrics. Not citations or h-indices or grant totals. The highest honor in Earth and space science goes to someone who gave themselves — unselfishly — to questions held in common. To the work of building knowledge not as a transaction but as a gift. To the covenant.

Soroosh never finished the sentence. But AGU, in its oldest and most serious ceremony, finished it for him.

If you want your work to be truly impactful, you must pursue it unselfishly, in collaboration, held in trust for the community and for the Earth.

—

A few months after the Annual Meeting, I stood before the AGU Board and offered some reflections on what it means to lead. I said: ‘AGU at its best is an organization where the board, staff, and CEO all hold the same questions — not just coordinate on the same deliverables.’

I was trying to describe the difference between contract and covenant. Between an institution that executes and an institution that ‘asks.’ Between science as engineering and science as — I want to say this carefully, and I mean it — as a sacred act of communion. With each other. With the questions we cannot answer alone. With the planet that holds us all.

The awardees who receive the Bowie Medal, I have noticed, do not talk about how big their ships were. They talk about their mentors. They talk about their students. They talk about the moment a young scientist asked a question that changed the direction of the work, and how they were changed by it. They talk about the covenant.

This is what science is, at its best. Not the extraction of data from an indifferent world. But the practice of showing up, again and again, to questions that are larger than any one of us — bringing our full attention, our best tools, our willingness to be changed — and doing it together.

I was struck by lightning in 1997 and heard my mentor’s voice telling me that impact requires something I have spent nearly three decades trying to name. I think I am getting closer.

It requires this: that we treat our questions as belonging to the community, not to us. That we treat our collaborators as people we are in covenant with, not in contract with. That we understand science not as a transaction between a researcher and a resistant world, but as a thin place — where what we think we know gives way to what we are being called to understand.

The sentence isn’t finished. I don’t think it ever will be. That’s not a problem.

That’s the work.

—

Soroosh Sorooshian is Distinguished Professor and Samueli Endowed Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He received the William Bowie Medal at the AGU Annual Meeting in December 2025. He knows about the dream.