No Fish Tale: Hopkins Student Dives Into Water Engineering, Fishing, and Lifelong Friendships Through Study Abroad Program
Joey Stanley, a senior studying environmental engineering, hopes to carry his love of water and the outdoors into his engineering career.
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Nicole Hughes
Associate professor Ciaran Harman (left) Joey Stanley (right).
Joey Stanley is passionate about water. He enjoys fly fishing, boating, scuba diving, and cold plunging—the act of submerging your body in cold water for a short time. That’s why the senior BS/MSE in environmental engineering major jumped at the chance to spend the summer of 2024 interning at Denmark Technical University. DTU’s emphasis on coastal resilience and marine engineering was the perfect complement to his studies at Johns Hopkins.
The opportunity came to him as part of Hopkins’ Study Abroad program. Each year, hundreds of Hopkins undergrads spend a semester or more abroad studying topics related to their discipline. The Study Abroad program allows students to expand their perspective and their skills.
“Academically, it was amazing learning a new style of teaching and going on field trips to big engineering projects in the Copenhagen area,” said Stanley. “Learning what type of challenges engineers face in another country and how different education systems work overseas was super informative.”
Stanley, whose twin brother, Tyler, also attends Hopkins, started fly fishing in his early teens, and devotes much of his free time to the hobby. While studying at DTU, he met people from the Danish and Copenhagen fly fishing communities.
“I was very excited to meet so many people with similar interests," he said. "I loved cold plunging in the ocean, walking around the beautiful city of Copenhagen, and biking in the parks close to campus.” Stanley says he's made lifelong friends from Denmark, Portugal, Australia, Mexico, Spain, and France, among other countries.
"I want to find myself working with water systems, whether that is ocean engineering, drinking water and agriculture distribution, or river restoration.”
Back on campus, Stanley's courses include an aquatic and biofluid chemistry course, a physical and chemical processes class, a coastal remote sensing independent study course, and a water quality engineering course. Stanley has worked with associate professor Ciaran Harman in his Landscape Hydrology lab every year that he’s been at Hopkins.
“We’ve done some really interesting work together using event-based catchment scale hydrology work to estimate different parameters about watersheds,” he said. Harman and Stanley look to answer questions regarding water quality for drinking water sources, external effects such as roads and logging, topography, and land use.
In December 2025, Stanley will present his research and analysis on the critical Bull Run Watershed at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington, D.C. He has also been working on a grant-funded project to analyze the constructed stormwater retention basin beside Olin Hall at the JHU Homewood Campus. He hopes to carry his interests into his engineering career.
"I want to find myself working with water systems, whether that is ocean engineering, drinking water and agriculture distribution, or river restoration,” he said.
Environmental Health and Engineering is a cross-divisional department spanning the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Whiting School of Engineering. This hybrid department is uniquely designed to lead pioneering research and prepare the next generation of scholars to solve critical and complex issues at the interface of public health and engineering. Learn more about our programs.