>> My name is Maria Parisi Vickers, and I consider myself a professional civil servant.
I was trained at Temple undergrad and law school, and I've exercised my profession
as an attorney for the past 40 years in two areas.
As a deputy attorney general, and later, chief deputy attorney general
with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
And the second phase of my career was with the federal government
at the Environmental Protection Agency, where I began as an attorney and then progressed
to manage and lead a couple of organizations.
In the last few years, in Washington, D.C., where I led a program in the management
of hazardous waste and solid waste.
Basically, making regulations for the entire country in the management of these wastes.
It wouldn't be a single project or one single item, because each day was made up of dealing
with a variety of issues that might come up across the country.
My office was responsible for promulgating the regulations to ensure that hazardous waste
in this country is managed safely.
And so our stakeholders were the general public, the states, Congress, and everyone in between.
So any particular day would find me dealing with a different group of people
and dealing with different issues.
In addition, I also managed the workforce that handled all these issues.
And so, a lot of my time was spending and dealing with management issues
to enable the scientists and engineers who worked
in our program to be as productive as possible.