Years ago, plutonium was allowed to contaminate the soil near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal in Colorado. When the wind blew hard, nearby neighborhoods were exposed to invisible, potentially toxic, radiation. Pouring over weather data and writing elaborate calculations, Jill Weber Aanenson mapped the path of these radionuclides to understand where they went and who might have been exposed. 

With this work in 1995 Jill began her professional consulting career studying radiation and other contaminants in the environment. In recent years, she has collaborated with teams of scientists evaluating sites including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Although she travels to collect data and meet with colleagues and clients, most of her work is done from her home office in the small town of Freeman, South Dakota.

Growing up in Sioux Falls, Jill loved math and science, as well as playing basketball and the alto sax. Her teachers recognized her academic talents and encouraged her to look far and wide at colleges, but Jill chose to stay close to home. “I am a momma’s girl,” she confesses, “and I just wasn’t ready to leave yet.”

At Augustana College in Sioux Falls, she was challenged academically. During the summers, she applied for and accepted interships at various national laboratories, including Brookhaven in New York, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. These jobs gave her a chance to see other parts of the country and work with top scientists from around the nation.

Offered a NASA scholarship for graduate school, Jill enrolled at Colorado State University to study radiation and its effects on living organisms. But biology was never her first love. As she progressed toward her degree, she became increasingly interested in the dispersion patterns of radiation and other contaminants in the environment. Answering questions in this arena demanded sophisticated math, which she enjoyed.

Near graduation, Jill began looking at jobs that demanded a physics background, but none of them appealed to her. One of her professors suggested she talk to John Till. A Naval Academy graduate, former submarine commander and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, Till had launched Risk Assessment Corrporation (RAC), a consulting firm, to perform environmental assessments of radioactive contamination.

When she interviewed with him, Jill discovered that Till had a very unusual organization. Wanting to maintain the rural lifestyle he had grown up with and offer that to his family and children, Till lived on his family’s dairy farm in South Carolina. To do his consulting work, he had assembled a virtual team of scientists from around the country. There was no central office. The team communicated by telephone, fax and dial-up modem.

In the interview, Till made it clear that he would not be supervising Jill’s every move. “One of the things that I need from you,” he told her, “is to trust that you’re going to do the work and that I’m going to get what I’m paying for.” It was a very adult agreement, Jill says.

Fortunately, even in her mid-twenties, Jill was not intimidated by this kind of autonomy. Although many people who work from home find establishing boundaries and schedules difficult, Jill made the transition pretty easily. “It’s probably some weird personality quirk of mine,” she says. “I was always one of those kids who did my homework right away.”

The Rocky Flats project was the first thing that Jill worked on with RAC. As she became involved in other studies in other parts of the country, however, she began to think about moving back to South Dakota. She could have moved anywhere, “but I’ve always been a homebody,” she says. “I didn’t want to move in with my folks, but I wanted to be close enough that I could have that relationship.”

In Sioux Falls, Jill also had friends from high school and college that she would run into from time to time, including Jason Aanenson. “We ran into each other at Best Buy,” she says with a smile. “I was buying a new mouse for my computer and he was buying a big TV.”

Jason had grown up in a small town in northern Minnesota. Like Jill, he graduated from Augustana. Then he went to dental school at Creighton University in Omaha. With his small town roots in mind, he was purchasing a dental practice in the town of Freeman about an hour west of Sioux Falls.

As they started dating, Jill hesitated over the idea of moving to Freeman. It seemed small and remote, but she was increasingly committed to the relationship with Jason. When they decided to get married, Jill thought “I’ll figure it out.” Fortunately, her work with RAC gave her the freedom to live anywhere as long as she had a telephone line and an airport relatively nearby.

When she made the move to Freeman in 1999, Jill was still on dial-up, as were most of her associates at RAC. But soon after she moved MediaCom, the local cable company (now Golden West), installed high-speed coaxial cable. Jill was one of the first people in town to sign up. She was also one of the first on the RAC team to get high-speed Internet. “Nobody could believe it,” she says, “because here I was living in this small town.”

For Jill, the social transition to Freeman was more challenging. She traveled frequently and people in the community did not understand her work. “Instead of a physicist, they thought I was a physical trainer,” she says. Others understood that she did science and studied radiation and the environment, so they associated her with Hollywood’s Erin Brockovich.

After she and Jason had their son Tryg, however, Jill’s roots in the community grew deeper. Through Trig’s daycare she met other parents. She started joining community groups and helped promote the construction of a new library. At times, there were tensions over her insider/outsider status in the community.

Nevertheless, Jill likes living and working in Freeman. “I think it’s a lot less distracting,” she says, gesturing out the window to the open yards of her neighbors and the fields beyond the highway. She talks about the noise in urban areas. “I know for  a lot of people that’s white noise, but for me that’s always been very distracting. I like to be focused and able to really concentrate. That’s a lot easier to do in a place like this than it is even in a city the size of Sioux Falls.”

Jill also like the connectedness she feels in Freeman. She doesn’t worry about leaving the keys in the car when she goes to the store. “Everybody knows whose car that is,” she says, “so if somebody other than me gets in and drives away, it’s going to cause a stink.”

In Freeman, she says, people watch out for one another and for the community’s children. “I like having everybody know who I am, and everybody knows who our son is.”