Keramida Environmental Inc.

• Author: Mengle, Rev
• Position: Company Profile

Vicky Keramida came to Indiana from Greece, graduated from Purdue and wanted to teach.

Now she's educating Indiana businesses about groundwater, hazardous waste and other environmental concerns.

Keramida is the owner of Keramida Environmental Inc., an Indianapolis-based engineering and consulting firm. After founding the company in 1988 with the Ontario Corp. under the name Ontario Environmental, Keramida bought the company in 1993.

Now the 21 employees of Keramida Environmental are involved with investigations of Superfund and other polluted properties, cleanup of wastes and remediation of soils and groundwater, air management and pollution control, hazardous-waste management, water-resources management, and environmental assessments and audits.

"I really don't know of any other female-owned environmental-engineering firms in Indiana," she says, "and there are very few of them in the country, because there are not many women environmental engineers to begin with."

After graduating from high school in her native Athens, Greece, in the late 1960s, she wanted to attend college with her older brother.

The family asked the two to go to school near New York, so they could fly back to Greece for holidays and vacations. Keramida and her brother drew a circle on a map, signifying an acceptable radius from the Big Apple. Indiana was at the extreme edge of the circle, but when Purdue was the first school to write them both back, it became their choice.

"We had no idea where we were going," she says. "So we came, and I never left Indiana--just because Purdue was the first school to write us back."

Keramida received her bachelor's in 1973, then continued on to earn a master's in 1976 and a doctorate in environmental engineering in 1979. What was then an emerging field has since exploded because of government regulation.

"When I was in school--and this is not 30, 40 years ago, we're talking about the '70s--there were really two areas, two programs, that you had to worry about: air and water. Two laws. And now, we have an avalanche of environmental laws and regulations. And new ones are coming out every day," she says.

"So what was then a very focused program, and a very limited program, now impacts everything we do in life."

Keramida got her first taste of helping companies abide by environmental regulations by working as a consultant during her graduate years. Still hoping to be an educator, she also taught environmental-engineering classes at Purdue...