By By KEVIN SCOTT CUTLER
Lifestyles & Features Editor
A Washington native who enjoyed a stellar career living and working in other parts of the United States has returned to her Beaufort County roots.
Priscilla Denney left the bright lights and big cities behind and has resettled in Washington, where she is running her own consulting business, as well as starting an eco-friendly line of products.
Denney attended Washington High School for one year before transferring to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. She is the daughter of Charles and Gladys Johnson. A visit home turned into something more long term, she said.
“I wanted to spend some time with my family, and I decided to relocate my consulting business and work from here,” Denney said.
The path home proved to be a long one for Denney, who began her college education at New York University. She studied abroad at the University of Konstanz in Germany and attended Hunter College and the University of Maryland at College Park. She capped off her education by receiving her master’s and doctoral degrees in environmental engineering from Perdue University.
Denney began her college studies in the music industry.
“Upon graduating from New York University, I realized what I wanted to get up and do every day wasn’t working in the music industry. I didn’t like what I saw there,” Denney recalled. “What would get me up everyday? The answer was the environment. I wanted to earn a good living so I chose engineering, but the environment was my passion and still is.”
Denney wasn’t afraid of hard work, so she crammed two years of classes into one year to prepare for graduate school. She also worked as an intern at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C., where she worked on a project that highlighted how everyday people’s lives were improved through engineering. During that time she met former astronaut Neil Armstrong, whom she described as “a lot of fun.”
Denney later went to work for Dow Chemical in Texas at the largest chemical plant in the world. She focused on the environmental side of a fresh water recycling systems and eventually moved to company headquarters in Michigan.
“I worked on that for a while and then decided to move to Indiana, where I taught statistics, environmental analysis and freshman engineering at Indiana University,” she said. “Then, on a visit home with my son to see my family while I was on the way to Europe, I decided to stay here.”
Since returning to Washington, Denney has put much of her time and energy into her company Priska, specifically developing and marketing her line of cleaning supplies friendly to the environment. She calls the line EcoDaisy, and when formulating the products she uses only purified water, all natural biodegradable surfactant and food grade perfume.
The still-growing line is available in Washington at Carolina Avenue 76, a business owned by her parents. To share her knowledge with the community, Denney has hosted a weatherization workshop that helped participants combat high power bills and she helped to organize a workshop on how to save energy in general.
“I’m trying to find out how eastern North Carolina can utilize my services,” she said. “I’m actively seeking to stay in this area and work with companies, cities and universities consulting on green building.”
She admits now isn’t the best time to try to get a new company off the ground.
“The economy has made this difficult, but I’m still going to stay in the game,” Denney said. “I believe in it.”
For more information about Denney’s company, visit www.priskaproducts.com.