Students Receive UMaine Edith Patch Awards for Mitchell Center-related Work
Graduate student Brieanne Berry and undergraduate Michaela Murray honored, others named Distinguished Nominees
On Sunday, April 28, 2019, the Friends of Dr. Edith M. Patch held the 14th annual Earth Day Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Dr. Edith Marion Patch, hosted at the Raymond H. Fogler Library. The eight students worked in part on Mitchell Centered-funded projects.
Ecology and Environmental Sciences (EES) major, Economics minor, and Honors student Michaela Murray, received one of two Undergraduate Edith Patch Awards and gave a talk to the audience about her research on sustainable viniculture (cultivation of grape vines for making wine) practices in Maine. She also discussed her prior SEANET research with Caroline Noblet, associate professor in the School of Economics and faculty associate of the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions.
Brieanne Berry, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and member of the Mitchell Center’s Materials Management research team, was also awarded the 2019 Edith Patch Award for a doctoral student. Read more about Berry here.
Distinguished Nominees included undergraduate EES/Economics double-major Kaitlyn Raffier, whose research focus is stakeholder decision-making about dams in New England, and EES Ph.D. candidate Emma Fox, whose research focus is small-scale hydropower technology and decision support tools for stakeholder decision-making about dams in New England. Both were recognized for their research with the multi-disciplinary, multi-state Future of Dams grant. Their nominator, Sharon Klein, is a team member on the FoD project.
Resource Economics and Policy Master’s student Afton Hupper, nominated by associate professor in the School of Economics and the Mitchell Center Tim Waring, was also recognized as a Distinguished Nominee for her work on cooperation in small-scale food purchasing organizations.
Other Distinguished Nominees include EES post-doctoral scholar, Sonja Birthisel, Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology who worked on a prior Mitchell Center project on weed management, Master’s student Melissa Flye who is working with Carly Sponarski on a Mitchell Center project on Atlantic salmon management, and School of Biology and Ecology junior Lucia Guarnieri, who worked on a study in Acadia National Park with Sandra De Urioste-Stone and Allison Gardner that seeks to help visitors reduce the risk of tickborne disease.
The Edith Patch Award is given by the Friends of Dr. Edith Marion Patch each year to graduate and undergraduate women in acknowledgement of distinguished work they have done while at the University of Maine, and in recognition of their promise for future contribution to the fields of science, agriculture, engineering, or environmental education.