News

Service Learning: Engaging Students for Real-World Problem Solving

Linda Silka gives keynote address at UNE Campuses for Environmental Stewardship Best Practice Showcase When you hear the phrase “student service learning,” you might immediately imagine college kids volunteering time in their community using aspects of their majors—food science, say—spending evenings at a local food pantry serving those gathered for a hot meal to get […]

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Perfect Dam Project

Ph.D. student Andrew Newcomb banks his future on the Future of Dams Only months after completing his bachelor’s degree at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and fresh from a stint as a field technician for the National Aquatic Monitoring Center based in Utah, Andrew Newcomb had no immediate plans to pursue a post-graduate degree. Until, […]

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Coming Home

Newly arrived on the UMaine campus, assistant professor Aaron Strong kept a promise and returned to Maine to help the state meet its sustainability challenges When Aaron Strong was ready to leave home for college, friends and mentors of the 2001 Maine state high school debate champ wished him all the success in his educational […]

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Rising to the Surface for Sustainability Solutions

Postdoctoral researcher Sam Roy is looking up as he looks ahead Sam Roy spent the bulk of his graduate years submerged in the deep time of geology. Then, as a postdoc in search of a career, Roy encountered the sustainability solutions mission of the Mitchell Center, which helped thrust him upwards toward work that might […]

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The Evolution of Aria Amirbahman

The opportunity to join a Mitchell Center citizen-science research project allowed the UMaine environmental engineer to grow as a scientist and teacher Aria Amirbahman is a professor of civil and environmental engineering with specific research interests in aquatic chemistry and contaminant transport. “I’m an engineer by training so I need a structured, systematic way to […]

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Snakebit

Ph.D. student Berlynna Heres cut her research teeth on eastern diamondback rattlesnakes but arrived at UMaine to find out how American eels get along with dams Long before going to graduate school at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, Berlynna Heres was drawn to the field of herpetology—from the Greek word “herpian” meaning “to creep.” […]

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Stories Hatched from the NEST

Formally concluded, work under the New England Sustainability Consortium’s Safe Beaches and Shellfish project continues to build on its success The New England Sustainability Consortium’s (NEST) Safe Beaches and Shellfish project, which began in September 2013 under National Science Foundation’s (NSF) the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program, is now winding down. But […]

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Transitions Beyond a Consumer Society

The Second International Conference of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) co-sponsored by the Mitchell Center took place on the UMaine campus June15-17.  The theme of the conference was “Transitions Beyond a Consumer Society” and was attended by experts and scholars from 20 different countries and included observers from the World Bank, the […]

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Science with Attitude

After graduating from St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont in 2012 with a degree in biology, Connecticut native Emma Fox became an AmeriCorps Environmental Educator at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read more…

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Weekly Dose of Sustainability, with a Dash of Hope

For UMaine Honors College freshman and Ecology and Environmental Sciences major Chantal Bussiere, signing up for the one-credit Seminar in Sustainability Solutions (EES 397) class offered each semester by the George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions was a no-brainer. Read more…

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