Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

Eight students get five minutes each to talk up UMaine sustainability projects… The topics run the gamut from cheesemaking startup businesses and the reuse of material goods to building energy-saving window inserts, weed management on organic farms, and engaging citizen scientists to investigate lake water quality. The tie that binds all the topics is sustainability […]

A key figure in the development of UMaine’s Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions is lauded for “helping lay the foundation for sustainable geography” By David Sims Robert Kates, recipient of the National Medal of Science, winner of a MacArthur “genius prize,” and Presidential Professor of Sustainability Science at the University of Maine, has been awarded […]

Ecological and economic anthropologist Cindy Isenhour’s photographic exhibit at the UMaine Hudson Museum explores Maine’s thriving reuse economy By David Sims UMaine assistant professor of anthropology and Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions associate Cindy Isenhour attended college as a business communications major—with minors in marketing and management, worked as an account executive for an advertising […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.” […]

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 […]