Mary D. Bird Receives Geddes Simpson Award
Contact: Judy Round 581-5104
ORONO, Maine — Mary Bird, instructor in science and environmental education in the University of Maine College of Education and Human Development, has received the Geddes Simpson Award for making a major contribution at the intersection of science and history. Bird will deliver the Geddes Simpson lecture at 3:15 p.m. April 26 in the Treat Room of the Buchanan Alumni House. This will be the fifth Simpson lecture to be presented at UMaine.
The award is supported by the Geddes W. Simpson Lecture Series Fund, which was established at the University of Maine Foundation by the family of Geddes Wilson Simpson. Simpson was a well-respected UMaine faculty member for 55 years, chair of the Entomology Department and editor at the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station. He retired from UMaine in 1974.
Bird’s presentation is titled Living Lessons from a Dead Entomologist: The Educational Legacy of Edith Marion Patch. The public is welcome to attend.
Throughout her career, Bird has consistently sought to explore the complex social contexts within which humans use scientific strategies to make sense of the natural world. This career-long effort has prompted Bird to focus her current research on the work of Dr. Edith Marion Patch, an internationally renowned UMaine entomologist who successfully engaged nonscientists in exploring and understanding complex ecological concepts. Bird’s doctoral dissertation on Edith Patch will be completed this year through the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“I’m deeply honored to be named Simpson lecturer and I am excited to be given this opportunity to celebrate the ways in which University of Maine scientists have built bridges between science and culture,” Bird says. “Americans have a fear-hate-love relationship with science, seeing it as the mysterious and threatening source of many of our problems, as well as the cure for these problems. Both Geddes Simpson and his predecessor, Edith Marion Patch, realized that by observing and investigating the natural world, we could come to understand better our place in it, our roles and responsibilities toward it. Patch and Simpson were respected and revered teachers because they engaged learners in the stories that nature has to tell us, and in the scientific processes required to understand those stories more fully. Educators today, working to increase scientific literacy, have much to learn from the practices of these outstanding individuals.”
Past recipients include David C. Smith, Bird & Bird Professor Emeritus of American History; Kim Sebold, UMaine graduate and faculty member at the University of Maine at Presque Isle; Howard Segal, Adelaide C. & Alan L. Bird Professor of History and Susan Brawley, professor of Plant Biology.