Susan Brawley Receives Geddes Simpson Award
Contact: Nick Houtman, Dept. of Public Affairs and Marketing, 207-581-3777
ORONO, Maine — Susan Brawley, professor of plant biology in the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences, has received the Geddes Simpson Award for making a major contribution at the intersection of science and history. Brawley will deliver the Geddes Simpson lecture at 3 p.m. April 19 in the Bodwell Lounge of the Maine Center for the Arts.
Her presentation is titled The Pursuit of Science and Science Literacy: Claude Bernard to Prozac. The public is welcome to attend.
Brawley is the principal director of the NSF GK-12 Graduate Teaching Fellowship program which received the New England Board of Higher Education’s 2005 Regional Award for Project Excellence. She was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Marine Biodiversity (1995) and a current member of the steering committee for CORONA (2001-2006), a trans-Atlantic ecological/biogeographic study of the North Atlantic. Her research has been continuously supported by NSF since 1983, and she has had four grants from the National Geographic Society.
“She worked with colleagues to preserve the Campana elm (in front of Hitchner Hall) and to develop a campus heritage map,” says David C. Smith, emeritus Bird and Bird Professor of American History at UMaine. “In spite of a heavy schedule, she has done what needed doing, what any one of us would hope to accomplish as a member of the university community.”
Past recipients include Smith, Kim Sebold (UMaine graduate and faculty member at the University of Maine at Presque Isle) and Howard Segal of the UMaine Department of History.
“It is indeed an honor to deliver the Simpson Lecture this year,” says Brawley. “Geddes Simpson was a prolific and excellent scientist, and his work on plant viruses was keenly analytical. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to explore the importance of scientific method through the words of Claude Bernard, a doctor and a brilliant experimentalist of the 19th Century, some of my own research in marine ecology, and the need to increase general science literacy in the U.S.”
The award is supported by the Geddes W. Simpson Lecture Series Fund which was established 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.
The steering committee is comprised of representatives of active faculty and emeriti faculty, the experiment station and the previous year’s recipient.