We hate to get going with a goodbye, but after 20 years of service at UW—including more than a decade with SEFS!—Margery Cooper will be retiring as our payroll coordinator this month. Her last day in the office will be June 19, and we hope you’ll join us in congratulating her for her many years of service to the school. We wish you great joy (and no more payroll forms) in retirement, Margie, but we will miss you!
From there we’ll launch into some great kudos for the honorees at the SEFS Year-End Celebration on Tuesday, May 23, including Rachel Yonemura as Undergraduate Student of the Year; Caitlin Littlefield as Graduate Student of the Year; Greg Ettl as Faculty Member of the Year; Karl Wirsing as Staff Member of the Year; Ryan Garrison for receiving the John A. Wott Fellowship in Plant Collection and Curatorship; Shelby Pace for earning the Richard D. Taber Outstanding Wildlife Conservation Student Award; Kern Ewing for the Director’s Award for Faculty Service; K.C. Deterling for the Director’s Award for Staff Service; and Loretta Rafay and Robert Tournay for Director’s Awards for Teaching Service. We’ve never had so many amazing nominees, or so many deeply thoughtful nominating letters, and we thank all of you for helping to make the awards such a wonderful part of the Year-End Celebration! (Oh, and we are still working through results from the Silent Auction, but you can expect an email soon, with info about payment and pick-up, if you won any items.)
Kudos to several undergraduate students who, after taking ESRM 458: Management of Endangered Species last winter, published a piece in The Wild Cascades newsletter about their work in the class, “The plight of the cascade red fox.” The course was taught by Professor John Marzluff and doctoral student Kaeli Swift from SEFS, along with Professor Marc Miller from the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, and the student authors include Kyle Barry, Tyler Haas, Patrick Kuo, Emily Newell, Ivy Terry and Suzannah Yu. The Wild Cascades is the newsletter of the North Cascades Conservation Council, and this issue should be available online soon.
Kudos, as well, to a great collaborative project—sponsored by Professors Dan and Kristiina Vogt at SEFS, along with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville and other partners—which won an award at the iSchool capstone night! Five graduate students in the iSchool have been working on an interactive tribal language game, and we have a longer story in the works about this very cool project. Great stuff!
In other news, the College of the Environment announced its annual gift in honor of the graduating class! Based on the recommendation of the Student Advisory Council and a vote by our graduating students, the College will be partnering with the Campus Sustainability Fund to help fund a project at Friday Harbor Laboratories (the College’s marine biology laboratory on San Juan Island) to construct an industrial composting facility, which will handle all of the current food waste production at FHL, reducing their CO2 emissions by 11 metric tons per year. Learn more about the funded project!
We welcome news, stories and events that touch on all aspects of diversity and inclusiveness, here on campus and around the world.
The candidate visits for four faculty searches—soils, BSE/ecohydrology, UW Botanic Gardens director and CINTRAFOR—are now completed (the video of the final UW Botanic Gardens candidate talks should be available shortly).
We now also have a tentative schedule for three candidate visits in the SEFS Director Search:
Candidate #1, June 14 and 15
Candidate #2, June 21 and 22
Candidate #3, June 28 and 29
We will confirm and provide more details about these visits and public talks as soon as they are finalized.
Wildlife Seminar: Done for the quarter
ESRM 429 Seminar: Done for the quarter
SEFS Seminar Series: On hiatus until Autumn 2017
Professor Aaron Wirsing is a co-author on a new paper in Nature Communications, “Top predators constrain mesopredator distributions,” and Michelle Ma at UW News wrote a great release about the research, “Wolves need space to roam to control expanding coyote.”
Aaron’s wolf paper has drawn some other great coverage, including a story and radio segment on KUOW, “Study: To Mitigate Problem Predators, Give Wolves More Space, Tolerance.”
Also, Professor Phil Levin was featured in a story on June 2 in UW Today, “How UW Works: Tips and Tricks from Leading Students and Professors.”
Don’t forget to pass along alumni news, great and small!
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