Department News

In the past year, the Department of Environmental Resources Engineering (ERE) welcomed one new faculty member and said farewell to another. Dr. Yaqi You joined the department in February as an assistant professor. Yaqi works in environmental microbiology and biotechnology at the interface of environmental engineering and environmental health. In the fall, Yaqi will take over teaching fate and transport of contaminants from Dr. Neil Murphy, who retired as a full-time member of the ERE department. However, Neil will continue to engage in research and service on campus and beyond. Our plans for a celebration to recognize Neil’s accomplishments were foiled by a global pandemic, but his contributions to the department, College and community are unparalleled. We are grateful for the time he gave us.

While the last part of the spring 2020 semester was complicated by the move to online instruction, ERE faculty and staff continued to engage in teaching, research and service activities. Dr. Bahram Salehi’s work in producing the first 10-meter resolution Canadian nationwide wetland inventory was selected as the feature paper of 2020 by the “Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing” and the map produced from the project was selected as a winner of the Esri Canada 2020 Map Calendar Contest.

Bahram was also invited by Google to present his wetland research using Google Earth Engine at the Google booth at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco in December 2019.

ERE students again received recognition via numerous awards. Students Cameron Daley, Mallory Delanoy, John Perez, Zaya Reilly-Zipkin and Tim Webb-Horvath received individual recognition at ESF’s Student Organization and Leadership Achievement Recognition (SOLAR) Ceremony.

The ERE Student Chapter of the New York Water Environment Association, advised by Doug Daley ’82, was also recognized as the Student Organization of the Year. Senior Justin Rosenberg was recognized with a Robin Hood Oak Award for Academic Excellence, which recognizes graduating seniors who have demonstrated their knowledge through research, internships, tutoring and in roles as teaching assistants.

Although the end of the academic year did not go as planned, the ERE faculty, staff and students rose to the challenge and completed the semester with true ESF spirit and determination. I am very proud to be part of such a committed group of individuals.

While the academic year may not have ended the way we would have liked, we still have much to celebrate as a department, and I wanted to share just a few of those highlights with our alumni. We have expanded the department with the addition of a major in environmental interpretation and education, to be led by Shari Dann. Dr. Dann comes to ESF from Michigan State University (MSU) where, as associate professor in the Department of Community Sustainability, her work centered on community engagement.

Through the efforts of Dr. Paul Hirsch, we are expanding our online presence through the continued development and expansion of the online graduate certificate in environmental leadership. Colleagues in the Department of Environmental Studies are developing two additional online graduate certificates: one in science and environmental communication and public relations management, which will start in fall 2020, and another in environmental justice and inequality, slated to start spring 2021. By fall of 2021, the plan is for the three certificates plus a capstone experience to comprise a fully-online master of professional studies.

Our faculty continues to excel in their respective fields. Silje Kristiansen was elected vice chair of the International Communication Association’s Environmental Communication division. Valerie Luzadis ’97 began in January as chair of the board of directors of the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). David Sonnenfeld was appointed co-director of research (environment), with the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC), at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Jill Weiss was appointed to the High Peaks Strategic Planning Advisory Group and also received the Robin Hood Oak Award for Outstanding Academic Advisor. Theresa Selfa received a seed grant from Iowa State University Crop Bioengineering Center to conduct research in the Netherlands and Germany in summer 2019 for a project “Enhancing Public Trust and Governance of Gene Editing for Agriculture and Food: A Comparison of Strategies between the EU and the U.S.” She was also a member of the team that was awarded a SUNY Discovery Challenge grant to fund a restoration science center.

We are proud to share that Dr. Lemir Teron was honored with an Unsung Hero award at the 35th annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in Syracuse. Also, after serving on the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology’s Board of Trustees since 2018, he was recently installed as the board’s secretary.

For this year’s department report, it took significant effort to recall and celebrate our high points given these recent few months with the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, know that our sustainable resources management faculty, staff and students have performed exceptionally well with the forced shift from in-class/in-field teaching with an emphasis on experiential learning, to distance teaching and learning. While certainly not the ideal situation, we have made the best of it and have done our jobs despite the challenges. Nearly 40 SRM faculty, including visiting instructors, remotely taught over 50 courses during the COVID-19 pandemic, without fanfare or catastrophe (as far as I know). We just got it done. Getting it done included maintaining research and service programs, albeit in some reduced “holding-pattern” ways. There is only so much time in a day. Our faculty members are all working hard, and for some, they are working harder than at any other time in their professional lives. I am proud and appreciative of our work in SRM and across the ESF campus throughout these past months of extraordinary challenge.

While we have recently been consumed by the impacts of COVID-19, we cannot forget what we accomplished as a department this past year. Consider the following highlights:

We continued to be the second-largest department at ESF, working with over 400 SRM students, and graduating approximately 125. These numbers are consistent with our high-performance levels over the past five years.

It was our good fortune to have hired four new faculty members: Dr. Julia Burton (forest ecosystem management and silviculture); Dr. Endong Wang (construction management); Dr. Mohamad Razkenari (construction management); and Dr. Obste Therasme (sustainable energy management). These folks have brought a dynamic spark to the department that is setting us up for a new, brighter, more impactful future as the management department at ESF.