Community notes
Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business Jay Friedlander continues to expand the reach of Profit Decoder, an online tool enabling entrepreneurs and small businesses to quickly answer questions about how changes in price and costs will impact their profitability. Jay ran programs for hundreds of small businesses with numerous economic development groups in Maine, such as SCORE, Maine Center for Entrepreneurs, Maine Sea Grant, Mount Desert 365, Sunrise County Economic Council, UpStart Maine, and other organizations. In the fall of 2023, Jay went to Japan where he led the first COA study abroad program to Japan—the Human Ecology Lab in Ōsakikamijima— with Abby Barrows MPhil '18. After leaving Japan, he joined numerous COA staff and faculty at the Society for Human Ecology conference in Tucson, AZ, presenting on COA’s sustainable business pedagogy.
Zach Soares '00 is the new director of audio visual services at COA. Zach is also the deputy Title IX coordinator, as well as a new teaching staff member leading classes in audio production and recording.
In the summer of 2023, Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Sciences Sean Todd inaugurated GOMSIP II, an extension of the original Gulf of Maine Stable Isotope Project that examines the impact of climate change on rorqual diet. He also spent time in Alaska in August, and Antarctica in December, aboard Seabourn's Odyssey and Venture, respectively, working as a polar guide and collecting data for the Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalog.
Richard J. Borden Chair in the Humanities Bonnie Tai is editing a book, whose working title is Writing College into Life, with first-generation, low-income, and BIPOC COA students and recent graduates contributing chapters. Bonnie spoke as an invited panelist on “The Power of Partnerships: Empowering Everyday Resilience,” at a plenary of the Annual Conference of the New England Educational Opportunity Association. She served on the organizing committee and co-facilitated sessions for in-person and virtual meetings on “Critical Exploration: Sharing, Supporting, and Expanding Our Work.” Bonnie co-organized two gatherings (April and September) co-sponsored by Unified Asian Communities, The Jackson Laboratory, and the MDI YWCA, building community with those who identify as Asian-American or Asian heritage and their partners and families. She served as a Hancock County Advisor selecting Community-Building Grantees of the Maine Community Foundation and on the Hancock County Teacher of the Year Selection Committee. Bonnie served on the planning committee for Indigenous People's Day events and performed in the Bar Harbor premiere of Jason Brown, a.k.a. Firefly's Suite for Orchestra—commissioned by the Bangor Symphony Orchestra. In collaboration with the Bar Harbor Fire Department, Bonnie designed and offered workshops for EMS instructors/coordinators on “Skills-based Evaluation” and “Giving Feedback” to area personnel.
This spring, COA Allied Whale researchers were honored to be invited as keynote speakers at the third Humpback Whale World Congress, held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Retired Allied Whale research associate Peter Stevick '81 was recognized as honorary president of the Congress. Allied Whale director of photo-ID research Lindsey Jones MPhil '18 gave an invited talk on the history and current state of humpback whale photo-ID research in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Lecturer in writing Martha Andrews Donovan looks forward each July to the multi-day celebration of the work of Maine writer Ruth Moore (1903-1989) that is held at the Bass Harbor Memorial Library, just a short walk around the corner (or through the woods) from where Martha has lived since moving back to Maine seven years ago. As part of the Ruth Moore Days celebration last summer, Martha (who also serves as a member of the library’s Board of Trustees) read her poem “There”—an homage to Ruth Moore and a musing on place, longing, and what it means to leave and return.
Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany Susan Letcher took two trips to Costa Rica this year. In June 2023 she worked with graduate students in an Organization for Tropical Studies course on a short field project on forest dynamics in the lowlands. In November and December, she returned with Conrad Kortemeier '26 and Lucian Vazquez '25 to measure forest recovery in a reforestation experiment that she and Dr. Alex Gilman (EARTH University, Guapiles, Costa Rica) have been running since 2009. Susan continues to publish high-impact papers in tropical forest ecology, most recently in the journal Global Change Biology. On MDI over the summer, Susan and author Kim Stanley Robinson discussed climate change, science fiction, and the human future as part of the COA Coffee and Conversation series.
Dave Feldman served as India site director and faculty member at the Complexity Global School (CGS) for Emerging Political Economics, held in Mumbai, India. This program, a two-week school for graduate students and professionals, is a new initiative of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), in collaboration with a number of universities in the US and abroad. Dave gave two lectures at the CGS: one on dynamical systems and one on the philosophy and epistemology of modeling. Dave also directed SFI's month-long Complex Systems Summer School in June in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
After 17 years together, manager of alumnx relations Jen Hughes and David Rockefeller Family Chair and T.A. Cox Fund in Ecosystem Management and Protection Ken Cline made it official in a small, oceanside wedding on Sept 2, 2023. They partied with family and close friends at a reception on The Turrets' porch and completely forgot to take a photo with the COA faculty, staff, and alums who joined them to celebrate their marriage.
Emily and Mitchell Rales Chair in Ecology Chris Petersen continues to work on multiple grants and organizations on a variety of issues, including climate change, fisheries co-management, aquaculture, and ecological and community sustainability focused on Downeast Maine. The past year he has been focusing on completing several multi-year studies, including a student survey of threats to the marine environment that started in 1992, a sea cucumber reproductive biology study that began almost 20 years ago with funding from the Rockefeller Fund, a five-year clam recruitment study funded by the Maine Shellfish Research and Resilience Fund, and a study of fisheries co-management in Downeast Maine funded by the Broadreach Fund. He is also working on handoffs of several of the partnerships where he represents COA before he retires, including the Downeast Fisheries Partnership, the Downeast Conservation Network, and the National Institute of Health Maine Biomedical Research training grant (known by the acronym INBRE).
In November, Dorr Museum director Carrie Graham, Thorndike Library co-director Catherine Preston-Schreck, Thorndike library technical services librarian Hannah Stevens '09, and arts and design professor Dru Colbert presented at the 2023 New England Museum Association Annual Meeting in Portland. They shared the design, goals, and outcomes of the course The Acts and Arts of Collecting, which they created and co-taught with former library director Jane Hultberg in spring 2021. This unique online course, a collaborative examination of collections from various perspectives including conservation, curation, and exhibition, was open to the local community of collections professionals, and introduced students to a diverse set of museum, archive, and library professionals from around the country as guest lecturers.
W.H. Drury Professor of Ecology/Natural History John Anderson attended the Northeast Natural History Conference with five students. Each presented original work built around research on Great Duck, MDI, and Mount Desert Rock. They met up with alums Hale Morrel '12 and Chloe Chen-Kraus '14 at the meetings, and John chaired a session on “Seabirds East and West.” Summer involved extensive work on Acadia National Park seabird islands, as well as our beloved Great Duck, and ended with Island Life's two weeks out to different islands up and down the coast, from Monhegan to Grand Manan. In October, John took six students to the International Waterbirds Conference in Florida, where Autumn Pauly '26 took second place in the Student Awards with a poster on her work on Great Duck.
Director of the writing program and professor of writing and rhetoric Su Yin Khor co-authored a new book, The Practical Nature of L2 Teaching: A Conversation Analytic Perspective (Routledge, 2023) with Joan Kelly Hall and Yingliang He. The book carefully examines the interactional and multimodal teaching practices in second language (L2) classrooms, such as turn-taking practices to manage student participation and teacher questions to facilitate learning in whole group activities. She was also the lead author of a book chapter, “Multilingual Writing Teacher Identities and Institutional Ecologies: A Collaborative Narrative Inquiry," published in an open access collection titled Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers of U.S. College Composition: Exploring Identities and Negotiating Difference (The WAC Clearinghouse / University Press of Colorado, 2024). The chapter sheds light on writing teacher identities and the role of programmatic infrastructures in creating space for diverse identities and literacies in first-year writing classrooms. In March 2024, Su Yin also presented research findings from a study about immigrant women’s writing and literacy learning at the American Association for Applied Linguistics AAAL in Houston, TX to engage in broader discussions about gender equality in educational contexts.
Rosie Chater '25 and Bridger Buck '26 both received their Royal Yachting Association RYA Skipper Licenses through two separate independent studies with Toby Stephenson '98 over fall term 2023. They get credit for it, but Toby considers it more than just credit. They flew to London to take the written and practical exams, and it was way more work than just an independent study. Toby published an article in the Maine Policy Review titled, “The Conflict with Lobstering, and Why Whales Are Critical to Ocean Health and the Gulf of Maine.” In summary, it attempts to show that, while lobstering is not without important value to our culture and economy, a decline in mega-fauna, such as the right whale, is foretelling of a much greater concern that may impact the future viability of not just lobstering, but the entire coastal community of our state.
David Rockefeller Family Chair and T.A. Cox Fund in Ecosystem Management and Protection Ken Cline and Sophie Chivers '24 presented at the XXV Conference of the Society for Human Ecology in Tucson, AZ in November 2023. Ken and Sophie gave a talk entitled, "Sharing is Hard—Co-Management of Public Lands with Tribes in the United States."
This winter, on the 6th of December, faculty member Palak Taneja married her long-term, long-distance partner Arshad Akbar Karumbamkandathil under India's Special Marriage Act. Here's to hoping that he will be able to join us in Bar Harbor before fall.
While on sabbatical, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and GeoSciences Sarah Hall traveled to two locations to engage with COA students and faculty to pursue professional development opportunities. She spent three weeks in Yucatán, Mexico with the COA Spanish immersion program studying Spanish and working with faculty to consider potential future collaborations and field experiences for students. In May, Sarah joined Dorr Museum director Carrie Graham, ecology professor emeritus Steve Ressel, and COA students on a portion of their monster course to Costa Rica as a guest geology instructor. She met up with three COA alums who are pursuing graduate degrees in Sweden: Sara Lowgren '20, Sahra Gibson '20, and Patricio “Pato” Gallardo Garcia Freire '18. Sarah continued writing projects into the summer months including a book chapter on the geology and tectonics of the Cordillera Blanca, Peru, co-authored with COA alum Alba Mar Rodriquez Padilla '18. Sarah is currently on leave from COA pursuing an American Association for the Advancement of Science Science and Technology Policy Fellowship in Washington, DC where she is positioned in the Landslide Hazards Program of the US Geological Survey.
While on sabbatical, Rachel Carson Chair of Human Ecology Suzanne Morse had the pleasure of spending two months in Norway, where she taught and collaborated with agroecology colleagues at the Norwegian University of LIfe Sciences in Ås. After finishing up her work at NMBU, Suzanne traveled around Scandinavia to catch up with old friends and alums. While in Bergen, she visited with former COA professor Heath Cabot and adorable son Lorenzo and connected with an anthropologist working with Maine fishermen. After returning from Bergen, Suzanne traveled to Copenhagen, visited the truly remarkable Louisiana Museum, and dined together with Lisa Bjerke '13, MPhil '16 and Mette Vaarst. During a short visit to Malmø, she also visited Lund University and caught up with Dom Arsenault '21, who had just finished his master's in human ecology. For the last month of her sabbatical, Suzanne met and interviewed seed savers across the UK, starting with the innovative London Freedom Seed Bank who connected her with farmers and seed collaboratives in each region of the UK. Suzanne spent 10 days in Totnes, Devon, the original transition town, where she met with Satish Kumar (founder of Schumacher College), the founders of a small local seed company, and with members of the GAIA foundation that have established seed collaboratives throughout the UK. Upon leaving Totnes, Suzanne traveled north to Edinburgh and met up with Bruce Pierce, friend and colleague from COA's collaboration with Organic Research Centre in the UK. From there, she went to visit the Bowhouse, another center of innovation in Anstruther of Fife. Bowhouse also serves as a social center and while Suzanne was there, T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts Nancy Andrews and Linda Smith performed work from their album, A Passing Cloud. Suzanne became a dedicated fan, following Nancy, arts & design professor Dru Colbert, and Linda to Glasgow and then London for their final concert. Suzanne finished up her UK visit with a lovely dinner and walk through London with Yaniv Korman '18.
