Newswise — The Mount Holyoke College community will celebrate the dedication of the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Center for the Environment--naming it for the former chair of the MHC Board of Trustees and her husband--with a public lecture and other events on October 28 and 29. The dedication ceremony is scheduled for Friday, October 29 at 5 p.m. in Dwight Hall.
The College announced the naming of the center for alumna Leslie Anne Miller and Richard Worley last year in gratitude for a $5 million endowed gift from the couple to support environmental education and programming at Mount Holyoke. Miller, a 1973 graduate of Mount Holyoke and now a Philadelphia attorney, served as the chairman of the College's Board of Trustees until this past July 1. The gift is being used to strengthen the center, which was established in 1998, along with environmental education, green campus initiatives, and scholarships and internships for students in environmental science or closely related fields. Specifically, the gift is being allocated for a new interdisciplinary professorship in environmental policy; for an endowment to support the center’s public programs and curricular and cocurricular efforts; and for an endowed fund to support student internships and faculty-advised research experiences involving environmental issues.
"Richard and I are honored to play a part in the Center for the Environment's influence in the life of the College," said Miller. “We believe this will position Mount Holyoke as a leader in environmental studies and advocacy and help the College fulfill its mission to educate its students to grapple with current pressing concerns. Richard and I see this gift as central to the College’s evolving curriculum that fuses academic rigor with purposeful engagement with real issues.”
As part of the celebration, the College will present a Miller Worley Environmental Leadership Lecture featuring Barbara Block, the Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Professor Chair in Marine Sciences at Stanford University, on Thursday, October 28 at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium. Codirector of the Tuna Research and Conservation Center--the only facility in North America holding bluefin tuna for captive research and exhibit--Block will speak on "Sushi and Satellites: Tracking Ocean Giants across the Globe."
Block and her team helped pioneer the successful development and deployment of electronic tags on tunas, billfishes, and sharks, work that has led to a rapid increase in the understanding of movement patterns, population structure, critical habitats, physiology, and behaviors of pelagic fishes that are also commercially important. Concerned over the possibility of northern bluefin tuna becoming commercially extinct, and armed with the scientific data to improve management, Block teamed with recreational fishers and other scientists to found the Tag-A-Giant Foundation in 2006.
Mount Holyoke's Center for the Environment is dedicated to engaging students more actively in the scientific, social/human, and global dimensions of environmental study. It enables students to make connections across disciplines, across points of view, and across structures that help them understand the concept of "environment" more broadly in their work, community, and lives.
Mount Holyoke has a longstanding and ever-growing commitment to being a green campus. The College – located in South Hadley, Mass., and the oldest women's college in the country – is committed to reducing the environmental footprint of campus operations and student life on campus. While all community members play a role in this effort, students who call MHC home for much of the year play the most significant role in greening Mount Holyoke. The College is actively working to make progress in a number of areas including: energy and climate change, waste reduction and recycling, green building, responsible land management, water conservation, and hazardous materials management.
Biographical information is available upon request and online: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/channels/22/stories/5682432
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