VT EPSCoR held a successful kick off to Year 4 with an exciting All Hands Meeting on June 4, 2019 at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, VT. Over 80 participants attended including the new 2019 Undergraduate interns, graduate students, post-doctoral associates, and members from the VT EPSCoR External Advisory Committee.
 
Keynote speakers included, Dr. Richard Galbraith, Vice President for Research at the University of Vermont who provided opening remarks about the significance of VT EPSCoR to UVM and Vermont, highlighting its multidisciplinary and state-wide strengths with Dr. Arne Bomblies, VT State EPSCoR Director; Neil Kamman, Sr. Policy Advisor, Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) who spoke about Vermont DEC and VT EPSCoR Alignment and Dr. Tim VanReken, NSF Program Director who provided an interesting overview of NSF EPSCoR and funding opportunities.
 
Keynote presentations were followed by talks from each BREE research team composed of faculty, graduate students and post-doctoral associates who provided overviews of their work, progress on the research and expectations for the upcoming year.
 
Heather Duhamel, Education Specialist from Vermont PBS, provided a brief update on the online Middle and High School curriculum guides developed in correlation to the television series, Saving Our Waters https://www.vermontpbs.org/water/ The curriculum guides are also posted on PBS Learning Media and available for download https://vermont.pbslearningmedia.org/
 
Dr. Veronica Sosa-Gonzalez, Coordinator for Workforce Development and Diversity (VT EPSCoR CWDD) at Saint Michael’s College and Dr. Declan McCabe, Chair, of Biology at Saint Michael’s and CWDD faculty leader, provided an update on the exciting workforce development and training efforts over the past year and what to expect in the coming year.
 
For more details please visit the videos and slides below.