Room to Grow
Mapping Out the Future of ENSP at William and Mary
The Environmental Science and Policy program recently received a $1.5
million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to provide for the
establishment of the Center for Geospatial Analysis and seed a
post-doctoral fellowship program.
The new center will expand the College's use of geographic information systems (GIS), an emerging technology that uses computers to plot, layer and organize data.
"The power of GIS is that there are so many disciplines that can benefit from it," noted Carl Strikwerda, Dean of Arts and Sciences at William and Mary. "Some really exciting research in history has been done by just taking data points that are a piece of land at a certain point in time. On one level, there's no story there, but if you put together 80,000 pieces of land and plot them over 10 years or 20 years, you can see patterns start to emerge-landholding patterns, migration, racial segregation or desegregation. Much of that has been either invisible or anecdotal at the qualitative level, but when plotted in GIS, suddenly these things emerge."
$800,000 of the Mellon grant
will go towards establishing an endowment for a postdoctoral fellowship
program in environmental science and policy at the College. The College
must raise an additional $1.6 million to complete the endowment,
primarily from private donors.
Postdoctoral fellowships are temporary positions held by scholars with new Ph.D.s., and are more common in large research-oriented institutions, although William and Mary typically has a few in the physics and applied science departments. Strikwerda explained that having post-docs in humanities and the social sciences will put William and Mary at the front of a new movement to transition graduate students more fully into balanced and complex faculty jobs.
"In 2000, Mellon funded us for three years to develop the environmental science and policy minor and later we were able to create a major and hire new faculty," interim program director Timmons Roberts said. "Then, in 2004, Mellon funded us for a second round, for three more years. In turn, the College itself has provided sustaining funds for these major initiatives. We're thrilled with this whole new level of support from Mellon for a program that they've helped us to build."
Plant a Seed
Give to the Environmental Science and Policy Program online.
Or by mail: make your check payable to The College of William and Mary Foundation. In your check's memo area, note Environmental Science; Allocation 2971.
Mail to:
The College of William and Mary
P.O. Box 1693
Williamsburg, VA 23187-1693
