Annual Report 2007 - Center for
Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Global warming. Clean water. Sustainable growth. As our understanding of complex environmental issues grows, so does the stark realization that each is connected to the others. UConn's interdisciplinary Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering (CESE) works to leverage those connections into social and scientific advances.
More than 100 faculty members, graduate students, governmental scientists and policy professionals from the sciences, agriculture, law and dozens of other specialties regularly interact and collaborate through CESE to help solve pressing environmental issues.
In 2007, UConn Foundation board member Sheldon Kasowitz '83 and his wife, Samantha, made CESE the sole beneficiary of their six-figure endowment, the center’s first major gift. Kasowitz views the gift as “philanthropic seed money," and says the couple’s focus on child welfare, education and the environment made CESE a natural choice.
"CESE bridges many of the areas that we’re interested in, and this is a great opportunity for the University to make a name for itself in environmental studies,” he says. “There are big, obvious environmental problems that the whole world is now thinking about how to solve. What a great time to support this."
Michael Willig, Ph.D., director of CESE and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, says the convergence of disciplines has helped to create a new generation of researcher at UConn.
"We’re training the scientists of the future, who look beyond their narrow specialty," he says. "They’re comfortable talking to and working with others in engineering, in medicine, in agriculture. The only way we can make transformative discoveries is to take risks with our research and science in all of these critical areas."
"The big solutions to environmental problems are going to come from academia and private sector business," Kasowitz believes. "I want my gift and others like it to sway donations to this area. There’s a chance to be a great catalyst."
