Dear Colleagues,

I hope you are enjoying the final weeks of spring and looking forward to another beautiful Maine summer. As a community, we have much to celebrate at the conclusion of a wonderful academic year.

We have just finished a successful and enjoyable reunion weekend. Todd Saucier and the UMaine Alumni Association staff deserve thanks and appreciation for their great work in organizing reunion events. We honored the Class of 1958 over the weekend on the occasion of its 50th reunion, and we had a great many opportunities to connect with UMaine alumni of from many classes.

Reunion also presented a wonderful opportunity to use the newly renovated Wells Conference Center for a series of important meetings and celebrations. Several of those in attendance praised the facility, which really adds to UMaine's ability to host various kinds of events.

The number of alumni grew by about 2,000 on May 10, when the Class of 2008 graduated from UMaine. It was a great day, marking the end of a series of events celebrating the achievements of our students, faculty and staff. Doug Hall's commencement address was well-received, and the ceremonies went very smoothly. I have had occasion to attend commencement at a number of institutions over the past several years, and I must say that UMaine's are among the most well-organized I have ever seen. Great credit goes to people like Wanda Legere, Jan Williams (who came out of retirement this year to help us), Tammy Light and many others. Photos and much more information are online at http://www.umaine.edu/commencement08/.

This year's valedictorian and salutatorian certainly appear poised to go on to great things after leaving UMaine. Valedictorian Marianne Schneider of Jena, Germany graduated with degrees in international affairs and economics, and with minors in French and Canadian Studies. She is planning to study international economics at a university in the Netherlands. Anh Do, a native of Hanoi, Vietnam, was the Class of 2008 salutatorian. Anh earned a business degree and took a job on Wall Street. In September, she will take a nine month leave of absence to pursue a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in England. This marks the first time that UMaine's valedictorian and salutatorian have both been International students.

Several days after commencement, we also learned that Anh Do has been awarded an Honor Society Phi Kappa Phi fellowship and award of excellence to support her graduate education. She is one of just 100 students from around the U.S. to receive one of these awards.

A real commencement season highlight is the opportunity to honor UMaine's faculty members. We are fortunate to have such a talented and committed faculty, and it is always a pleasure to recognize those who have been selected to receive UMaine's top annual awards. This year's winners are:

- Jan Kristo and John Vetelino, who shared the University of Maine Alumni Association's Distinguished Maine Professor Award

- Mary Ellen Camire, Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award

- Alan Cobo-Lewis, Presidential Public Service Achievement Award

- Gail Werrbach, Presidential Teaching Award

Congratulations to Jan, John, Mary Ellen, Alan and Gail, and to all the other faculty members who received departmental, college and other forms of recognition during this academic year.

I am pleased to have several more recent faculty achievements to note. This list represents just a small sample of the ways in which UMaine professors are making their mark in various disciplines, earning recognition well beyond our campus community.

Lu Zeph, the director of UMaine's Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies, has been named to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee's Strategic Planning workgroup. This group will provide expertise and recommendations for a national strategic plan for research related to autism.

Economics professor Jonathan Rubin, who is also with UMaine's Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, has been named chair of the Committee on Transportation Energy on the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. Jonathan will serve a three-year term in that important role.

David Hiebeler, a faculty member in UMaine's Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant. David will use the five-year grant, one of five active CAREER grants at UMaine, to advance his research on mathematical population ecology and epidemiology.

Angela Fuller, an associate graduate faculty member and post-doctoral research assistant in Wildlife Ecology, has been selected to be part of The Wildlife Society's 2008 Leadership Institute. The institute, based in Maryland, provides extensive training to selected early-career wildlife professionals.

The Learning Disabilities Association of Maine has honored UMaine's Diane Jackson with its Sylvester Service Award for service to people with attention disorders and learning disabilities. Diane is a clinical instructor in special education at UMaine.

Barry Goodell, a UMaine wood science and technology professor, continues to get positive notice for his new book about issues related to wood preservation in outdoor applications, such as residential construction. The book, “Development of Commercial Wood Preservatives: Efficacy, Environmental and Health Issues,” recently achieved a #2 ranking on the ACS/Oxford best-seller list.

I would also like to note the outstanding public service provided by Jim Dill and Clay Kirby from the UMaine Cooperative Extension faculty. Jim and Clay are pest management specialists, and they have been tremendously helpful to Bangor residents dealing with difficult issues related to grub worms. They spent a good part of one day last week at a Bangor public forum where property owners came to get reliable information about this issue.

It was a real pleasure last month for me to attend the annual retiree banquet. Some of UMaine's most outstanding long-term employees are moving on to new stages in their lives, with our heartfelt thanks and appreciation for a job well done. UMaine has certainly grown and evolved during the careers of those who retired, and it would not be the institution that it is today without the contributions of each retiree.

Several faculty colleagues staged a nice send-off for two legendary professors who have just retired, Steve Norton and George Jacobson. Rep. Emily Cain brought a legislative sentiment to the reception event, reflecting the important role that we all know George and Steve played as members of the "Faculty Five" group that got the public and Maine leaders thinking about the value of investing in university R&D. That effort led to the creation of the Maine Economic Improvement Fund and several other initiatives that have brought UMaine to the point where its research enterprise is now very close to $100 million annually, ranked by the National Science Foundation at #94 among public universities in the U.S. (and #45 among those without a medical school). The impact of George, Steve and their colleagues on UMaine, on graduate and undergraduate education related to research, and on statewide economic impact, is incalculable.

Later this week, we will celebrate the fifth anniversary of the University of Maine Museum of Art's opening in downtown Bangor. The museum continues to provide a positive link between UMaine and the greater community, and it is a real cornerstone of Bangor's arts community. We are proud of the museum and what it provides to our friends and neighbors from a wide area. We will also welcome George Kinghorn, the new museum director, who comes to UMaine from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Fla. We will also extend our thanks to Prof. Laurie Hicks for her outstanding work during her tenure as the museum's interim director for the past several months.

Speaking of events, it was great fun to celebrate the opening of the Bridge Family Tennis Courts at UMaine last Friday. Adjacent to the Student Recreation Center, the eight-court complex will be a great addition to our campus, and it will provide wonderful new opportunities for fitness, recreation and fun for members of the UMaine community and those who come to campus. The Bridge family has been tremendously generous over many years, and I know they are delighted with the final product.

We were joined in late May by Gov. Baldacci and Congressman Michaud in Franklin, for the opening of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture aquaculture research facility known as the National Cold Water Marine Aquaculture Center. This spectacular new building is adjacent to UMaine's Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research, creating great opportunities for complementary research projects, and further establishing UMaine's international leadership role in this type of aquaculture research.

It was very exciting last Friday to host more than 600 Maine middle school students as part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative Student Technology Conference. Those students, representing nearly 50 Maine schools, accessed UMaine's expertise and facilities to learn about new ways to use their laptop computers for research and other educational activities. UMaine professors Mohamad Musavi and Bruce Segee are instrumental in making this annual program such a success.

Along similar lines, Prof. Kristin Sobolik and her colleagues in the Dept. of Anthropology, the Dept. of Earth Sciences and the Climate Change Institute, hosted Maine middle school and high school students for a day-long workshop on climate change science. "Ice, Stones, Bones and Bugs: Unraveling the Secrets of Climate Change" included a series of hands-on activities and opportunities to interact with UMaine faculty and graduate students.

Programs like these are wonderful in every respect, and I am certain that they will have a positive impact on future enrollment, as this outstanding young students get a first-hand opportunity to sample what UMaine is all about.

Congratulations also go to Jim McConnon from the UMaine School of Economics and Cooperative Extension faculty and his colleagues, for UMaine's leadership role in a consortium that staged a series of conferences aimed at providing advice, training and assistance to those who run small businesses. Gov. Baldacci spoke at a May 21 conference at Eastern Maine Community College, where the keynote address was given by UMaine alum and business leader Bion Foster, for whom UMaine's Foster Student Innovation Center is named.

UMaine has also received a recent generous gift from Moss, Inc., a Maine-based business with facilities in midcoast Maine. In recognition of this gift, given in support of UMaine's Hutchinson Center in Belfast, we will name part of the expanded Belfast facility the Moss, Inc. New Media Center. With this new gift, we are now within $1 million of our fundraising goal for the Hutchinson Center expansion, which will add significantly to UMaine's ability to bring high-quality education and outreach to the Belfast area.

The overall Campaign Maine fundraising total is currently at $86 million, and we continue to receive positive feedback from the alumni and other supporters with whom we are discussing this initiative. You may recall that the campaign total goal is $150 million, and we are pleased with the progress to date. We have recently hired Rick Gwinn, a 1996 UMaine graduate with extensive fundraising experience and a track record of success, as campaign director. With Rick's arrival, and with some other positive developments on the near horizon, we are hopeful to begin to close in on our goal quite quickly.

I am also pleased to have some notable student achievements to highlight in this month's message.

Students in UMaine's remarkable Alternative Spring Break program, and their advisers including Audra Grady of the Division of Student Affairs staff, raised some $10,000 through an art auction event last month. This money will go toward an endowment to support the activities of that group, which takes UMaine students all around the U.S. during spring break to work on community service activities.

Three UMaine electrical and computer engineering students have been chosen for summer positions at NASA field centers, where they will work on wireless technology for space vehicles. Stephanie Duy of Caribou, James Knarr of Carmel and Fred Schwaner of Hebron are all juniors who now work as research assistants in UMaine’s WiSe-Net lab, directed by Prof. Ali Abedi. The summer internships, which will take place at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, are funded by NASA through the Maine Space Grant Consortium’s workforce development program.

And, yet another NASA connection: UMaine doctoral student Margaret Estapa, has earned a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. Margaret, who is studying oceanography in UMaine's School of Marine Sciences, will use the grant to support her work looking at the release of carbon from the mud that moves from the Mississippi River to land along the Gulf Coast. Some of this carbon forms carbon dioxide and can move into the atmosphere. Professors Larry Mayer and Emmanuel Boss are Margaret's advisers

Molly Feeney of Knox, a UMaine political science major, has been named one of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation's 2008 James Madison Junior Fellows. These awards, which support graduate studies in American government by students who plan to teach secondary school history, government or social studies, are very prestigious. Awards are generally limited to one per state, but nobody from Maine received one last year, and only eight Mainers have received the awards in the past 16 years.

Some 50 members of UMaine's University Singers are just back from a great experience, a ten-day concert tour in Italy and Sicily. Prof. Dennis Cox headed up the group, which also featured several accompanying musicians. The University Singers are exceptionally capable and talented, with members coming from academic programs all across UMaine. The Singers do a week-long concert tour every year, usually in the northeast U.S., but they perform in Europe every fourth year.

For the third consecutive year, a UMaine student engineer team will participate in the American Society of Civil Engineers National Concrete Canoe Competition. This year's event is set for Montreal June 19-21, and the UMaine team will represent New England following its great performance in a recent regional competition.

Several women studying science at UMaine were honored at a recent celebration of the Life and Legacy of Dr. Edith Marion Patch, the entomologist who first came to the UMaine faculty in 1903. The student organization Women in Science, Fogler Library and the Friends of Dr. Edith Marion Patch co-sponsored the event, at which graduate students Christy Finlayson and Tiffany Wilson were recognized, along with undergraduate students Heidi Purrington, Aimee Guy, Corinne Grant, Danijela Krsmanovic, Alice Doughty and Jennifer Dionne.

As we turn our attention from the just-completed academic year and really focus on the one that will begin in the fall, I would like to express my appreciation for all those who worked so hard to make the student experience in 2007-2008 so positive and productive. It was a watershed year in that regard, as we instituted the First Year Residence Experience Program, brought online the Student Recreation Center and opened the renovated Hilltop Dining Facility. The UMaine student experience is being transformed, in positive ways, through the creativity and leadership of many in our community. The initial analysis of FYRE and the related activities and initiatives suggests that they were very successful, and that the positive results can be measured in many ways. As we look at data showing that we appear headed toward more good enrollment news in the fall, we can take pride in the fact that UMaine students are doing well, and they are helping spread the word -- throughout Maine and beyond -- the UMaine represents quality and value, and that it is a university on the right track. This trajectory is positive, exciting, and it is due to the great efforts of everybody on the UMaine faculty and staff.

Sincerely,
 

Bob Kennedy

President