Above photo of Dr. Robert E. Menzer, Founding Director of the MEES Graduate Program, and his wife Sara Lee shortly after unveiling Dr. Menzer's portrait at the Dedication Ceremony for the MEES Program held May 16, 2013.
About the Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences Graduate Program
Mission
Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences (MEES) is an inter-institutional graduate program of the University System of Maryland whose mission is to educate students to become the scientific leaders and problem-solvers of the future. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we train students to engage in scientific discovery, integration, and application to generate new knowledge and to solve environmental problems.
The MEES Program is an inter-institutional, statewide graduate program within the University System of Maryland (USM). The program is composed of faculty from several of the USM's degree-granting universities and research institutions as well as experts from government, non-government agencies and other non-academic units. Thus, the MEES program affords students an unparalleled opportunity to combine the expertise of the best environmental scientists in the region to guide their program of study. Although the title of the program emphasizes its strengths in marine and estuarine sciences, the program itself spans the environmental sciences as a whole, irrespective of habitat. While the interests of students in the program are diverse, they generally center on some aspect of the interaction between biological, physical and/or chemical systems in the environment. Student research ranges from studies of molecular mechanisms to fisheries ecology, chemical pollutants, or economic assessments of environmental impacts. Since its faculty members come from so many sources, MEES provides a unique and valuable graduate education across the broad range of the environmental sciences.
Read more about the MEES Program:
Message From the Director
Overview
History of the MEES Program
Program Committee Members
Administration
Participating Institutions
ANNOUNCEMENT: The MEES program is seeking news and notes of our past alumni. If you would like to be included in our "Notable Alumni" section of the website, please send an email to the MEES program letting us know where you are and what you have been up to as well as anything else you'd like to share with the MEES Community. Thank you!
Dr. Caroline Solomon.
Ph.D. Student Roy Weitzell
Faculty Member, Dr. Margaret Palmer
Alumni Spotlight: Dr. Caroline M. Solomon
MEES alumn Dr. Caroline Solomon was featured in a recent New York Times article in regards to the sign language science lexicon. Caroline was quoted in the article, which discusses the issues that deaf scientists have in terms of understanding each other because there are often more than one sign for the same term in science. Caroline goes on to discuss that the use of signs for science terminology is a collaborative effort. Dr. Solomon is collaborating with Dr. Richard Ladner at the University of Washington on the ASL-STEM forum, an online sign wiki for the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) lexicon, and the Workshop for Emerging Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Scientists, which took place in May 2012. Dr. Solomon's research was recently featured on Gallaudet's home page as part of the Research with Deaf Scientists series. For more information about Dr. Solomon and her research, please click here.
Student Spotlight: Roy Weitzell, MEES Ph.D. Student
Roy Weitzell, a MEES student working with Dr. Andrew Elmore at the UMCES Appalachian Laboratory, was recently awarded an EPA STAR (Science to Achieve Results) Fellowship. Administered within EPA by the National Center for Environmental Research (NCER), the goal of the STAR Fellowship Program is to encourage research that advances EPA's mission to protect human health and the environment. Roy's research focuses on the effects of stream burial, where streams are directed into culverts, pipes, concrete-lined channels, or simply buried beneath impervious surface, on network connectivity and biodiversity in headwater stream ecosystems. Knowledge of the cumulative impacts of urbanization on streams, including alteration of the structure and functioning of stream networks associated with stream burial, is crucial for predicting interactions with global climate change and informing management. Roy’s project will combine innovative remote sensing and connectivity modeling methods to form a novel statistical approach to quantifying these interactions for the Potomac River Basin.
Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Margaret Palmer
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Chesapeake Biological Laboratory scientist Dr. Margaret Palmer has been awarded the University System of Maryland Regents' Faculty Award for Excellence for her scientific work informing policymakers and the public about the environmental impacts of mountaintop mining and restoration ecology. Dr. Palmer's recent scientific work detailing the environmental impacts of surface mining has helped call attention to the controversial practice. In mountaintop mining, upper elevation forests are cleared and stripped of topsoil, and explosives are used to break up rocks in order to access coal buried below. Much of this rock is pushed into adjacent valleys where it buries and obliterates streams. Her research was published in the well-respected journal Science. Read more about Dr. Palmer's work HERE.
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