Following a successful year implementing a sustainability action plan for Fort Lewis College in Colorado, Heather J. Ellis of Essex Junction has been named as the first Sustainability Coordinator for Saint Michael's College. Ellis, a 2007 graduate of the University of New Hampshire with highest honors, in environmental conservation, began this week with the major assignment of calculating Saint Michael's carbon footprint.
"We're very anxious to get our sustainability efforts going in a programmatic way," said Rick Battistoni, associate director of facilities-occupational/environmental health and energy/recycling. "We've been doing a lot of separate things through the physical plant operation, but now we can move forward throughout the whole college having an energetic coordinator like Heather," he said.
Ellis will develop and manage sustainability programs, and work to foster a culture of sustainability on campus.
"I've been really interested in campus sustainability since I was in college myself," she said. "I care about the environment and like to communicate with other people-so this is a perfect area for me. It touches food, transportation, employment, so many topics that impact the environment," she said. "We'll have to learn together; we're in this together," Ellis said. "We've made the negative impacts together, and we've also made a lot of the positive impacts-at a college we can focus on the positive and be optimistic."
Ellis was the Environmental Center intern at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colo., from August 2007 to May 2008, where, among other things, she organized the campus community on cultural diversity and environmental action. She was also a campus climate intern from January 2007 to May 2007 at Clean Air - Cool Planet of Portsmouth, N.H.
Heather Ellis is the daughter of Enid and Bill Ellis of Wheelock, Vt., near St Johnsbury.
Saint Michael's College, founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's Best 368 Colleges. A liberal arts, residential, Catholic college, Saint Michael's is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America's top college towns and less than two hours from Montreal. As one of only 270 institutions nationwide with a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael's has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael's students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and Saint Michael's professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last eight years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation's Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2008 U.S. News & World Report rankings.