I hope that everyone had a relaxing Thanksgiving. My daughter and I visited her Mom’s side of the family on “the farm” in Plymouth, WI. The food was lovely and very local and the gathering was comfortable and free flowing.
On the drive up, we cut over through the Horicon Marsh on rte 49 and as we turned north on County Y (or YY?), we noticed lots of windmills going up. Maybe 1/2 dozen with rotors in place to the south and another dozen or so with just the bases in place to the north. I expect the folks in Byron are none too pleased - I would really like to understand their objections better.
On the Nelson Institute front, we have had a busy month. The Governance faculty met last week and discussed the re-animation of the Environmental Monitoring program. The gist of the discussion is that we should continue to develop a redesign that is much broader than its original remote sensing focus. There was also discussion regarding how best to organize our degree offerings around this topic in light of the recent renaming of Environment and Resources (hmm seems I didn’t blog that…) and the existence of our clear MS / professionally CBSD and WRM programs. One idea that has been floated is to create a profession EM masters and to funnel interested Ph.D. students into E&R.
Also at the Governance meeting we had the first reports of discussions to create a joint Nelson / MPH degree. Each of the graduate program committees will be discussing the possibilities for their own program. If all of the graduate programs and the Nelson Institute APC agree to move forward with this option then we will contact the Medical School APC and start the formal dual degree process.
The search for the next Director is ongoing. Fairly well established rumor has it that the committee is close to a short list that could be forwarded to the Chancellor’s office. More than that I will not say…
The WICCI (Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts) Science Council meets tomorrow and I hope to be able to report on decisions regarding the governance of the Science Council after that meeting. We have a small amount of seed money on the table to get some science going and are in the process of gathering more.
We submitted 3 excellent Baldwin pre-proposals this year: 1) Support for the launch of WICCI; 2) Support for the WRM practicum; and 3) Support for an “inreach” internship program organized by LTC and coordinated with the Business, Enviroment and Social Responsibility effort. While we were not invited to submit full proposals, we will continue to look for avenues to develop these ideas.
Effort reporting implementation is in full swing. Kim Moreland and Diane Barrett visited the Nelson Institute to provide a well-attended training session and answer questions. Hope Simon has been working with our staff scientists to address the details of our current implementation period. We have an estimates of our current costs and we will be developing policies to ensure that our budgeting continues to support the full range of their activities in the Nelson Institute.
Finally (although I am sure I am forgetting many things), the Nelson Institute Holiday gathering is coming up on 6 December. At that gathering we will acknowledge the passing of another year and the graduation of another lot of our talented students. I look forward to seeing you there.