WISER Center: Call for Proposals: 2026 (Year 3)
The Center for Weather & Innovation, Smart Energy and Resilience (WISER), led by the University at Albany and the University of Connecticut, is soliciting proposals from prospective principal investigators and co-PIs for Year 3 (2026). Proposals are due December 1-7 and should be directed to Matt Reuter, WISER Program Manager (mreuter@albany.edu). Descriptions of current research projects are also available for reference.
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Campus Power Plant Hydrogen-Capable and More Efficient Than Ever (UConn Today)
The University of Connecticut Central Utility Plant, which provides most of the energy used by UConn Storrs, is installing new turbines that can burn hydrogen as well as natural gas. The new turbines could reduce the facility’s carbon emissions by 30%, a key part of the University’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2030.
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UConn Professors Receive NSF CAREER Awards (UConn Today)
Professor Diego Cerrai (Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering & Interim Director of the Eversource Energy Center), along with four other UConn faculty members, received the prestigious CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the 2025 cycle. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a competitive award honoring early-career scientists and providing them with funding to support the continuation of their career.
[Read More]About Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Alfred Teale was born in 1899 in Joliet, Illinois, and died in 1980 in Hampton, Connecticut. Personally, he lived the charmed life of an affable local nature writer who worked closely with his beloved wife Nellie at their old New England farmstead. Professionally, he was a forceful national advocate for respecting Nature, especially its power to teach us how to live. In 1945, he published a scathing critique of the insecticide DDT that helped inform Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, whose 1962 publication marked America's turning point toward greater environmental awareness. Teale nurtured Carson's talent for sixteen years between 1949 and her death in 1964. In 1966 he became the first American to win the Pulitzer Prize for nature writing.
During the autumn of 1980, Edwin and Nellie donated their voluminous archive to the University of Connecticut. Today, these materials are housed within the Dodd Center where the Teale lectures are usually held. Preserved for posterity are: published books, articles, reviews; records of scientific societies; correspondence with key environmental leaders; voluminous private journals; and various awards, medals, and honorary degrees, including a record of his election as a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This archive chronicles his life as a key founder of American environmentalism.
In 1921, Teale discovered a lifelong role model in the writings of Henry David Thoreau. In 1941, he quit his salaried day job as a magazine staff writer in New York City to become a full-time writer. In 1959, he relocated from the crowded suburbs of Long Island to the wooded highlands of eastern Connecticut, where he built a writing retreat modeled after Thoreau's famous experiment at Walden Pond.
By working independently from the 1940s through the 1970s, Edwin Way Teale was able to ignore the widening schism between the sciences and the humanities, and the narrowing and hardening of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines. Our lecture series follows his example by featuring a smorgasbord of artists, scientists, writers, economists, filmmakers, politicians, philosophers, lawyers, archivists, journalists, and others.
Robert M. Thorson
Professor of Earth Sciences