ES&P Internships

Jo-Anne Crystoff (ES&P/MA ’08) interned last summer at the Cadmus Group in Watertown, Mass. Her responsibilities included compiling dossiers for the containment candidate list, researching ecosystem service functions for wetlands at Great Salt Lake, and conducting risk assessment for a leading underground storage tank. She received the Geller Student Research Award for her contributing work on the adverse human affects at a PCB contaminated housing complex in Southbridge, Mass.

Meghan Gunyuzlu (ES&P/MA ’08) is currently working as an intern at Industrial Economics, an environmental consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Stephanie L. Oleksyk (ES&P/BA/MA ‘08) is currently an intern at Corporate Environmental Advisors of West Boylston, writing a release abatement measure plan (RAM) for a former liquid waste dump in Leicester, Mass. This paper will be submitted to the Mass. Dept. of Environmental Protection before a voluntary clean-up of the site.

Danielle Adams (ES&P/MA ’08) and Camila Calvache (ES&P/MA ’08) worked as research assistants for the Neighborhood STRENGTH Environmental Justice Project, a project which is a partnership of four local organizations. Adams and Calvache have worked with the citizens action group Toxics Watch to help residents in Worcester’s Main South and Piedmont neighborhoods test their homes for indoor pollutants. Although in the final year of the Neighborhood STRENGTH Environmental Justice Project, the collaboration hopes to be able to continue sampling residents’ homes through a sustainable continuation of the project.

Jeffrey Apigian (ES&P/MA '08) will be working with WaterAid Nepal and the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation to assess the effects of the Maoist Insurgency on water resources in hill regions, and explore the potential for sustainable water management activities in the post-conflict period.

Aaron Bouchane (ES&P/MA '07) interned at the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust.

Stephanie Parent (ES&P/MA '07) participated in the New Zealand Mud Snail Internship with the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission. She conducted a literature review on the impacts and control methods of this small, non-native, invasive, freshwater snail and provided recommendations for control.

Mukesh Kumar Gupta (ES&P/MA '07) completed an internship with a West Virginia-based NGO called Future Generations. He was assigned to carry out a study of the potential and implications of integration of the carbon market with Van Panchayat (Forest Management Committees) in Uttaranchal, India.

Laurie Kennison (ES&P/MA '07) interned at Industrial Economics, Inc. in Cambridge, providing support to the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Performance Track program.

Jia Liu (ES&P/MA '07), from Hunan Province in China, worked as a summer intern for The Climate Group. During her internship she conducted a research study on China's low carbon development. The objective of this study was to identify Chinese companies and cities that are promoting the low carbon economy. This study further provided insights into various policies and environmental issues laying foundation for The Climate Group's future engagement with Chinese organizations. At The Climate Group, Jia also contributed research to "Carbon Down, Profits Up," an international report that addresses issues of climate change.

Natalie Howlett (ES&P/MA '06) interned at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative this past summer. MTC is the state's renewable energy trust. With MTC, Howlett worked on creating consumer demand for clean energy which involved helping design promotional materials, creating newsletters, attending events, doing research on what other state funds were doing, and helping to create plans for how to increase overall demand.

Catherine Cox (ES&P/MA '05) and Stephen Metts (CDP/ MA '05) worked for the City of Worcester as technical service interns on a brownfield inventory project. Their primary responsibilities were database creation and management, and analysis of spatial information related to brownfields with the use of GIS software. They presented their findings to the City Manager, the Mayor, and the City of Worcester Brownfields Roundtable Consortium.

David Greene (ES&P/MA '05) studied the efforts of TepozEco in Tepoztlan, Morelos, Mexico. The organization works to promote water recycling with urine-separating dry toilets, greywater filters, and rainwater catchment in urban households, as well as to research the logistics of urine reuse as fertilizer.

Patrick Keeler (ES&P/MA '05) interned at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project [PFP] in New York as a summer farming and education intern. He worked with teens in weekly education modules modeled on the Boston Food Project's curriculum. Programs included running the PFP downtown farmer's market, marketing, and daily farm activities.

Ann Langlais (ES&P/MA '05) interned with the Sustainable Watersheds Office of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management in Providence. She worked as a research specialist on a guidebook for a restoration effort in several of Rhode Island's south coast salt ponds. She also surveyed vegetative buffers around salt ponds in two Rhode Island counties.

Corinn Mauldin (ES&P/MA '05) worked as an agricultural and livestock manager at the Drumlin Farm Audubon Sanctuary in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She educated visitors about organic farming, explored markets for organic produce, worked with livestock, and built partnerships with farmers' organizations and extension services.

Kamweti G. Mutu (ES&P/MA '05) interned with the African Conservation Centre [ACC] in Nairobi, Kenya. He researched the effectiveness of community-based conservation [CBC] initiatives, as a complementary conservation approach for Kenya's protected area system. He also identified ways to improve CBC performance. Kamweti also interned with the Blackstone Watershed Coalition, a volunteer water quality monitoring program based at the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester. He created GIS-based maps of water quality sampling points in the Blackstone watershed and did spatial analysis based on land use/land cover and sub-basins.

Seema Parakh (ES&P/MA '05) interned at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City for the UN Cartographic Section, Department of Peace Keeping Operations. She worked on a worldwide GIS dataset of international boundaries. This dataset was the result of long-term cartographic information and data compilation from multiple sources.

Marissa Staples (ES&P/BA/MA '05) interned as a project assistant with the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance in Saco, Maine. She assisted with a number of projects, including the Scallop Enhancement project, in which she researched the cause of declining scallop populations in the Gulf of Maine and other areas.

Carissa Williams (ES&P/BA/MA '04) interned with the Regional Environmental Council in Worcester, a small non-profit organization that works on issues such as community gardens, Earth Day celebrations, and raising awareness on toxics in the home. She is responsible for organizing the Earth Day clean-ups in Worcester, which involves coordinating with volunteers and sponsors.

Sara Anne Lowell (ES&P/MA '04) interned as a hydrologist at the office of the Regional Water Resources Division Office for the US Geological Survey in Providence, RI. She worked on a Water Use Study for the East Bay and South Coastal Basins of Rhode Island to determine where the water is pumped from, distributed to, and disposed.

Stella Capoccia (ES&P/MA '04) was the New England Outreach Coordinator for the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF). Apart from fundraising, she conducted education programs, networked with personnel from area zoos, museums, and universities. Her primary responsibilities included organizing the New England portion of Dr. Laurie Marker's fall tour (Director and co-founder of the organization).

Michael Marshall (ES&P/MA '04) was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to work on "Nutrient Transport Modeling" in the Ecological Modeling and Spatial Analysis Lab at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD. He ran and interpreted a topographic-based watershed model whose inputs included precipitation, evapotranspiration, and temperature. He also determined a relationship between nitrate discharge and saturation deficit for various catchment's basins in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Kamweti Mutu (ES&P/MA '04) interned with the Blackstone Watershed Coalition, a volunteer water quality monitoring program of Massachusetts Audubon Society's Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester His tasks included the creation of GIS-based maps of all water quality sampling points in the Blackstone watershed for presentation, and eventual spatial analysis based on land use/land cover and sub-basins, using data gathered by volunteers and himself.

Shreela Chakrabarti (ES&P/MA '04) was an ECO Associate with the Environmental Justice Program at ECO.org. With the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), she worked on the Boston Community Partnership Program to increase participation by less privileged communities in the management and utilization of national parks in Massachusetts.

Sarah Rosenberg (ES&P/MA '04) interned with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection in the Division of Water Management. She worked on the Westfield and Farmington Watershed in Massachusetts. Her duties involved drafting reports and composing data to be used in environmental assessment reports. She collected water samples from rivers, streams, and brooks to test the water's dissolved oxygen, turbidity and ph at the hydrolab.

Emily Harvey (ES&P/MA '04) collected funds for 125 children's books for the school library village of Capitan Sosa in northern Paraguay and to send four village youth environmental leadership camp. She delivered the books to Capitan Sosa, where she served as a teacher in the Peace Corps. She also interned at the Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Watershed Management in Worcester. She worked with the scientists who sample macroinvertebrates, water quality and flow in lakes and streams as well as designed a database in Access.

Amy Mosher (CDP/MA '04) interned for Greater Worcester Community Foundation (GWCF) doing research to help the foundation improve its environmental grant making. For the Water and Land Stewardship (WLS) Fund Committee, she designed and implemented a phone survey to assess the needs, challenges and achievements of approximately fifty environmentally related community organizations throughout Worcester County. She also began a database and literature review for the foundation and reported preliminary findings and recommendations to the WLS committee.

Nathan Oetting (IDSC/MA '04) interned with the US Army Corps of Engineers in East Brimfield, MA. His responsibility was to identify sites within Corps-owned land most suitable for wildlife habitat and to develop a management plan specific for these areas. With the Ruffed Grouse Society, he developed a medium- and long-term natural resource management/habitat restoration plans that the Corps can follow. Using GPS and GIS technologies, he was able to update the Corps database with information.