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Two TRCC STRONG-CT students, Amanda McCarthy and Elizabeth Welch, have won the prestigious Bingham Award for "Excellence in Environmental Studies".
This award is named after Dr. David Bingham. Dr. Bingham is a retired Norwich OBGYN; he is a life long resident of Salem. He is a conservationist, environmentalist, and an avid bird watcher. Dr. Bingham is the founder and President of the Salem Land Trust and has helped to preserve hundreds of acres of land for all to enjoy. This award, in his name, is to honor those students that have the same concerns and love of nature and the environment as Dr. Bingham does.
The students received this award are NSF TOP scholars and are in the NSF STRONG-CT (science and technology reaching out to New Generations) program- a TRCC, MCC, QVCC and UConn collaborative.
Amanda McCarthy and Elizabeth Welch are students in the environmental engineering technology program. They both love being outdoors and for the past 2 semesters have helped mentor students in my environmental studies class while performing the rapid bioassessment (looking for different insect larvae in a river). It was quite exciting a couple of weeks ago – I fell in the water and Liz caught a snake!
During the semester they also helped research water quality in two rivers using monitoring equipment and studying diatom populations (one celled algae which are excellent indicators of the health of a river).
Recently both Liz and Amanda came with me to attend Pfizer’s SMART (Science and Math are really terrific) SamJam where 3700 junior HS students came to learn about science and technology from many different organizations. They helped me with a presentation on water quality using macro invertebrates (insect larva) and monitoring equipment for the JR HS students. The JR HS students really enjoyed the presentation and hands-on lab. Amanda and Elizabeth attended 3 days of their own time!
Amanda and Elizabeth also helped organize the TRUE club this semester and are the President and VP respectively. Amanda represented Three Rivers at the Northeast Climate Conference this past April held at Yale in New Haven, spending 3 days.
This year’s youth-organized Northeast Climate Conference brought together approximately 300 climate leaders from over 60 high schools, organizations, and colleges/universities to plan for a year of student networking and strategic climate and energy campaigns across the Northeast, Chesapeake, and Eastern Canada. Amanda and Elizabeth have also volunteered to host and organize the Connecticut Climate Campaign Summit which is tentatively scheduled for early October. The summit will serve as a forum for student representatives from Colleges and Universities across the state to address state climate issues and initiate collective action.
As you can probably tell these girls have been very busy! I am very proud of them for their efforts. This award is given to students that demonstrate achievement to the highest academic standards in environmental stewardship, community service, outreach and education and volunteerism.
Diba Khan-Bureau
TRCC
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