|
Get to know the humans behind Sustainability Matters. This year, we’re introducing staff, board members, and key volunteers through e-news and social media. If you’re impatient, meet the whole fam right away on our website. As our Scientific Programs Catalyst (aka lead educator), Hannah Bement coordinates the training and research agenda for Sustainability Matters’ Science Team. If you volunteer this summer, you’ll get to learn from her and, inevitably, be drawn into her passion for native plants and pollinators, salamanders and scientific exploration, and landfill selfies. Hannah has also developed SM’s new EcologiGALs program (conservation education for at-risk teen girls, debuting this summer in Fairfax County), our Monarch Migration Game, and countless other educational initiatives for adults and children. She writes and illustrates the What’s Blooming at the Landfill blog, illustrates interpretive signage at Making Trash Bloom sites, and has even turned her talents to a purrtrait of our spokescat, Haym. She first connected with Sustainability Matters through her work at Mountain Vista Governor’s School, where she teaches biology and ecology. Her students there - our favorite sustainable teens - are actively involved in multiple Sustainability Matters initiatives. The daughter of a zookeeper, Hannah shared her childhood bedroom with orphaned squirrels and helped chase escaped emus through town. Her undergraduate thesis was on the use of positive reinforcement in alligator training (really). She has worked at the National Zoo and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and on a research project involving anesthetizing black widow spiders (Latrodectus mactans) to harvest their silk for use by the Department of Defense (again, really). Hannah is a Master Naturalist volunteer, a Master of Environmental Science from Yale, and the mother of two young naturalists, already skilled in turning over logs to look for cool critters.
|
