BELL: New Orleans & Louisiana Gulf Coast Faculty
Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Development for High School Students
Robin Rose, Senior Associate Dean of Continuing Education has served Brown University for over 30 years, as a therapist, as the chief student affairs officer and as the founder and director of the Leadership Institute and the Brown Environmental Leadership Labs. She also founded and directed the Brown Outdoor Leadership Training (BOLT) program, a nationally recognized outdoor leadership program. Dean Rose has a national reputation as expert on leadership development programs for youth and experiential education. She currently supervises all summer programs within Continuing Education. She is passionate about environmental issues, gardening, snorkeling and learning from and with young people.
Kevin Currey has been involved with the Leadership Institute since it began in 2002, when he was a student at the very first BELL program. He has since spent four summers as an instructor at BELL: Rhode Island. Kevin has also served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme, managed conservation programs for a nonprofit in southern Kenya, and performed fieldwork in arctic Alaska. He holds a master's in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a BA in environmental studies from Yale College. Originally from southern California, he now lives and works in New York.
Richard Campanella, Geographer and Senior Professor of Practice at Tulane School of Architecture, is the author of six critically acclaimed books on the physical and human geography of New Orleans, as well as numerous journal articles and studies on New Orleans, historical geography, GIS, and remote sensing. The only two-time winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities “Book of the Year” Award, Campanella has also received the Williams Prize for Louisiana History, the Mortar Board Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Newcomb College Institute of Tulane University, and the Monroe Fellowship from Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. For more information, please visit RichCampanella.com
Morgan Crutcher is the Technical and Policy Analyst for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL), where she provides staff with accurate and reliable scientific, technical, and policy information for the purpose of establishing CRCL’s advocacy positions. Her broad range of previous work includes lobbying D.C. congressional staff for passage of the North American Wetlands Conservation Act for Ducks Unlimited, building nutria captivity pens in a flotant marsh for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Louisiana, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to analyze changes in wetland vegetation in relation to Great Lake levels for the USGS Great Lakes Science Center in Michigan, interviewing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer residents along the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a Columbia University study on the health needs of this population, and fenceline monitoring of an oil refinery in St. Bernard Parish for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She has also volunteered in both West Africa and Central America. Morgan has a bachelor’s in environmental studies from Loyola University, New Orleans and a master’s in natural resource policy from the School of Natural Resources and the Environment (SNRE) at the University of Michigan.
New Orleans native David Muth, Louisiana State Director, National Wildlife Federation (NWF)'s Coastal Louisiana Campaign, has spent a lifetime in the Mississippi River delta and on the Louisiana coast, studying its geology, ecology, plants, wildlife, history and culture. He took his degree in history at University of New Orleans and became professionally interested in the connection between culture and environment in the context of the delta. He worked for 30 years with the National Park Service at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in south Louisiana, eventually managing its natural and cultural resource programs. At the beginning of 2011, he joined the Louisiana Coastal Campaign as the Louisiana State Director of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). The campaign is a joint effort among NWF, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Audubon Society, along with local partners like the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, and the Nature Conservancy of Louisiana, to bring about comprehensive, systemic restoration of the Mississippi River delta. They are working to find and seek consensus and national support for an ecologically sound and sustainable program to restore the flow of the Mississippi River to its dying delta, and to do so in a way that preserves the communities and culture of coastal Louisiana to the maximum extent possible.
Lauren Watka is a recent Brown graduate, having received her Master's in Environmental Studies in May 2012. She has a strong background in natural science and has conducted research at Brown University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Dartmouth College in subjects from micro- and molecular biology to ecology (her favorite). Lauren delights in talking to people about ocean science and conservation and especially loves bringing in her experience working with NOAA as a scientist on New Bedford commercial fishing boats. Lauren hails from Cape Cod but is happily setting down roots in Providence, RI where she supports local food movements, bikes as a means of transportation, and volunteers with her church at a local elementary school.