By scholarly engagement, I refer to the back-and-forth between my life as an academic at within UConn and my life as a member of the community, town, state, and nation that supports my work at UConn.  Because UConn is a Land Grant/SeaGrant/SpaceGrant  university, it has a special responsibility to return investments in tax and tuition dollars to those who support it.   My engagement takes five principal directions, all of which are related.

Stone Wall Initiative – Since 2002 I have coordinated the Stone Wall Initiative (SWI), which in 2005 was taken under the administrative umbrella of the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.  Basically I maintain an information website and blog that facilitates my dialogue with interested readers.  I respond to an average of three public inquiries per week.

Stone Pavilion – In 2020 I spent months researching and examining the history of the Stone Pavilion, my candidate for UConn’s most symbolically significant historic building.  This small hidden gem will soon become an outdoor exhibit of the Connecticut State Museum of Natural history, a portal for Earth Science education at UConn, and a popular site for visitation at UConn Nation, located between the Dairy Bar and the Jonathan statue. It has its own separate website.

Benton Museum of Art – I recently completed  Seeing Climate Change?, my third co-curated exhibit at the Benton Museum and have a fourth in the works.  All of these are designed to engage the public and non-science students with Earth Science.  Geology, as a highly visual discipline, lends itself well to art interpretation.

Ask a Geoscientist –  In 2021, when I was the transitional department head between the former Center for Integrative Geosciences and the the subsequent Department of Geosciences (now Earth Sciences), I worked with Clay Tabor to create the department’s new website.  An important part of that is a menu item under engagement titled Ask an Earth Scientist. which I coordinate.   This is our way of streamlining and organizing the dozens of inquiries that come in each year from the public hoping to have a landform explained, a fossil named, or a mineral specimen identified.  Other faculty help me with the inquiries.

Media Contact – I serve as a frequent media contact for earthly matters, particularly when earthquakes, new discoveries, or hazards reveal themselves.. I’m often called directly, but am also referred via the CLAS Office of Communications  and University Communications.