REU Project

Watershed partnerships are collaborative groups of local stakeholders, interest groups, and governmental officials that come together to create and implement a watershed management plan. Many researchers have found that such partnerships benefit not only the environment, but the community as well. For my project we are doing an extensive review of the literature on the organizational characteristics and challenges of watershed partnerships. When we have established what we can contribute to this literature, we want to apply our question to the Upper Midwest. We will be collecting data on the Upper Midwest primarily through interviews. In the end we intend to use the data to determine how success is related to partnership characteristics identified by the sociological literature.

Personal Information

I’ve lived my whole life in Gettysburg, PA. I got out of the small town when I started school at Villanova University, which is located approximately 20-30 minutes outside of Philadelphia. I’m going to graduate in the spring with a double major in Political Science and Honors, as well as with a concentration in Environmental Studies and a minor in German. On campus I’ve been the president of the Villanova Amnesty International chapter for 2 years. I’ve also been involved with the Villanova Environmental Group and the Villanova Women’s Ultimate Club (VUWU). I love speaking German and spent the spring and summer of 2005 in Freiburg, Germany, where I took classes at the University and played a lot of Ultimate Frisbee. Also, while in Germany I worked in an ecologically-sound garden, called the Bio-Garten. I hope to eventually work in promoting sustainability through sound policy after graduating, especially for the poor and those most affected by environmental degradation.