Press Releases

Officials with the University of Maine at Presque Isle and the Fairmont Cemetery Association are partnering on a unique project that is helping to preserve important information about a local cemetery for future generations.

Drs. Michael Sonntag, Lynn Eldershaw, Kim Sebold and Chunzeng Wang have garnered two MEIF [Maine Economic Improvement Fund] Small Campus Initiative Fund grants – one this year and one last year – totaling $23,000 to complete a project titled “Developing a Cemetery GIS Database for Historic, Cultural, and Social Research in Aroostook County.”

The University officials are working with members of the cemetery association to create a GIS database that will allow people to search an inventory of information about the Fairmont Cemetery, including burial data and more than 5,000 photographs of burial plots. The Fairmont Cemetery, established in the 19th century, represents one of the oldest and largest graveyards in northern Maine.

The University of Maine at Presque Isle is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Eddy A. Ruiz as its Project Compass director, completing an effort that has been underway since the summer to establish a three-member retention team for the initiative.

Members of the campus and community are working together to create a new garden for the University that is tied to the local region and Native American culture.

Professors Alice Sheppard and Dave Putnam received a 2009 Project Compass Educational Mini-Grant for about $1,000 this summer to work with students and community members on the installation of representative plant specimens at a small plot near the central campus park woods. These plants are used by the region’s Native peoples in many ways, including food, healing, dyes, ceremonies, and artifacts.

VPAA article on RateMyProfessors.com published
UMPI Vice President of Academic Affairs Michael Sonntag has had an article he co-authored about the website RateMyProfessors.com published in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.

Students in Art Professor Renee Felini’s ceramics class headed to the Aroostook River on Sept. 30 for a special class project that helped them to understand more fully the organic nature of the art form they’re learning about.

Felini and her class gathered at the boat landing near the Route 1 Bridge at the north end of Presque Isle to release into the river more than a dozen hollow, clay spheres that they had made in the ceramics studio.

Thomas Wire, a 2008 University of Maine at Presque Isle graduate, recently made international headlines for a study he completed this summer which concluded that spending money on family planning, as opposed to more conventional green technologies, would be more cost effective in the global effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Wire completed the study – which was commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust, a UK think tank concerned with the impact of population on the environment – in August 2009 as a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. His study was mentioned in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, and the story was then picked up by media outlets such as The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

Officials with Project Compass, an effort on the University of Maine at Presque Isle campus to develop and improve culturally responsive strategies for its Native American students, has announced that it has funded 9 mini-grants to campus faculty and staff totaling nearly $18,000 that will help to support the mission of Project Compass while engaging students and increasing campus awareness of Native cultures.