We held a reception for current and former UMCES faculty, staff and students at the biennial Coastal and Estuarine Federation (CERF 2023) conference in Portland, OR. In addition, UMCES sponsored a booth in the coffee break and poster session area. The evening event on November 13th was a chance to gather UMCES folks together, as the meeting had ten concurrent sessions and you could miss seeing each other as you raced from session to session. I made the following introductory remarks at the gathering.

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As we continue to watch the horrible news from the Middle East, I have been reflecting on my experiences with environmental restoration efforts that have served to unite, rather than divide people in the region. There is a story that I want to share that may provide some hope in this bleakest of times. When I was based in Australia, we created the International RiverFoundation to champion integrated river basin management of the world’s rivers.

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Staff Appreciation Day for University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science; 25 Sept 2023

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Randy Rowel organized the annual C-StREAM Symposium at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on 4 August 2023. Sixteen student interns presented the results of their projects, following a couple of plenary speakers.

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Governor Wes Moore came to the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) Horn Point Laboratory on 20 July 2023 to speak about the actions he will be taking to improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay.

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Vanessa Vargas-Nguyen and I had such a great summer with our wonderful Global Sustainability Scholars (GSS) and had a nice goodbye dinner in Annapolis overlooking the Chesapeake Bay during their last week in Maryland.

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Dr. Vanessa Vargas-Nguyen, Alexandra Fries and I represented UMCES IAN at the third annual Sustainability Research & Innovation (SRI2023) conference in Panama City, Panama.

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We held our midterm meeting for the Ocean Sustainability program, funded by the Belmont Forum. The meeting was held on the Open Day of the Sustainability Research & Innovation 2023 conference in Panama and was a hybrid event. There are 13 projects in the Ocean Sustainability program, and each project provided a brief overview of their progress.

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Dr. Xin Zhang has assembled an international consortium of agricultural researchers in a program entitled “Sustainable Agriculture Matrix: A transdisciplinary and transnational network to guide the pursuit of sustainable agriculture”. The consortium includes researchers from the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Austria, and sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Ghana, and Morocco). Xin, and her faculty research assistant Kevin Jackson, organized two Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM) workshops, the first workshop was in Istanbul, hosted by Dr. Levent Ozturk in October 2022. The second workshop was in Panama in June 2023.

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On 22 June 2023, the building housing the Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed the Rita Rossi Colwell Center in a gala event. It was a spectacular evening of tributes to Rita, organized by IMET Director Russell Hill and his capable staff.

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