Office of Public Affairs

Kacey Foerster ‘21 is taking time to help some special seniors in her community.

USM Professor of Environmental Science and Policy Robert Sanford co-edited the recently published book “River Voices: Perspectives on the Presumpscot” — and he had a raft of USM faculty and staff collaborators on board for the project.

CubeSats are small research satellites that are made up of multiples of 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm, that have ushered in a new era of space research, allowing high-schools and universities to participate in this one very niche field. The workshop had prestigious speakers that included an award-winning educator, engineers work at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a commercial CubeSat kit company and USM faculty.

The Harold Alfond Foundation has made an historic commitment of $240 million to the University of Maine System, the eighth-largest gift ever made to a U.S institution of higher education and the largest ever to a public institution of higher education in New England.

For the second consecutive year, Maine’s Teacher of the Year is a University of Southern Maine graduate.

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded more than $2.6 million to USM’s TRIO program to augment its work with students who have a low income, a disability or are the first in their families to attend college. The just-announced funding — arriving in two, five-year grants — expands TRIO advising to target students pursuing fields in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The new funding, $1.3 million, allows TRIO to advise 120 STEM students.

On Thursday, September 24, President Cummings announced an unprecedented matching gift challenge to fully endow the Promise Scholarship program to benefit future generations of Maine students with high academic potential but limited financial means. The Promise matching gift challenge comes at a critical moment when scholarship support for higher education is more essential than ever.

Dr. Ryan Wallace, Director of Maine Center for Business and Economic Research at USM’s Muskie School of Public Service, told CBS News that in this era of social distancing, pandemic-impacted small businesses may lack the technical savvy to reach customers and new markets through the internet.

The pandemic may have required a shift to remote learning over the summer, but that didn’t stop a group of USM engineering students from solving an urgent, real-world problem: how to make a fully functional, prosthetic arm that can operate in hot and humid climates — all for under $110 per unit.

The permanent bus shelter art installation — located on the west side of Bedford Street on the Portland Campus — is latest work by artist Justin Levesque ‘10.