USM Spotlight
University of Southern Maine (USM) students, faculty, staff, and alumni are getting involved and giving back. From internships to research, community engagement to public service, and so much more, we are proud to share their stories.
Information
May 2021
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi — professor, best-selling author, and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research — captivated viewers of our online 141st Commencement ceremony with his powerful keynote address. We are excited to see how our 1,665 graduates — including eight doctorates, 240 graduate degrees, and 1,237 undergraduate degrees — will change the world.
April 2021
Thanks to a $500,000 gift from David E. Shaw '76G, '15H — founder of IDEXX Laboratories — we launched the Shaw Innovation Fellows program. Each year, the program will award five graduate students a fellowship to conduct research projects that demonstrate innovative approaches to solving environmental, economic, human, and societal problems. Fellows will receive a $5K grant and mentorship from business leaders in their fields of interest.
March 2021
More than 250 nursing students from across the entire University of Maine system will enter clinics and hospitals this spring to participate in Maine’s COVID-19 vaccination deployment. 100 of these dedicated students are from the School of Nursing at USM — they’re ready and willing to help and grateful for the experiential opportunity.
February 2021
Are you wondering what our Huskies do with their first-rate education? Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, our Career Hub and WMPG teamed up to launch a new "Hired Huskies" podcast that will provide you with some answers! Through personal interviews, you'll get a taste of some remarkable careers of our alumni from all walks of life and professional industries. Learn tips and tricks for getting hired and launching your own successful career.
January 2021
We recently joined the Arctic Education Alliance to help build international education programs that support training in sustainable tourism, hospitality, and land and fisheries management in Greenland. Funded by a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of State, the partnership will lead to collaborations — like student exchanges — between USM and the University of Greenland.
November/December 2020
Thanks to a $2.8 million grant from NASA, we launched a series of workshops to engage Maine high school students in Cube Satellite development. "CubeSats" are miniature research satellites that have ushered in a new era of space research. Workshop speakers included an award-winning educator, engineers from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a commercial CubeSat kit company, and USM faculty.
October 2020
The U.S. News & World Report college rankings for 2021 are here! Out of 4,000 colleges and universities in the country — 1,500 in the northeast — we ranked as a top university for social mobility in the northern U.S. The strength of our undergraduate engineering program also earned recognition.
August/September 2020
COVID-19 is killing more men than women, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn — assistant professor at USM and co-founder of the Harvard GenderSci Lab — wants to know why. That's the reason she helped develop the U.S. Gender/Sex COVID-19 Data Tracker, the most comprehensive collection of sex-aggregated statistics offering data and analysis on the pandemic.
July 2020
This fall, classes at USM will be offered in a combination of online, blended, and face-to-face modalities. Our decisions and actions during this period of disruption will be grounded in ensuring the health of our students by working to prevent the spread of COVID-19, maintaining the quality of our learning experiences, practicing new norms of behavior, and continuing to live our values.
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Looking for an old issue of the USM Spotlight? Contact Sam Lavoie with inquiries about our newsletter archive.