HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The Harvard University Center for the Environment has received a $1.5 million gift from John and Elaine French for its Environmental Fellows Program. The gift will endow the postdoctoral John and Elaine French Fellowship, one of 12 postdoctoral fellowships the center hopes to sustain.

The John and Elaine French Environmental Fellowship is the first endowed position in the program. The center will name the fellowship’s first recipient in March 2007.

The Environmental Fellows Program is open to recent recipients of doctoral degrees in any discipline. Each fellow works for two years with a faculty mentor anywhere within the University. The unifying theme of this interdisciplinary program is a focus on research related to the environment. In its inaugural year, the program has accepted seven postdoctoral fellows.

Through the program, these fellows — Peter Alagona, Nicole Smith Downey, Peter Huybers, Valeriy Ivanov, Alex Johnson, David M. Thompson, and Roxanne Willis — will conduct research with host faculty members in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, and, within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and English.

Their research topics will include the study of new materials for fuel cells; the connection between global warming and the formation and intensity of hurricanes; climate dynamics and ice ages; the flow of mercury in the environment; the distribution of vegetation in arid landscapes; the history of conservation biology in California; and the role of Alaska in America’s environmental imagination. The center is now recruiting applicants for the second group of fellows who will start work in September 2007.

“We decided to endow one of the environmental fellowships at Harvard because it will permanently expand the University’s capacity to undertake top-quality environmental research,” John and Elaine French said. “By attracting some of the best new post-docs in the world to Harvard, the fellows program is a training ground for the next generation of environmental scholars. We are confident that some of those scholars will make lasting contributions at Harvard or elsewhere to climate-change research and other environmental fields. We urge our friends and colleagues in the Harvard community to make a similar investment.”

“Even in its first year, the Environmental Fellows Program has attracted an extraordinarily talented group of scholars to Harvard,” said Daniel P. Schrag, director of the Center for the Environment and professor of earth and planetary sciences at FAS. “As the program matures, it will profoundly enhance the University’s capacity to tackle this century’s critical environmental problems. By endowing one of the dozen fellowships that the center hopes to sustain, John and Elaine French have helped guarantee that the program will flourish. Their generosity will benefit not just Harvard and the Center for the Environment, but all of us.”

John French, a 1966 graduate of Harvard College, is the former vice chairman of Spieker Properties, a commercial real estate firm sold in 2001 to Equity Office Properties. As chairman of the Yosemite Institute and vice chairman of Yosemite National Institutes, he currently works to bring young children to U.S. national parks to learn environmental science.

Elaine Abbott French, a 1973 graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, is a freelance writer who previously served as the director of information services at the Menlo School in California. She currently serves as chair of The Nature Conservancy’s Idaho Chapter Board.

Gifts from Robert Ziff and the Beagle Foundation enabled the Center for the Environment to start the Environmental Fellows Program and are supporting its first group of fellows.