[Photo by Pinar Ozger]
Collins will be the commencement speaker at the Conway School’s forty-first graduation, on June 29, 2013.
For ten years Collins worked for the World Wildlife Fund, where he served as the World Wildlife Fund managing director in the Amur River region of northeast Asia and as a senior advisor to the environmental organization’s CEO, and has helped lead the group’s outreach efforts. Before that, he was WWF’s regional forest coordinator for Latin America.
A graduate of Tulane University (PhD, Anthrology; MA, Latin American Studies) and the College of the Atlantic (BA, Human Ecology), for his Ph.D. he studied ethnobotany in Guatemala, and in the process became fluent in Spanish and Q’eqchi’ Maya. He has also researched the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and has worked on leopard conservation on the Russia-North Korean border.
Collins is the first graduate of the College of the Atlantic to serve as the college’s president and its first president born after the school’s founding. COA is an ecology-focused college that admitted its first class in 1972, the same year as did the Conway School. In 2007 COA was the first U.S. college to go carbon neutral.
A skilled communicator, Collins has written and designed TED Talks (see bit.ly/17WlHUH), created the award-winning film “Amur River Basin: Sanctuary for the Mighty Taimen,” and worked on an IMAX film about Siberia’s Lake Baikal.
