Laura first came to the Midcoast at 5 weeks of age as her father was a counselor at Kieve on Damariscotta Lake; the family has spent summers at the lake continuously since that time and she and her sisters still have a camp on the lake.
She grew up in Philadelphia and went to Harvard (AB ‘73, in anthropology), graduate school at the University of Arizona (MS ‘78 PhD ‘82, in Geosciences/Dendrochronology), and was on the faculty in Geography at Dartmouth College (Hanover NH) from 1982 to 2015. Her teaching and research have focused on aspects of physical geography including forest dynamics and ecological history, climate, geology, field studies, and women in science. She has one daughter who lives with her husband and a toddler-aged son in Maryland.
Outside of the classroom, Laura served on the Hanover (NH) Conservancy ‘s stewardship board and is a trustee emerita of the board of the Pine Park Association in Hanover. At Dartmouth, one of her committee assignments centered on the management of the Second College Grant in northern NH. Before graduate school she worked for the Appalachian Mt Club, and at the Smithsonian Institution, where she was on the staff of the Handbook of North American Indians.
Laura moved to South Bristol from New Hampshire in 2022 after two winters on Merrymeeting Bay in Topsham. She happily began learning more about the area with much help from Coastal Rivers’ Sarah Gladu and her Midcoast Stewards course (2023). She serves on Coastal Rivers’ Lands committee and helps steward the Walpole Woods and Wild Lily preserves, and she participates in other activities such as Trail Tamers and Trimmers, roadside cleanups, and horseshoe crab counts. She loves to walk the woods and hone her naturalist skills with others (including birding!), read and write about the natural world, play the piano, and boast about her adorable grandson.
