For most of his career, Stephen Mulkey has been a champion of interdisciplinary research, education, and outreach in the environmental sciences. Mulkey was President of Unity College in Unity, ME, from 2011 through 2015. He led Unity College to adopt Sustainability Science as a framework for its liberal arts programming and to become the first college in the nation to divest its endowment from the top 200 fossil fuel companies. Prior to his appointment to Unity, Dr. Mulkey served as Director of the program in Environmental Science at the University of Idaho from 2008 through spring 2011. As Director, he led an initiative obtaining National Science Foundation funding for the creation of a new Professional Science Master’s degree in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, which included degree tracks in Sustainability Science and Climate Change. With major funding from NASA, he directed a statewide project focused on climate change education.
From 1996 to 2008, Dr. Mulkey served as tenured faculty in the University of Florida’s Department of Botany and as a research associate with the School of Forest Resources and Conservation. He also served as Director of Research and Outreach/Extension for the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida, and as science advisor to the Florida Governor’s Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida.
Dr. Mulkey co-founded in 1990 and later directed the International Center for Tropical Ecology at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. In collaboration with the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the Center became a nationally recognized interdisciplinary graduate training program in tropical ecology and conservation. For over twenty years Mulkey was a research associate with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Dr. Mulkey holds a bachelor’s degree in fisheries and wildlife and a master’s degree in ecology from the University of Missouri. He earned his PhD in ecology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986.
Essays and recent lectures by Stephen Mulkey
- “The Environmental Century” (Stephen Mulkey’s blog)
- “Curriculum for Sustainability in the Environmental Century” (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Opening Keynote Address, 2015)
- “Crisis and Opportunity in the Environmental Century” (Climate Solutions Maine, Keynote Address, 2014)