Organization
Moravian University
Diane White Husic
Profile
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Employment StatusUniversity / 4-year College Faculty - Tenured
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Telephone610-625-7100
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BiographyDiane Husic is the founding dean for the Center for Scholarship, Research and Creative Endeavors at Moravian University. She also is the director for the Environmental Studies and Science program and a Professor of Biology. Previously, she served as the founding dean of the School of Natural and Health Sciences at Moravian University, and before that she served as chair of the Biological Sciences department. She has taught courses in biochemistry, environmental science, conservation biology, sustainability, environmental health, and global climate change.
Trained in biochemistry (NMU) and as a plant biochemist (Michigan State University), her research focuses on the ecological restoration of a contaminated site (the Palmerton Superfund site) and examining heavy metal impacts on plants. She is involved with ecological monitoring for climate change impacts along mountain landscapes in the portion of the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania and in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem/Rocky Mountains. Of particular interest is how forest habitats, birds, and pollinators are responding to climate change and other environmental threats. These projects, including the Eastern Pennsylvania Phenology Project, involve citizen scientists and provide an opportunity to better understand STEM learning in informal settings. The phenology project was launched when Dr. Husic was an Audubon TogetherGreen Fellow in 2010-11.
She is an author on over 50 publications and has contributed to several reports, including a 200-page ecological assessment for a Superfund site and the 2011 PA Climate Change Adaptation report. She has attended the international meetings as a credentialed observer for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since 2009. She has brought delegations of students and faculty to the U.N. climate meetings in various countries on 4 continents since 2009 to develop global citizens who will help address our greatest challenges by working at the science-policy interface. Through this work, she serves as a member of the steering committee for the international Research and Independent NGOs constituency group and has served on the Adaptation and Innovation Taskforces of the UNFCCC Technology Executive Committee.
Dr. Husic served on the steering committee that developed a climate action plan for the City of Bethlehem and currently serves on the city’s Environmental Justice Council. Additionally, she has been working with the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission as they develop a regional greenhouse gas inventory and climate action plan. In January 2022, she was named Senior Fellow with the Global Council for Science and the Environment – a nongovernmental organization that advances the use of science to inform environmental decision-making.
Currently, she is involved with two National Science Foundation grants: a Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant (3-D Naturalists) focused on discovery and digital data collection, and diversity and another RCN grant focused having students from various U.S. and international institutions work on cross-disciplinary teams to learn to work at the science-policy interface especially on issues related to the UNFCCC and the SDGs. This is the Youth Environmental Alliance in Higher Education or YEAH initiative.
Along with six colleagues, she established the Camaquiri Conservation Initiative in Costa Rica (www.camaquiri.com) – a 500-acre rainforest preserve for education and research. For several years, she has brought students to the country for a course entitled Costa Rica as a Model of Tropical Ecology and Sustainability.
Locally, she works with nature centers and non-profits to develop informal education programming on a wide range of environmental and sustainability issues and finding unique ways to effectively communicate science to general audiences and engage the public in science and policy. She is president of the board for the Lehigh Gap Nature Center and serves on the board and chair of the conservation science committee for Hawk Mountain Sanctuary – an organization that is a leader in raptor science and conservation throughout the world.