17-th Annual Harold W. Borns, Jr. Symposium
History
By Kirk Allen Maasch
In the early 1990s members of the Institute for Quaternary Studies were awarded a third NSF EPSCOR grant facilitating significant growth of both faculty and infrastructure. In addition, this funding supported many graduate students and led to a large increase in research activity. As a means of sharing all of this activity with each other the institute started an annual symposium held on campus at the end of each spring semester.
The first Research Symposium, as it was called, was held in May 1993. In 1999 the seventh annual meeting was named the J. Louis Agassiz Symposium acknowledging the contribution made by Agassiz to the development of the initial curriculum at the University of Maine in the late 1860s. In year sixteen the symposium was renamed the Harold W. Borns, Jr. Symposium in honor of Hal Borns, the founder of the Climate Change Institute.
