Faculty of the Atlantic, a small liberal arts faculty with an emphasis on environmental research, has chosen a former college official in Utah to be its subsequent president.
Sylvia Torti, who served because the dean of Honors Faculty at College of Utah for greater than a decade and holds a Ph.D. from the identical college, is predicted to tackle her new position as COA’s president on July 1.
COA made the announcement on its web site.
Torti will likely be COA’s seventh president, taking up for Darron Collins, a COA graduate who has held the place since 2011. Collins is retiring from the publish on the finish of this educational yr.
COA officers say Torti is “an achieved author, ecologist, and revolutionary educational chief with 15 years of expertise in increased training.”
As dean of College of Utah’s liberal arts faculty from 2012 to 2023, Torti tripled the variety of the coed physique and elevated the variety of out-of-state college students, based on COA. She has a 30-year document of publication, together with a number of scientific analysis papers, opinion items, two novels, and a number of brief tales and essays.
Previous to serving as faculty dean, Torti was the director of the college’s Bonderman Subject Station in japanese Utah. She earned a Bachelor of Arts diploma from Earlham Faculty in Indiana and her Ph.D. from the College of Utah’s College of Organic Sciences. Her newest novel, Cages, was printed by Schaffner Press in 2017.
Beth Gardiner, chair of COA’s board of trustees, mentioned Torti has a “confirmed monitor document” of main in experiential and interdisciplinary studying, and of selling shared governance.
“Dr. Torti totally understands the second we’re in, the necessary position that COA has on the earth of upper training, and the way very important it’s to make it possible for variety, fairness, and inclusion are central to how we evolve as a school presently,” Gardiner mentioned. “She has a agency grasp of the significance of attracting and retaining numerous college students and school, and increasing the sorts of courses provided in order that we are able to higher replicate the world round us.”
Torti was chosen from an preliminary pool of 81 candidates for the job, from each inside and out of doors academia, COA officers mentioned.
“As an distinctive chief and a methods thinker, Dr. Torti will excel at each the inner work of administration and mission refinement and the exterior work of fundraising and public-facing management,” mentioned Cynthia Baker, a COA trustee who chaired the search committee.
Torti’s associate, Scott Woolsey, will be a part of her in Bar Harbor. Woolsey, whose household has loved a lakeside property close to Bethel, Maine since he was a toddler, has an intensive background in meals methods and natural farming in New England, COA officers mentioned.
