Environmental Studies

Faculty

A participating faculty of more than 40 professors, representing almost every academic discipline, giving close supervision to student programs, senior theses and projects, and field experience.

Student groups

Students are actively involved in a variety of campus organizations, including Greens, the Sustainability Committee, the Outing Club, and the Vassar Rangers at the Ecological Preserve.

Environmental Research Institute

The Environmental Research Institute (ERI) is a research and public outreach wing of Vassar’s Environmental Studies program. Its mission is to provide opportunities for faculty and students to conduct research on Earth’s environmental systems, to promote fieldwork, and to foster engagement with the local community.

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and its Magoon collection, a gift from the college's founder Matthew Vassar, which includes many Hudson River School landscape paintings illuminating the complex relationship between nature and culture in our historic region.

Campus facilities

Additional campus facilities used by ENST majors include the GIS laboratory, greenhouse and growth chamber facilities, the A. Scott Warthin Museum of Geology and Natural History, and Special Collections in Vassar library.

Vassar Farm & Ecological Preserve

The Vassar Farm & Ecological Preserve is Vassar's 412-acre ecological preserve and field station, built in 1995 for the study of natural history, ecology, botany, and geology.

Undergraduate Research Summer Institute

The Undergraduate Research Summer Institute (URSI) has shown hundreds of students the wonders of scientific discovery through high-level research with faculty supervisors. Each summer, students and faculty collaborate in an intensive ten-week program, designing and shaping their views of the world with exciting explorations, rigorous experimentations, and critical analyses.

Program in Environmental Studies will expand Vassar's study of South Asia through prestigious Mellon Grant

Vassar College has been awarded a four-year $630,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Liberal Arts Colleges Program, to advance the study of South Asia in the college's Environmental Studies program. The Mellon Foundation's key support will be for a new tenured scholar of the environmental history of South Asia, and its grant will also help make possible additions to the Environmental Studies curriculum, new library resources, research, and related travel. Read more about the grant.

Hudson River Valley

The college's location in the Hudson River Valley, one of the world's great watersheds, and proximity to the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains.

New York City

Students utilize opportunities for the study of urban ecology in New York City, an hour-and-a-half from campus, and in association with local and regional organizations such as the Vassar-founded Poughkeepsie Institute.

Ecological institutes

Nearby ecological and environmental institutes such as the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook and the Daniel Smiley Research Center in the Mohonk Wilderness Preserve (only 40 minutes from Vassar), as well as the Hudson Valley's many conservation and preservation organizations, such as Clearwater, Inc., and Scenic Hudson.