By Sam Parnis
The George Washington University (GW) Alliance for a Sustainable Future announces Angela Melidosian as its first Assistant Professor of Sustainability. Melidosian comes to GW from the University of Florida, where she has served as the program coordinator for the Active Learning Program for the past 6 years.
Melidosian will teach “Introduction to Sustainability”, the Sustainability Minor capstone courses, and an environmental ethics and justice course at GW. She has a strong interest in teaching sustainability policy within the minor courses and examining the ethical frameworks related to policy and the environment. She defines sustainability as “a lifestyle and a framework for understanding life, ideas for ways to operate and connect with the world, and an approach for problem-solving with an interdisciplinary lens.” With this focus, she also hopes to examine the intersection between how people relate ethics and justice and how people interact with the environment.
Few people might trace their interest in sustainability back to language classes; but Melidosian points to her Spanish class as her starting point. In the course, she and her classmates learned advanced vocabulary and language lessons in Spanish that included concepts about sustainable practices. She enjoys the alternative paradigms for living and interaction with the world that a sustainable lifestyle offers, and the interdisciplinary approach to looking at the environment, nature, and animals. Throughout all her years studying sustainability, her favorite Sustainable Development Goal has become Goal Four, quality education, specifically at the collegiate level. Her professorship is entirely dedicated to sustainability, and she hopes to bring quality and sustainable education to GW’s sustainability minor.
Melidosian is a “Triple Gator,” having three separate degrees all from the University of Florida. She received her bachelor's degree in sustainability studies, a master’s degree in sustainable development practices, and is currently finishing her doctoral degree in interdisciplinary ecology. For her master’s degree, she conducted research in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Sustainable Development Goal 3, good health, and well-being. In this research, she focused on end-of-life care in hospitals and hospice care to develop a manual for improving care. La Asociación Latinoamericana de Cuidados Paliativos published this work in a manual. Her dissertation for her doctorate focuses on enhancing students’ learning outcomes within sustainability education and examines alternative assessments to find competence in attitude, knowledge, and skills and how these would affect students' work after graduating from university.
At the Active Learning Program at the University of Florida, Melidosian had coordinated with community organizations to create team-based internships for undergraduates of any major. The program engaged 160 students and 60 different partner organizations.
Melidosian said she’s excited to come to Washington, D.C., and bring new opportunities into the classroom. She looks forward to working with the GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future, helping to grow the sustainability minor, and introducing students to “a revolutionary way to connect with and look at the world,” she said.