Three Honored with Terra Awards for Sustainable Practices

This fall's Terra Award winners are, left to right, staff member Olivia Pounds, Associate Professor Beth Feingold and student Kyle Lininger.

ALBANY, N. Y. (Nov. 24, 2020) — Three members of the UAlbany community were honored for their commitment to sustainability earlier this month, when the Office of Sustainability named its Fall 2020 Terra Award winners. The awards are bestowed each semester to a student, faculty member and staff member who demonstrate persistent efforts to further environmental goals both on campus and in the community.

Staff Terra Award: Olivia Pounds 

Olivia Pounds is the manager of Finance for grants and contracts in the School of Education and is involved in supporting the sustainability initiatives on campus. She is a member of the University’s Sustainability Coordinators Committee, heads the Terra Award committee and recently agreed to start a new outreach sub-committee for the group.

Pounds also makes individual contributions to every sustainability social media campaign and promotes Green Scene events through the School of Education social media accounts. Previously, she chaired a sub-group during the development of the Climate Action and Sustainability Plan which developed a pledge card and poster that was used during the rollout of the plan formation. 

Faculty Terra Award: Beth Feingold 

Beth Feingold is an associate professor in the Environmental Health Sciences Department in the School of Public Health. She conducts research both internationally and locally on sustainable food production, consumption and nutrition, as well as work on environmental toxins in water in Peru and their effect on women and children in the Southern Amazon.

Feingold is the co-director of UAlbany’s Institute for Health and the Environment, a World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Children's Environmental Health. Together with Assistant Professor Xiaobo Romeiko, she has led a local study with funding from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research on the impacts of COVID on local food insecurity and redistribution programs. Feingold teaches a variety of sustainability related courses and has participated in several panel discussions and co-curricular events related to sustainability.  

Student Terra Award: Kyle Lininger 

Kyle Lininger is a senior chemistry major, a research assistant for the Department of Environmental and Sustainable Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is the senior operations manager in the Office of Sustainability, charged with collecting, coding and analyzing data and serving as the “behind the scenes” workhorse, performing vital functions for the office’s programming efforts including doing energy meter reads, compost collection, website maintenance and compiling the list of sustainability courses, to name a few. 

Lininger has been involved in the University’s wastewater testing for COVID-19, and assisted in a research project analyzing food waste diversion. 

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