Dr. Stephen W. Kress
Director

Steve is Director of the Seabird Restoration Program and Vice president for Bird Conservation of the National Audubon Society. He received his B. S. in Zoology and M.S. in Wildlife Management from Ohio State University and his Ph.D. in Environmental Education from Cornell University. Steve began Project Puffin in 1973 and has remained its Director since the beginning. He is also Manager of National Audubon's Maine Coastal Island Sanctuaries. He was Ornithology Instructor at the Audubon Camp in Maine on Hog Island from 1969 through 1981, was the Director of the Camp from 1982 through 1986, and is currently serving as the Director once again. He is a Laboratory Associate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY, where he teaches a very popular annual birding course called Spring Field Ornithology.

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Rosalie Borzik
Associate Director

As Associate Director of the Seabird Restoration Program. Rose is responsible for all logistics and finances at both the Ithaca office and the Audubon Base in located in Bremen, ME. She also creates and maintains the summer intern/volunteer/staff schedules. She has a B.Sc. in Animal Science from Cornell University, and is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, specializing in raptors. She maintains a turkey vulture "TuVu" and two red-tailed hawks who function as "wildlife ambassadors" and accompany her to educational presentations given to groups ranging in age from pre-school through adult. She also knows the value of a good antique and good food on the research islands.

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André Breton
Database Manager

André Breton encountered Project Puffin in 1993 when he went to work for the Hog Island Audubon Camp. Two years later, he served as intern at Matinicus Rock and Seal Island as a Project Puffin Intern. The following year André supervised Eastern Egg Rock and continued in this role (eventually switching to Seal Island) for six years. Along the way, André became interested in graduate school, met Tony Diamond from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and ultimately joined his lab in the fall of 2000, where he received his Ph.D using data about puffins from Project Puffin. After a winter stint in Ithaca working to put together a mark-recapture database for Atlantic Puffins (known today as Puffin Finder), André developed skills in database management, Microsoft Access, and eventually, programming in Visual Basic 6. André uses these skills as Database Manager for Project Puffin.

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Ruth Likowski
Annual Giving Manager

Ruth is the Annual Giving Manager for Project Puffin. She joined the Project in 1997. She holds a BS degree in Business Administration/Marketing from Penn State University. She enjoys collecting antiques and collectible advertising, and dabbles in the online auction world in her spare time.

 

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Arthur Marchese
Office Assistant

Artie helps Project Puffin with whatever they need help with!

 

 

 

 

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Erica Marx
Hog Island Ornithology Camp Coordinator/Registrar

Erica is responsible for publicity and registration for the Hog Island Ornithology Camp sessions, held each summer in Maine. She holds a Masters Degree in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida and a Bachelors Degree in Natural Resources from Cornell University. In addition, she is adjunct faculty at Ithaca College's Biology Dept. and coordinates the Spring Field Ornithology course at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Prior to joining the Project Puffin staff, Erica founded and managed a reforestation project with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

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Susie Meadows
Manager, Project Puffin Visitor Center (PPVC)

Susie is the manager of the Project Puffin Visitor Center located in Rockland, Maine and by chance she met Steve Kress in the summer of 2006 and realized working at the Project Puffin Visitor Center would be a wonderful place where her birding and educational experience could collide. She attended Unity College in Unity Maine and graduated from Northland College in 1999 with a BS in Outdoor Education with an emphasis in Natural History. Between the years of 1996-1999 she worked in the ornithology field banding birds and nest searching and from 1999 to 2002 she worked at various environmental education centers teaching kids. In 2005 Susie received her teaching certification from Appalachian University and moved back up to Maine to start her teaching career. Susie lives in Union, ME with her husband and son, and enjoys being creative in her free time.

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Terry P. Mingle
Assistant to the Director
Webmaster

Terry began working part-time for Audubon in 2006. In addition to her duties as webmaster, she has assisted with keeping track of grants and contracts, and organizing the project's annual Contributor Trips in the summer months in Maine. Terry has created and continues to maintain much of the content for the Project Puffin web site. Terry received a Bachelors Degree in Music Merchandising (Music/Business/Marketing) from Mansfield University in Mansfield, PA. Her outside interests (besides birds) include Chow Chow dogs, trains, iTunes, and singing and playing various instruments in the Central NY band Blue Monday - she even has an endorsement with iGuitar. Terry works for Project Puffin part-time, and has worked full-time at Cornell University full-time since 1988. Before becoming an official staff member for Project Puffin, Terry worked with Dr. Kress for many years as the coordinator/event planner for his popular birding course Spring Field Ornithology in Ithaca, NY.

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Pete Salmansohn
Education Coordinator

Pete Salmansohn a/k/a "Puffin Pete" received his M.S. in Teaching from the Environmental Studies Department at Antioch/New England and his M.S. in Social Ecology from Goddard College. He has instructed adults at the Audubon Ecology Camp in Maine for nine summers, children for seventeen seasons, and still teaches at the family camp and during special education weeks. Pete is the Education Coordinator for the Seabird Restoration Program and helps "Seabird Sue" Schubel coordinate the school outreach program. Pete gives lectures about the Seabird Restoration Program, and narrates the Audubon seabird tours aboard commercial boats. He is co-author with Steve Kress of two books about the Project: Project Puffin, and Giving Back To The Earth, and has most recently written a new book with Steve Kress, called Saving Birds: Heroes Around the World. In 1998 the Maine Environmental Education Association named Pete as the Environmental Educator of the Year.

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Susan Schubel
Outreach Instructor

"Seabird Sue" Schubel is Project Puffin's own Disney Hero, and has been the Outreach Educator for Project Puffin since 2000. She loves to engage her students (usually elementary school age) in exciting learning activities and share real data from the seabird islands with them. Her acquaintance with Project Puffin began in high school, when she saw Marlin Perkins rowing ashore with Steve on Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom". By strange coincidence her Ornithology professor at UNH knew the Project well, and directed her to the Audubon Camp at Hog Island. She first volunteered as a research assistant on Matinicus Rock in 1984, and since then has spent many summers on Maine seabird islands, in addition to seabird stints in California and Galapagos. Her current summer island base is as a caretaker for Maine Audubon's Hog Island Audubon Center, where much of the wildlife is human, but she keeps her hand in the seabird restoration business by supplying sound attraction equipment to projects from Bermuda to Hawaii, and Quebec to Baja. Sue loves islands and beasts, and recently acquired a dog with very familiar little black triangles over its eyes.

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Diane Tessaglia-Hymes
Graphic Designer

Diane has been creating graphic materials for the Seabird Restoration Program since 1991. She is responsible for the design and layout of most of the Project's printed materials, including CDs, DVDs, and the Egg Rock Update newsletter. She also came up with the initial layout/design for the second generation of the Project Puffin web site. Diane works full-time as Design Director for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and operates Green Heron Graphics, a freelance graphic-design business. She has been a birder for 30 years, but never saw a puffin until she became involved with Project Puffin. In her free time Diane is learning Japanese. She enjoys watching anime amd jdorama, cooking, and spending time with her husband and daughter.

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Dr. Gerald Urquhart
Web Consultant

Jerry is a Visiting Professor at Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University. He loves to share the things he knows with others, while learning from them as well. He believed that educational activities needed to extend beyond the walls of institutions and reach communities and societies everywhere, and he developed Project Puffin's original web site when the Internet was in its infancy, in order to demonstrate his commitment and interest in outreach education and to share information about puffins with the world. The project staff has since taken over Jerry's pages, and redesigned them, but they still look to him for web advice now and again.

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Deborah J. Wood
Financial/Development Administrator

Debbie, who hails from Freeville, NY, is the Financial/Development Administrator for Project Puffin and the Seabird Restoration Program. Debbie is responsible for all the financial income and payables that are received for Project Puffin and are recorded in the Puffin Donor Database program. In addition, Debbie assists Rose Borzik and Steve Kress with office management and development. Previously, Debbie worked for 14 years with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the Bookshop and also in the Slide Department. Debbie has an AA degree in Primary School Education, and taught kindergarten and 2nd grade for 2 years until she gave it up to have her own family. She also has a minor in secretarial and computer science. Deb has been working with Steve and Rose on Project Puffin since 1999. Outside interests including sewing, and spending time with her husband George and her two children, daughter Kelly & her husband Brian; and son Justin & his wife Jennifer. She also very much enjoys her wonderful grandchildren. Her interests include stock car racing, and watching the Yankees win over the Red Sox.

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