Laura Goldin

I went to Yale, got a degree in Psychology, got married (long divorced), went off to psych grad school at Cornell for a year. Loved Cornell but not grad school, so I took a leave of absence and worked for Arthur D. Little for a couple of years before deciding either to head back or do something else. At ADL I worked on air quality modeling, and with EPA on cases against the steel and power companies for causing acid rain in the Adirondacks and elsewhere in the northeast -- all land that I love and wanted to protect. So I decided to go to law school and try to help protect the environment. I practiced for about 20 years (representing non-profits, forward-thinking industry, land use authorities; and finally was general counsel of the state environmental agency.) For the last 10 years, I've been teaching environmental law and policy, environmental social justice and sustainability at Brandeis University.

The greatest joy is my nearly 22-year old daughter, Katy. She's finishing up this year at Penn State in Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management. We are based in what was, when we arrived with horse in tow, a small new England farming community about 40 miles northwest of Boston. (It's now ridiculously developed, and the horse is gone.) We spend as much time as possible in the Adirondacks with the rest of the extended family.

I was probably working too hard and was too up-tight then to remember! Or maybe my memory is just getting a little fuzzy these days...