Dean Emerita Carmen Cid honored with ESA service award

Carmen Cid, dean emerita at Eastern Connecticut State University, is the recipient of the 2025 Distinguished Service Citation from the Ecological Society of America (ESA), which recognizes long and distinguished volunteer service to ESA, the scientific community, and the larger purpose of ecology in the public welfare. As an active member of ESA for 45 years, Cid has co-created, implemented, or advised every ESA diversity and education initiative, while creating strategic links to national diversity in ecology and higher education networks.

A native of Cuba, Cid is a forest and wetland ecologist who has dedicated her career to putting her educational, research, administrative, and fundraising skills to make ecology careers accessible, meaningful, and affordable to all students. Her community engagement and mobilizing efforts began in 1991 when she was appointed the founding chair of the permanent ESA Women and Minorities in Ecology committee (WAMIE). She wrote significant portions of the first ESA strategic plan for diversity and education initiatives (WAMIE I report), including outlining the Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity, and Sustainability program.

As a respected ecology educator and later dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Eastern, she helped put ecology in the biology major, promoted sustainability across the curriculum, and developed career readiness initiatives to prepare today’s liberal arts graduates for the environmental workforce. In 2001, in Project Wonderwise – Urban Ecologist, she integrated her wetland seed bank research to develop a widely used, nationally recognized, award-winning multimedia curriculum for middle school students.

“The experience, motivation, and training for my nationally recognized ecology education and diversity work came from mentoring, doing research with and teaching Eastern biology students right in the forest, stream, and pond of the Eastern Arboretum field lab,” said Cid. “Eastern alumni taught me how best to make them career-ready for today's environmental workforce. I am grateful to my students and to Eastern for supporting my journey as an ecology professional and administrator in developing national ecology education standards for the Ecological Society of America.”

Cid continued: “The 2025 ESA Distinguished Service award is great recognition from the world's largest professional society of ecologists, with its 9,000 members. All the students who helped me deserve much credit and that is why I set up two scholarships in 2021 to support biology, health sciences, and English majors in their career journey at Eastern — the Cid-Polo Scholarship, and the Emergent Scholars in English grant program.”

Cid has been an ESA Fellow since 2017. She has chaired the ESA Education and current Diversity committees and served as ESA Governing Board member and VP for Education and Human Resources. As Chair of the ESA Board of Professional Certification, she helped link ESA undergraduate ecology education curricular framework efforts to the ESA members’ career development needs in applied ecology.

As founding chair of the current ESA Diversity Committee, she helped implement the first three years of the ESA Excellence in Ecology Scholars program, developing strategic guidelines for meeting the career development needs of ESA’s diverse members. Since 2020, she has continued to elevate the human dimension in ecology education and research as Co-PI to the NSF RCN UNIDE – Undergraduate Network for Increasing Diversity of Ecologists, linking the ESA four-dimensional ecology education curricular framework (4DEE) she helped develop to UNIDE’s culturally-responsive pedagogy efforts.