
LANCE POLYA
DIRECTOR​
Lance recently retired as a lecturer in the Environmental Program at the University of Vermont. During his ten years there, he developed and taught courses in Environmental Systems Thinking and in Modeling Dynamic Systems. As part of these courses, he taught the unintended impacts of population growth on various environmental policies, including climate change. He was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to create these courses.
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Lance earned a Ph.D. in Systems Science from the State University of New York at Binghamton, took doctoral courses at Dartmouth College, and has a Masters in Applied Mathematics from North Carolina State University.
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He travelled widely in his younger days. He hiked solo in Africa, spending a month each in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, staying with families in rural villages. He has bicycled across Canada, Europe, and Central America.
Currently, Lance volunteers for Meals on Wheels, delivering food to the elderly. Previously, he went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to reconnect abandoned animals with their owners.