Annually, the Case Western Reserve University Office of Energy & Sustainability takes nominations for the Sustainability Champion awards to honor members of the CWRU community who are working hard on sustainability and climate topics. The following individuals were selected for awards this year:
Maia Gallagher
Maia Gallagher is the student award winner and will graduate this month with a major in civil engineering and a minor in physics. Gallagher is a longtime member of the Student Sustainability Council (SSC), having served as its chair (fall 2018-fall 2019), co-vice chair (spring 2018), and Farm Harvest Festival co-chair (2018). She also has lived in the Sustainability House during the past two years, most recently serving as house leader. When not studying or tending to sustainable needs, Gallagher enjoys writing and going for walks in the woods. She was nominated by many student peers.
Siu Yan Scott
Siu Yan Scott is this year’s staff Sustainability Champion and serves as the registrar for CWRU’s School of Medicine. She is a 2017 graduate of the Cuyahoga County Master Recycler Program and a member of the Ohio Advisory Board for The Trust for Public Land. Scott founded the HEC Community Cutlery Library program to reduce single-use plastic for events at the Health Education Campus and is passionate about new ways to create awareness and collaborative relationships to address sustainability issues. COVID-19 interrupted plans for the first near-zero waste event at the School of Medicine’s Match Day, but Scott is committed to renewing these efforts next spring with partners Rust Belt Riders, CWRU Food Recovery Network, and the CWRU Office of Energy & Sustainability. Scott was nominated by her coworkers in the School of Medicine.
Beverly Zella Saylor
Beverly Zella Saylor is this year’s faculty Sustainability Champion. She is the Armington Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Case Western Reserve. Saylor is a geologist whose work on the sedimentary formations includes studies of past environmental change in Namibia, Bolivia, Ethiopia and across North America, spanning the last billion years of Earth’s history. She also studies sedimentary rocks as repositories for fluids, including CO2 storage. Saylor teaches a First Seminar on environmental decisions and upper-level geology courses, including a field course near Death Valley. Saylor was nominated by a number of her students.