The Friends of the Ashley Schiff Preserve Executive Board is composed of four officers (President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer), a community liaison, and the chairs of all standing committees. We meet monthly, and any member of the FASP is welcome to attend our meetings.
Schiff Family Representative: Dorothy Schiff-Shannon
President: Sharon Pochron
Sharon Pochron teaches in the Sustainability Studies Program at Stony Brook University and is the PI of the Worm Lab. She is also the director of the Ecosystems and Human Impact major. She joined the FASP because the woods offered her students an opportunity to escape the walls of campus and a place to study interactions between people and the environment.
Vice-President, and Scholarship Committee Chair: Paul Siegel
Paul has been a member of the Friends since its resurrection by the campus environmental committee. He has at various times served as vice chair and chair. As chair he is most proud of having worked with the membership to create and enshrine the by-laws and creating the Guardian of the Glade award to recognize those individuals who have provided exceptional service to the Friends. He sees the Preserve as providing a tangible measure of honoring the University’s beginnings and one of its early professors.
Secretary: Sue Avery
Sue is a botanist, a certified landscape designer and has experience volunteering for various conservation organizations, namely Seatuck Environmental Association, Long Island Native Plant Initiative and Four Harbors Audubon Society. She is passionate about conserving open space for the benefit of all.
Treasurer: Donna Digiovanni
Donna is the Assistant to the Chair for the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University. She joined the Friends of the Ashley Schiff Preserve in 2005 when the committee was recruited to advocate for the preserve. She echoes the goal pf the Friends: to ensure that it would not be developed and to keep the preserve “forever wild”, highlighting the importance of natural areas.
Community Liaison: Nick Acampora
Nomination Committee Chair: Lauren Donovan
Education Committee Chair: David Taylor
David Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability. His writing crosses disciplinary boundaries and genres—poetry, creative non-fiction, scholarship and science/technical writing; however, at the core of his work always is the concern for environmental sustainability and community. His poetry includes a book Praying Up the Sun (Pecan Grove Press, 2008) and a chapbook The Log from The Sea of Cortez: A Poem Series (Wings Press, 2013) based on John Steinbeck’s 1940 collecting trip with biologist Ed Ricketts.
Management and Planning Committee Chair: Chart Guthrie
Membership and Development Committee Chair: Maureen Murphy
Alumni Representative / Social Media Manager : Hogyeum Joo
Hogyeum ‘Evan’ Joo is a Stony Brook University graduate (BA in Ecosystems and Human Impact, 19′) and a Ashley Schiff Preserve Scholarship winner 2018-2019. He has been doing research on awareness level of the Preserve for the past 3 years, and manages the website, facebook, and the instagram page of the FASP. He’s currently a masters’ student at Columbia University studying sustainability management.
Other Roles
Although not members of the Executive Board, the following members play prominent roles in the FASP:
Social Media Coordinator: Melissa Cohen
