Dr. Eric Block selected by the UAlbany Emeritus Center as a William L. Reese Memorial Fellow

The University at Albany Emeritus Center recently elected Eric Block and Gary Kleppel as William L. Reese Fellows. Named after our founding President and benefactor Bill Reese, the Fellows program is designed to confer appropriate honor to UAlbany Emeriti for sustained, consequential, and exemplary post‐retirement professionally‐related contributions and achievements in scholarship/creative productions, teaching, or service, in or outside the University.

Since retiring from the Department of Biological Sciences in 2017, Professor Kleppel has continued his scholarship, teaching and service focusing on sustainable and environmentally regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture promotes the use techniques that produce healthy food, while simultaneously restoring soil health, mitigating the impacts of farming on natural resources, and reducing the contribution of agriculture to climate change. It is the subject of a multi‐year project he has initiated called Eden 2.0, which was funded in part by one of our Three Voices grants in 2018. Professor Kleppel has also given guest lectures post‐retirement and is active in town and county agricultural programs.

Professor Block retired from the Department of Chemistry in 2018 and has actively continued his research on sulfur chemistry. He has relocated to Southern California for part of the year, where he has served as a Visiting Professor at UCLA and the University of California at Irvine. He continues to publish articles in peer reviewed scientific journals and has presented his work at international symposia. In 2020 he was awarded a Three Voices grant to help support his travel as a co‐chair of a session at Pacifichem 2021 in Honolulu. He has been named “An Ambassador of Excellence” by the American Chemical Society for his work on the editorial board of Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Edward Fitzgerald, President of the Emeritus Center, says “that the Board is very impressed with the work that both Professors Kleppel and Block continue to do after retirement and that they exemplify the Center’s goal of encouraging emeriti to stay actively engaged with their profession and the University”. William Hedberg, Senior Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and the administrative liaison for the Center, says “I have always thought of the scholarly life as a life‐style. The opportunities the Emeritus Center offers for support and recognition of continued meaningful participation in the scholarly life are substantial, and unusual I think in the SUNY system and perhaps beyond. I thank Prof. Reese for his vision and resources to make these opportunities possible, and I congratulate Profs. Kleppel and Block on their selection and thank them for being exemplars of how the scholarly life continues after retirement”.

For more information about the Emeritus Center and the Fellows Program go to https://www.albany.edu/emerituscenter/index.php.