During the 2016-17 academic year, Professor Heidi Hurd will pursue a unique one-year Masters in Environmental Management at Yale University's acclaimed School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Dr. Timothy Gregoire, who directs the mid-career MEM program, says that Hurd is unquestionably "a little bit outside the box! In the 15 years that I have been directing this wonderful program, we’ve never hosted a former Dean before!" 

Hurd describes herself as "alternatingly thrilled and terrified." In recent years her teaching and scholarly interests have turned increasingly toward environmental law and ethics, and she has taken numerous courses for credit at the University of Illinois in Crop Sciences, Animal Sciences, and Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. 

"I find that I learn best when I force myself to write the papers, take the midterms, and sweat over final exams with the twenty-somethings who think a lot faster than do I and who have a mastery of modern learning technology I lack," she says. "My year at Yale will take this form of ‘positive stress’ to a whole new level, opening doors to topics, methodologies, and players within the environmental arena that will undoubtedly prove inspiring." 

While Hurd returns to the life of a graduate student, living out of a backpack and bicycling around New Haven, Professor Michael Moore will be a visiting professor for the year at the Yale Law School where he will teach a large 1L section of Criminal Law and an upper-level cross-listed course on "Addiction and the Law: Perspectives from Philosophy, Economics and Neuroscience." Co-taught with Gideon Yaffe (Yale Law/Philosophy/Psychology), Alan Schwartz (Yale Law/Economics) and Hedy Kober (Yale Neuroscience), this latter course will explore the bearing of addiction on various forms of treatment under the law, including but not limited to the criminal liability of addicts. Inasmuch as Moore's next book is devoted to exploring the relationship between neuroscience and responsibility, this unusual multidisciplinary collaboration will both capitalize on and advance his expertise about the conditions of moral and criminal culpability.