Academic literature on the topic 'Commonwealth Teaching Service'

John Cyril Smith (1922–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Nottingham where he headed the Law Department for three decades. In 1952–1953, Smith was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at Harvard University and became impressed by the casebook method of teaching. The only subject he had taught every year throughout his career was evidence. His deep understanding of the law was apparent in his case commentaries on the subject for the Criminal Law Review, although by the mid-1980s he was handing over many evidence cases to his colleague and former student Diane Birch for commentary. He was a strong advocate of the presumption of innocence, in the form of the principle. It is chiefly for his work on the substantive criminal law that Smith will be long remembered. In addition to his three decades as Head of the Law Department at the University of Nottingham, and all his academic writings, Smith gave considerable time to official committees and other public service work.

The philosophy of research in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program expanded what I learned in graduate school from H. T. Odum by providing an approach for a holistic understanding of ecological processes in the tropics. Participation in the LTER program enabled collaborations with many talented people from many parts of the world and enabled the mentoring and education of a new cadre of tropical natural and social sciences students. By expanding the opportunities for research and analysis at larger scales, the LTER program allowed me to address tropical ecosystem responses to such phenomena as hurricanes, floods, landslides, and past land uses and to do so at the appropriate scales of time and space. Paradigms of tropical forest resilience and adaptability in the Anthropocene emerged from research at the Luquillo (LUQ) LTER site. I first became aware of the LTER program in 1978 as I walked by the White House in Washington, DC, with Sandra Brown, then an intern on the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and Wayne Swank, a US Forest Service employee on detail with the National Science Foundation (NSF). I was a staff member at CEQ, and W. Swank explained to us a new long-term ecological research program that he was helping develop at the NSF. Although the first cadre of sites appeared to have been selected, I was immediately captured by the concept and expressed my interest in developing a proposal for a tropical site in Puerto Rico. Little did I know at the time that my whole scientific career was about to change, in part because of the LTER program, but also because I was to become a US Forest Service scientist. The first 30 years of my US Forest Service career would be heavily influenced by the LTER program and the people I worked with while developing a new way of thinking about tropical forest ecosystems. I am an ecologist trained at the Universities of Puerto Rico and North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My experience before becoming part of the LTER program involved (1) teaching at the University of Florida at Gainesville and (2) government work at the Commonwealth (Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources) and federal (President’s Council on Environmental Quality) levels.