Newsletter helm changes leadership

The Leopold Center welcomes Laura Miller as the new communications specialist and editor of the quarterly Leopold Letter. Miller assumes the part-time post formerly held by Elizabeth (Liz) Weber, who resigned last June.

Miller comes to the Center with a wealth of publications and agricultural writing experience. Since 1986, she's been a communications specialist for ISU Extension, working on a variety of grant-funded projects within Extension's agriculture, families, and communities state programs to write, edit, produce, or market various print and audio-visual materials. Miller also has served in several interim positions, most recently as editor of the ICM, Extension's external four-color weekly newsletter about integrated crop management.

Currently, Miller is communications coordinator of Extension's statewide farm safety program and editor of the Exchange, an internal two-color newsletter for the 900 elected County Extension Council members in Iowa. She also is a communications consultant.

She holds a M.S. in Mass Communication from Iowa State University. She has won numerous national awards from Agricultural Communicators in Education (ACE) and serves as state co-chair of the Iowa ACE chapter.

Weber came to the Center as its first full-time technical editor in 1991. She is joining her husband, ISU landscape architecture professor Ken Lane, in his retirement. From 1991-1996, Weber was responsible for the Center's yearly progress report, organizational annual report, fact sheets, conference proceedings and other documents. She also coordinated or facilitated the hiring of three other current Center staff members.

In 1996, Weber began a job-share arrangement with Center communications specialist Anne Larson by assuming Larson's editorship of the quarterly Leopold Letter.

In between traveling with her husband and staying home with their two cats, Weber will pursue free-lance writing and editorial projects. Her personal essays appear occasionally in the Des Moines Register, Christian Science Monitor and other periodicals.

Return to the Fall 1998 Leopold Letter Index