William R. Freudenburg, an investigator at the Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) LTER and the Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara, has passed on. Bill, as he was affectionately known, passed away on December 28, 2010, succumbing to bile duct cancer.
Born in Madison, Neb., on November 2, 1951, Freudenburg earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his master's and doctoral degrees in sociology at Yale University, and began his academic career in 1978 as an assistant professor at Washington State University. In 1986, following a year as a Congressional Fellow in the U.S. House of Representatives and a year as visiting associate professor at the University of Denver, he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as professor of rural sociology and environmental studies. He was named the Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at UCSB in 2002.
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