Beth McLennan joined the University of Illinois in fall 2004 and LEAM in spring 2005. At LEAM, she will be assisting with GIS presentations and habitat fragmentation modeling.

She is a master’s student in Urban and Regional Planning, where she is interested in sustainable landscape design, urban agriculture, green water management infrastructure, and new urbanism.

Beth received a BA (Geography) at the University of Colorado-Boulder (1998), where she focused on forest ecology and environmental policy, and a post-graduate certificate in GIS from Penn State (2001). She worked as a GIS analyst in Chicago for two years prior to coming to UIUC, helping build the City of Chicago zoning layers, Cook County’s parcel GIS, and a pilot geodatabase for the Chicago Department of Water Management.

In her previous career, Beth worked as a personal chef and caterer in Aspen, CO, and Beverly Hills. She has cooked for a variety of entertainment industry figures, such as Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, Paul Simon, Don Henley, Seal, and Edie Brickell.

Beth loves traveling, having visited 43 states, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, New Zealand, Australia, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. An outdoors enthusiast and former W-EMT, she enjoys telemark skiing, kayaking, biking, climbing, and backpacking, and was an assistant trip leader for the Colorado Alpine Club and a volunteer for Mountain Rescue-Aspen.

Beth’s current dream trip would be to spend a year trekking and climbing in Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan with her husband and dog, but given her current time constraints, she’ll most likely settle for a weekend camping trip to Wisconsin.