Andrew Egan

Dr. Andrew Egan serves the University of Maine at Fort Kent as Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professional Studies. He can be contacted by phone at (207) 834-7629 or by email at andrew.egan@maine.edu.

Following a career as a professional logger and later a landowner assistance forester in New Hampshire, Dr. Andy Egan was a tenured professor on the forest science faculties of the University of Maine and Laval University (Québec), where he was a Canada Industrial Research Chair designee in forest operations. Later, following a trajectory of increasing administrative responsibilities, he held positions as Dean of the School of Forestry and Natural Resources at Paul Smith’s College, Executive Director of the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute, Dean of the Faculty of Science at Brandon University (Manitoba, Canada), and Head of Campus/Vice-President Academic in the Penn State and University of Maine systems. In addition to his responsibilities at UMFK, he is currently adjunct professor, Department of Environmental Science, Central Luzon State University, the Philippines, and serves on the advisory committees of several graduate students at the Institute of Forestry in Nepal.

Egan has worked with students from a variety of backgrounds, including Native American and international students. During seven USAID-sponsored postings at the Escuela Ambiental in the Dominican Republic, he collaborated with Dominican colleagues on rural economic development in the forestry sector. He has been engaged in higher education internationally as a Peace Corps Response volunteer at the Forestry Training Institute in Liberia (2017-18) and later with the Department of Environmental Science, Central Luzon State University, the Philippines (2019-20). After being evacuated from the Philippines in March 2020 due to the pandemic, Egan was a forestry professor at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Georgia. He has been awarded two Senior Fulbright Scholarships (2004; 2022) to teach and conduct research at Nepal’s Institute of Forestry. He has developed partnerships with Aboriginal communities in the US, particularly among Navajo bands in New Mexico, that have helped to stimulate economic growth and job development in ecological restoration. While a Peace Corps Response volunteer, he co-founded of The Gola Foundation, which supports the education of disadvantaged youth in Tubmanburg, Liberia.

The author of over one hundred peer-reviewed and technical publications, Egan’s research has focused on the interactions between silviculture and forest operations, woods labor in the forestry sector, and the socio-economic dimensions of watershed restoration. He has presented his research during conferences across North America and abroad, including Croatia, China, Kazakhstan, and France. He was an associate editor for two forest science journals: the Journal of Forestry and Northern Journal of Applied Forestry. Egan has published two books: Adirondack Hard Times (2021; The History Press), about power and politics in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, and Haywire (2022; University of Massachusetts Press), about the challenges facing Maine’s forest products industry.