Nelson Institute head is a master at merging worlds

For most of her working life, Frances Westley has thrived on blurring boundaries, invariably seeing gray where others notice only black or white.

Her gift for moving seamlessly between professional worlds — and stitching together talent from disparate fields — will be critical as Westley celebrates her first Earth Day (April 22) as the new director of the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

“The reason [Westley] is a terrific choice is because of her inter-disciplinarity,” says longtime collaborator Steven Carpenter, a UWMadison ecologist who has coauthored several papers with Westley.

In this regard, Westley is on fertile ground at the Nelson Institute, which has earned acclaim for crafting multidisciplinary solutions to environmental dilemmas. “It’s a fascinating job,” says Westley of her new position. “It’s a perfect fit between the things I care about, the skills I have and an opportunity that arose at the right moment.”

On the job since January, the new director aims to boost the institute’s influence as a dynamic network of ideas and expertise. “I want to integrate and synergize interactions between different people,” says Westley. “I want to work like any good broker, connecting resources to possibilities.”

The winding path of possibilities that led Westley here from Montreal also is a lesson in how one person can mold a career, seizing unexpected opportunities and amassing expertise while dodging professional categories all along.

Far from environmentalism, Westley started out as a fine arts student at Vermont’s Middlebury College. But returning in the early 1970s to hometown Montreal, she sensed that art was not her only calling.

After briefly teaching drama and even considering medical school, Westley finally decided to follow in her sociologist parents’ footsteps, enrolling at Montreal’s McGill University to study sociology.

After completing a master’s thesis on Charlie Chaplin films, Westley went on to write a doctoral dissertation about new religious movements. Later, she took a job teaching pop culture theory at the University of Western Ontario, in a small town called London.

The story might have ended there, but Westley’s newfound professional stability was destabilizing her personal life. Her husband was a tenured religion professor in Montreal. The couple lived apart for four years, having two daughters amidst the distance.

Hoping to unite the family, Westley started looking for work in Montreal. Opportunities were scarce, though, even as Westley began to feel ambivalent about her field. “I was feeling restless with sociology,” recalls Westley, “I felt the need to move from theory into more practical application.”

Her restlessness most likely prompted Westley in 1982 to apply for and win a government fellowship that helped social science professionals re-orient into the management field. Soon, Westley was working at McGill’s management school.

Within two months, Westley became an assistant professor. But adjusting to the career shift proved extremely challenging. “I wasn’t trained in the whole jargon of management; I didn’t even know what a bottomline was,” says Westley of her steep learning curve. “Getting up to speed was the equivalent of doing another Ph.D.” During this difficult time, she also gave birth to a third daughter.

But six years in, Westley began asking herself some hard questions. “Even as I learned that many businesses use brilliant methodologies, I was chilled by what I was encountering at the big corporations I was researching,” says Westley. “I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to spend my life working in this environment?'”

Almost in response to her thoughts, Westley was invited in 1990 to speak at a conference that explored how management professionals could apply their knowledge to pressing global problems such as hunger and disease. “This was exactly what I was looking for; it was a watershed moment,” Westley recalls.

Always passionate about nature, Westley decided to use her management expertise to solve problems in conservation and the environment.

Still at McGill, Westley became involved with several organizations including the ecology group Resilience Alliance, and the Captive Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG), which works to save endangered species. Her services quickly became indispensable. She traveled around the world helping scientists collaborate effectively with diverse interest groups, ranging from international logging companies to bare-foot indigenous villagers.

“Frances opened our eyes to how people take in conservation information and how to convey hard-core science to the public people who will be most impacted by it,” says Philip Miller, CBSG’s senior program officer. “She brought the human element into the science of conservation biology.”

Carpenter, who met Westley at Resilience Alliance, agrees. “[Westley] would be the key communicator who can translate ideas among several technical jargons and help people see points of commonality or points of difference.”

Westley will most likely depend on such abilities — what she calls her “skills of the margins” — to negotiate her new working environment. In initial months, she plans to talk to faculty and staff about teaching and outreach programs at the Nelson Institute to determine exactly what institute members want for the future. Longer term, it will be a challenge to intensify resources, says Westley. She hopes to lure new, young faculty members as one step in that direction.

After a lifetime in bustling, cosmopolitan Montreal, Madison certainly is a new world. But, says Westley, “When an opportunity comes up you take it even if you don’t know where it’ll lead. When so many factors align, it’s almost like a call.”