PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — The University of Maine at Presque Isle will present U.S. Senator Susan M. Collins — a County native and key leader in the U.S. Senate — as the first guest speaker in its 2015-16 Distinguished Lecturer Series.
Collins will deliver her talk, Can an Institutionalist Be a Change Agent?, on Thursday, Sept. 3, at 4 p.m. in the Campus Center. This talk is free and the public is welcome.
Collins will discuss her years in Washington and her work in facilitating bipartisan compromise. First elected in 1996, she is serving her fourth term in the U.S. Senate. She has never missed a roll-call vote, casting nearly 6,000 consecutive votes, and has shown leadership in critical areas ranging from homeland security, national defense, and disaster response, to education, business development, and health care.
She is the chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging and co-chair of the Congressional Task Force on Alzheimer’s Disease. A recipient of the U.S. Navy’s highest civilian honor, Collins has successfully advocated for employees at Bath Iron Works and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, as well as the Maine Military Authority and the Defense Finance and Accounting Services Center in Limestone, the Air National Guard base in Bangor and the Maine Army National Guard.
Collins is a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Appropriations Committee, where she is chairman of the Transportation Appropriations and Housing Subcommittee and a senior member of the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee.
Collins was born and raised in Caribou, where her family runs S.W. Collins, a fifth-generation lumber business, founded by her ancestors in 1844. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of St. Lawrence University, she is married to Thomas A. Daffron and resides in Bangor.
The University’s Distinguished Lecturer Series was established in 1999. Each year, four to six speakers from Maine and beyond are featured.
For more information about this event, contact the university’s community and media relations office at 768-9452.
