Bruce Taterka teaches environmental science and theory of knowledge at West Morris Mendham High School in Mendham, New Jersey. Bruce is a trustee of the Schiff Nature Preserve in Mendham where he has designed and led after-school environmental education programs for middle and high-school students. In 2009 Bruce won an Earthwatch Fellowship to study trophic relationships in the cloud forest of Ecuador, and in 2010 he was a NOAA Teacher at Sea working aboard NOAA ship Oregon II in the Gulf of Mexico during the BP oil spill. Bruce has rafted and paddled the waters of the Americas from the Tena River in Ecuador to British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands to the Colorado, Snake, Allagash, and Passaic rivers in the U.S. In 2011-2012 Bruce worked on federal and state education policy as a U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellow and served on the New Jersey Department of Education's Evaluation Pilot Advisory Committee.
Prior to his career as a teacher, Bruce worked for seventeen years in the environmental industry, first as an environmental consultant and then, after earning his law degree at night from the Pace University School of Law, as an environmental lawyer at the international firm Latham & Watkins. Bruce is currently co-authoring New Jersey's Environmental Literacy Plan with his wife, Tanya Sulikowski, who is an environmental educator working on her MS in ecology at Montclair State University. Bruce has a BA from Vassar College and MS in geology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Mendham, NJ
United States