Richard Dumouchel Scholarship

In honor of our beloved trustee, Richard Dumouchel, the Foundation awards one URI student with a scholarship to pursue an education in conservation.

  • Anya Almeida is a senior in Wildlife and Conservation Biology graduating in the spring. She grew up in Rhode Island and has been living in Narragansett for the past 4 years. She grew up hiking and swimming in local ponds and at the ocean nurturing her love for the outdoors.

    From 2020-2022, Anya worked at an organic no-till vegetable farm in Exeter. During the summer of 2022, she worked as a Naturalist Teacher at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown. Her research experience includes working as a research assistant this past summer (2023) in Peru with an organization called Field Projects International. This organization has been collecting data on primate species in the Amazon rainforest for the last 12 years. Anya worked with Emperor Tamarin and Saddleback Tamarin species. Finally, she worked with URI professors on an aquaculture research project. This project looked at the impact of shorebird species on the bacteria levels in and on the aquaculture farms.

    In the future, she hopes to continue her work in conservation and research.

  • 2022 Patrick Felkner

    2021 Kylie Rezendes

    2020 Emma Paton

    2019 Alicia Jones

    2018 Sadie DeCurtis

    2017 Ryan Healy

    2016 Anthony “Ant” Sawaia

    2015 Gillian Baird

    2014 Mary Grande

    2013 Marianne Diffin

    2012 Joshua Sargent

    2011 Ryan Kleinert

    2010 Charleve Carey

    2009 Cynthia Maynard

    2008 Ben Vinhateiro

    2007 Samantha Petzold

    2006 Malcolm Grant

    2005 Grace Lentini

    2004 Jeffrey Backer

  • To be eligible, a student must be majoring in either Environmental Science and Management or Wildlife and Conservation Biology and have grown up in Westerly or Washington County RI.

    A committee of URI NRS faculty members reviews and ranks the eligible applicants based on their resumes, their experience working on conservation projects, their GPA, and their commitment to conservation.  Nominees are forwarded to the Weekapaug Foundation for Conservation for consideration.

Hugh H. Hoffman Scholarship

In memory of Hugh H. Hoffman, a longtime Weekapaug resident and a lifelong environmentalist and friend of the Foundation, each year the Weekapaug Foundation awards a University of Rhode Island Natural Resources Science (NRS) student with a scholarship for their studies. This is a new scholarship, based on a bequest from Mr. Hoffman and his beloved family. The scholarship award will begin in the summer of 2025.