Alumnus Featured on National Public Radio

April 24, 2008

Dr. Richard Ormrod (Ph.D. 1974) was featured on the National Public Radio (NPR) program, All Things Considered, on April 22, 2008. The story, "Gorilla Population Up 24 Years After Genoice," describes how the population of endangered mountain gorillas saw dramatic decreases in number as Rwanda was thrown into the grips of conflict. As social strife waned the gorilla population increased.

Dr. Ormrod was in Rwanada as a representative of People to People International-an organization founded by Dwight Eisenhower as a means to create and facilitate linkages between individual citizens among nations and to encourage the development of on-going cooperative programs between international groups.

"The Rwanda delegation focused on economic and social development, and children's issues set against the background of the genocide of 1994," Dr. Ormrod says. "My role was simply as a "delegate" visiting projects, interacting with other delegates (including NPR's Jake Warga, the journalist of the story), and meeting local people. We visited two village development projects, including Rwanda's Millennium Village (a UN sponsored project based on principles developed by an international panel of specialists headed by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs), a coffee cooperative project, two projects working with homeless street children, and an orphanage. We also learned about Rwandan initiatives in community-based tourism. The Gorilla trek was an optional activity at the end of our program, which dovetailed nicely with the theme of re-emergent tourism and highlighted Rwanda's efforts to develop ecologically sustainable tourism."

During the story, Jake Warga mentions that Dr. Ormrod gets in the way of a gorilla while on the trek. Dr. Ormrod articulates: "After all, I was standing in its way."

This is not the first People to People delegation Dr. Ormrod has been involved with. Two years ago, he traveled to South Africa with a group of psychologists.

When not traveling to South Africa or Rwanda, Dr. Ormrod is a Research Professor at the Crimes against Children Research Center (CCRC) at the University of New Hampshire. His recent projects have focused on analysis of a longitudinal data set generated by the center itself, entitled "The Developmental Victimization Survey" (DVS). The DVS collected extensive information on the victimization experiences of a national random sample of over two thousand children ages 2 to 17 years, in 2000, 2001 and 2003.