UW-Green Bay’s Katers awarded Frederick E. Baer Professorship in Business

University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Prof. John F. Katers, Natural and Applied Sciences, has been named to the Frederick E. Baer Professorship in Business, effective July 1, 2014. He is appointed for a five-year term.

The professorship recognizes and gives support for a tenured faculty member who has demonstrated a productive commitment to scholarship and/or outreach, and whose work exemplifies the spirit and mission of UW-Green Bay. It is specified for faculty members who work directly with business leaders, in business development or with students who later enter the business world. Scholarship namesake Frederick E. Baer had a distinguished 44-year career with Paper Converting Machine Corporation, culminating in his tenure as the company’s president and CEO from 1969 until his retirement in 1993.

Katers, a member of the graduate faculty in Environmental Science and Policy, teaches courses on pollution control, pollution prevention, waste management, renewable energy and resource management. His research has been in these same areas, where he has been able to consistently obtain research funding for his work, supporting more than 30 graduate student thesis projects and numerous other undergraduate research projects. Most notably, Katers has worked on anaerobic digestion systems for dairy farms, an area in which Wisconsin is a national leader, and on solid waste and recycling issues in the state. He is the current chair of the Brown County Solid Waste Board. Katers is also the director of the University’s Environmental Management and Business Institute (EMBI) and serves as the academic director of the newly created online M.S. program in Sustainable Management.

Katers has been at UW-Green Bay since 1995, working for the University of Wisconsin Solid and Hazardous Waste Education Center as a recycling specialist before joining the Natural and Applied Sciences faculty in 1999. He holds a B.S. in Environmental Science and Business Administration and an M.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from UW-Green Bay and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Marquette University. Katers has received numerous awards for community service, including the UW-Green Bay Founders Award for Community Outreach and the Distinguished Alumni Award from Green Bay Southwest High School. He was also named a Wisconsin Idea Fellow by the University of Wisconsin System in recognition of his outstanding public service and outreach to business and industry. More recently, he was awarded a Fulbright Specialist position that will allow him to travel to Chile to work collaboratively on sustainability issues with the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago.

In his free time, Katers enjoys golf and bowling, where he is the author of eight 300 games. He also coaches youth bowling and baseball, but everything else stops when the Green Bay Packers play.

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