Join the West Side Woodwind Quintet on April 21st at the Baruch Performing Arts Center for a special memorial concert to honor the life and work of Professor Mindy Engle-Friedman. The concert will feature the Westside Woodwind Quintet, playing a program that includes  'Fugue in g minor' by Johann Sebastian Bach, 'Le Tombeau de Couperin' by Maurice Ravel and 'Aires Tropicales' a modern Cuban dance suite by Paquito d'Rivera. All proceeds from this performance will directly support the Dr. Mindy Engle-Friedman Climate Scholars Endowment.

General admission tickets to the concert are $25, with $15 tickets for Baruch staff and $5 for students. 

Please consider donating to the Dr. Mindy Engle-Friedman Climate Scholars Endowment online. As a token of appreciation for your support, email Matt at matthew.lepere@baruch.cuny.edu to receive complimentary tickets. 

The West Side Woodwind Quintet was formed in 2015. The members of the group perform with chamber music ensembles and orchestras throughout the New York metropolitan area. The members of the quintet met through their affiliation with the Broadway Bach Ensemble, a community orchestra that performs on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The quintet has performed in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They were heard on WDVR as the featured musical group in the River Town Radio Theater’s broadcast of “Return to the Mill”. In addition, they have participated in chamber music recitals sponsored by the Broadway Bach Ensemble and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. They are regular performers in the Center Series at the Flemington Jewish Community Center and have performed at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in a concert to benefit climate research at the college. The musicians hold a variety of careers, including professor of law, school librarian, Assistant Producer and Project Coordinator at Steinway & Sons, Director of Marketing for Steinway & Sons and medical oncologist. 

Dr. Mindy Engle-Friedman received her BS in psychology from SUNY Binghamton (now Binghamton University). She was awarded a PhD in psychology from Northwestern University and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University. She joined the faculty of Baruch College in 1987 and taught there for her entire career. She taught courses in sleep and sleep disorders, abnormal psychology, psychology of free speech and psychology of environmental sustainability. She was a member of the founding faculty for the Mental Health Counseling Masters Program, teaching Ethics in Psychology. She was awarded the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service to the College twice as well as the Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence. 

Mindy ran a lab dedicated to undergraduates, mentoring over 100 students. Many of her students are teaching at major institutions around the country. She presented her research at over 60 conferences internationally and in the US. Her publications include studies in sleep and its influence on effort and performance, trust in the media with regard to the environment, behavioral attitudes toward environmental sustainability and its influence on child bearing behavior. 

Her initial research interests involved sleep and its effect on performance. As public awareness of climate change grew and the peril it presented to the world became more apparent, Mindy shifted her interests and research to working to environmental sustainability. She created the Baruch College Task Force on Sustainability in the early 2000’s. Her efforts promoted college wide recycling, reduction in printers, reducing paper and ink usage and the creation of water bottle stations across the vertical campus. Additionally, the main stairwell of the college is adorned with environmentally conscious messages. Please take a look the next time you climb those stairs and acknowledge her work. 

In 2019 she created the Baruch College Climate Scholars Program. This program includes a series of didactic sessions with experts from within CUNY and outside the university, exposing the students to a diverse range of topics related to sustainability. The students also spend time in various laboratories around CUNY and work as interns at a variety of organizations including Bloomberg, Penn Environment, Inside Climate News and others. The program has received funding from Bloomberg, Colgate Palmolive and private philanthropy through the college. Recently, the Climate Scholars received funding from CUNY and expanded to include students from all four-year and two-year colleges across the CUNY network. Many of these students have gone on to assume important roles in various organizations nationally working on environmental sustainability. It is our hope that your donations will help fund this program and ensure ITS sustainability into the future. 

In addition to all of Mindy’s remarkable academic accomplishments, she cared greatly for the well-being of the college, its students, faculty and staff. She served as the college Ombudsperson, settling disputes, calming apprehensive students and staff and providing her unique empathy for all who worked at Baruch. She always strove to make the college a better place.  

She loved Baruch. Her legacy continues through the Mindy Engle-Friedman Climate Scholarship, which supports students dedicated to environmental science and sustainability.