Directory - Employee

Professor Forster-Holt holds a Ph.D. and an M.B.A. from the University of Maine, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University. At the University of Maine, she developed and taught courses on small business management and accounting for the School of Business and the Foster innovation center, and she was a research associate with the Center on Aging. She joined the Husson faculty in the summer of 2011.

A Certified Management Accountant, she serves on the Small Business Committee of the Institute of Management Accountants where her area of interest is the impact of banking reform on community banks and their small business constituents. She completed coursework and exams at UNC Greensboro leading to the Registered Financial Gerontologist certification. At the Babson College Entrepreneuship conference, she presented research to international audiences on entrepreneurial exit, or “endrepreneurship” a termed she has coined. She serves on the Key Contact network of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, most recently on the issue of healthcare reform. Locally, she is the treasurer of the Orono high school hockey boosters, and served as team manager for the PVHC squirts. At UMaine, she served on the Business and sustainability committee of the School of Business, as a judge for capstone case presentations, and as a thesis committee member for several Honors College candidates.

Prior to earning her doctorate, she gathered substantial work experience in both large and small business including executive management at a large credit union, public accounting audit, and tax at the Big Four firm of Ernst & Young, sales and marketing for national accounts, SBA counseling, and consulting. Her work in asset liability management (A.L.M.) garnered national C.F.O. best practices awards and inclusion of the credit union in a national A.L.M. pilot program by the N.C.U.A.

She is also the co-owner of Shaw & Tenney, a manufacturing company that recently won MTI grants for innovations in manufacturing and commercialization of wood products. For over 150 years, Shaw & Tenney has produced the world’s finest oars, paddles, masts, spars and flagpoles.

Originally from Albany, N.Y. She has lived and worked in NYC, Sacramento, California and Bangor. She is married to Steve, and they have three children. They live in Orono.

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Elisa Giaquinto received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Brenau University in Gainesville Georgia and her Master of Science in nursing from Georgia State University with a specialization in gerontology. In addition, Elisa studied social gerontology at Georgia State University and received a Certificate of Graduate Study in gerontology. While working as a clinical nurse specialist in gerontology, Elisa designed and directed an acute care medical unit for elders on Cape Cod, created a gerontology nurse resource program for acute care nurses, organized community based wellness clinics for seniors in residential retirement communities, designed and led an inpatient unit for community based elders with dementias, and helped a variety of hospitals in Georgia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island to create patterns of care delivery systems for frail acutely ill elders.

Elisa returned to school to explore the role of cultural values and systems of belief in the formation of health policy and their role in the structure of community life for older people. She earned a Master of Arts in anthropology from Brown University and continued on with doctoral studies where she examined the everyday life of older people and the relationships between social institutions, rural community life, social integration and independence in central Italy.
Elisa’s research interests continue to involve community institutions and their relationship to health and independence through the life course and specifically as they affect the lived experience of old age. Currently she is conducting ethnographic research in rural Nova Scotia.

Elisa has taught nursing, sociology, anthropology for Regis College, Lasell College and Pine Manor College in Massachusetts before joining Husson University and moving to Bangor Maine in the fall of 2011. She also has a home in Southwest Nova Scotia where she is active in the Gerontology Association of Nova Scotia and in her local community. She is an avid photographer and plein air painter.