Professor Toth’s background in teaching and research was focused on regional landscape planning and design with an emphasis on ecosystem sciences.  He received an Associate’s degree in Natural Sciences and went on to complete his Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture at Michigan State University and his Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.  Interdisciplinary projects dealing with large landscapes – with an emphasis in watershed analysis and management – would become a primary focus of his future teaching and research.

 

Professor Toth’s first academic appointment in 1965 was at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. It was at the University of Pennsylvania that he met some of his most influential mentors. With a team of eminent ecologists, limnologists, anthropologists, forest economists, and regional planners, he worked on one of the first large-scale watershed management studies for the Delaware River Basin.

 

During his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania (1965-68), Professor Toth and his wife, Diana, spent several summers traveling throughout the western U.S. In the summer of 1967 he had the opportunity to teach summer school at Utah State University. That experience convinced his wife and him that their future was to take place somewhere in the Intermountain West. In 1968 he was invited to join with faculty in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, where he and associates developed major new approaches in regional planning.  Later, in 1972, he was presented with an opportunity to come to Utah State University as a professor in the Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning department. At the time of his USU appointment, he also held Harvard appointments as visiting professor. In 1974 he was asked to serve as Department Head in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning.

 

His tenure at USU was in two departments and two colleges (LAEP/HASS and ENVS/QCNR) with teaching focused on both undergraduate and graduate education. In 2001 Professor Toth joined the Environment and Society department where he was instrumental in maintaining the Masters of Science program in Bioregional Planning, which he and another colleague initiated in 1997. The Bioregional Planning program offers an interdisciplinary curriculum centered on a year-long studio course, dealing with real-world issues at community and regional scales. He continued to encourage his students to look for the relationships within the landscape in order to understand the natural and social processes which give form to settlement and culture.