Spring 2021 update | FAQ page | Class flexibility for students | Novel coronavirus updates
May 19, 2020
My name is Lina, and when I was a kid, I used to believe that I am a superhero, [this is] because I am meant to be one,” Lina Khalifeh declared at the 2019 WE Empower pitch night hosted by billionaire fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg in her New York studio apartment. WE Empower intern, Revere Wood elaborates on how Lina Khalifeh and SheFighter are continuing to support the SDGs while navigating through the challenges of COVID-19.
ASU Now | May 18, 2020
Grasslands across the globe, which support the majority of the world’s grazing animals, have been transitioning to shrub lands in a process that scientists call “woody plant encroachment.”
Managed grazing of drylands is the most extensive form of land use on the planet, which has led to widespread efforts to reverse this trend and restore grass cover.
Until now, researchers have thought that because woody plants like trees and shrubs have deeper roots than grass, woody plant encroachment resulted in less water entering streams and groundwater aquifers. This was because scientists typically studied the effect the grassland shift toward shrubs has on water resources on flat ground.
May 18, 2020
The Digital Carbon Warehouse
An EarthX talk by Bill Brandt
April 24, 2020
Common sense tells us that “in the long run, it will be more profitable to save the planet than to ruin it.” So how do we mobilize at scale, engaging as many of us as possible and involving all who may want to participate in sequestering carbon? We can all do our part with some “smart” assistance.
May 18, 2020
ASU Knowledge Enterprise hosted a May 18 conversation with KE employees to answer some of the questions they've received as they prepare and plan to resume in-person operations and classes. Topics included teleworking, building preparations, lab safety protocols, and a variety of other useful information.
A recording and slides will be made available to KE employees on the Knowledge Enterprise Electronic Portal at asu.edu/keep (ASUrite login required). Those who are not employed by KE will soon have access to a resource page for the broader research community.
AZ Central | May 16, 2020
ASU's Biodesign Institute has published a website that displays user-friendly graphs and visualizations of the spread of COVID-19 in Arizona and across the United States. "The idea behind the website... is to get data out there so people can look at it and they can follow trends," said Joshua LaBaer, executive director of ASU's Biodesign Institute.
In addition, ASU researchers have published a model projecting healthcare demand in Arizona due to COVID-19. The model can be viewed in preprint form at medRxiv. "I think (the model) helps us to understand where we are, so that we can think about where we want to go next," said mathematical epidemiologist Tim Lant, one of the model's authors.
May 15, 2020
In many parts of the U.S., the farming industry has been forced to waste food due to supply chain interruptions from COVID-19. But the Carbon Cowboys featured in Peter Byck's 10-part documentary series say sales are soaring.
In his series, Byck details the farming technique known as regenerative grazing, which involves quickly rotating cattle from pasture to pasture, before they can damage the land — similar to how bison herds move across The Great Plains. The practice, which does not use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, builds soils that are richer in carbon, which in turn boosts crop and livestock yields.
The series, directed by Peter Byck, was filmed over six years in various rural communities across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. View it online at CarbonCowboys.org.
May 15, 2020
A survey led by urban planning professor Deborah Salon probed 800 workers across the U.S., many of them concentrated in Arizona and other western states. Initial responses showed that workers anticiapte working more from home in the future, driving less and biking or walking more.
Salon's early results were shared, along with several other studies, in a May article published by CityLab entitled How Will Americans Commute After Lockdowns End? Salon is an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.
May 14, 2020
From the American Society of Civil Engineers:
Elham H. (Ellie) Fini, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, co-founder of Bio-Adhesive Alliance Inc., senior sustainability scientist at Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and associate professor of Arizona State University, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Fini has served as a program director at the National Science Foundation and as president of the American Association of Civil Engineers (Northern branch in North Carolina). She has been Fulbright scholar at Aalborg University of Denmark and research affiliate at MIT's Center for Materials Science and Engineering. She is currently serving as an invention ambassador for American Association for Advancement of Sciences and as the associate editor of ASCE's Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering. She is also the inventor and co-founder of a startup company and has published more than 100 journal papers, one book and one book chapter.
May 13, 2020
Sustainability scientists Darshan Karwat of the School for the Future of Innovation in Sociaty and Jenni Vanos of the School of Sustainability were among several experts interviewed by local Phoenix National Public Radio affiliate KJZZ last month. The April 27 radio piece was titled Worse Air Quality In Phoenix Communities Of Color Could Mean Higher COVID-19 Risk.
Karwat’s research shows correlations between neighborhoods’ poverty levels, percentage of minority residents, and pollution levels. Vanos studies the influence of extreme heat, radiation, and air pollution on human health. With so many cars off the road as people stay home during the pandemic, Phoenix’s air has been much cleaner for the past few weeks, which the two see as an opportunity for shared research.
ASU Now | May 13, 2020
Every year Arizona State University Faculty Women’s Association recognizes exceptional mentors across the university with the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. This year, social sciences faculty members Amber Wutich and Tracy Spinrad from The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences were selected for the honor.
Sustainability Scientist Amber Wutich joined the School of Human Evolution and Social Change as an assistant professor in 2007 after initially coming to ASU as a postdoctoral student in 2006. Today she serves as the President’s Professor of anthropology, the director of ASU’s Center for Global Health and the associate director of ASU’s Institute for Social Science Research.
May 12, 2020
Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them. Written in exquisitely wrought prose, Pigs asks questions about community, environmental responsibility, and the possibility of innocence.
In this May 20 lunchtime event, hosted on Zoom, author Johanna Stoberock joins a panel of experts to discuss the unanticipated effects of our real-world linear waste system on people and communities, assessing current trends and innovations for a circular economy to reuse and regenerate our world’s resources. Register for Zoom details.
This event is presented by the ASU Rob & Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service, ASU Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, Changing Hands Bookstore.
ASU Now | May 12, 2020
Anyone that’s ever been out walking on a hot summer day has probably experienced an uncomfortable phenomenon: sometimes, the heat radiated from the pavement below is just as hot as that coming from the sunlight above. In a quest to cool city streets, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Surfaces has pioneered the use of solar reflective coatings with the idea that coating streets with a lighter color will lower the surrounding temperatures. It’s an interesting theory, and one that has attracted the attention of researcher and urban climatologist Ariane Middel.
May 11, 2020
Marina Melnik, a 2019 WE Empower finalist, is the founder of SkillsUp. Her company provides training, development, and consulting in the information technology field. SkillsUp is making strides to care for the environment by moving their materials online, eliminating paper and plastic waste in coffee zones, and supporting recycling.
May 8, 2020
One of the many changes David Ginn experienced as he moved from rural Pennsylvania to metropolitan Phoenix was the increase in his concern for the growing climate crisis. Motivated to do something about it, he decided to enroll in the Master of Sustainability Leadership program at Arizona State University.
“The focus on global and strategic perspectives in sustainability seemed like a great trajectory for the program, and the subject matter of the curricula for each course seemed very interesting to me,” Ginn said. “I was not from a traditional sustainability background for my undergrad studies, so this seemed like the perfect bridge into the field.”
Medium | May 8, 2020
In the latest thought leader piece from the Global Futures Laboratory, "Societal Planetary Boundaries: When Global Society Endangers the Future of Our Planet," Sander van der Leeuw, Manfred Laubichler and Peter Schlosser discuss the unstable state of our global societal systems and how we can change. "We are challenged to find and establish a completely new structure for current societal dynamics, and to do so within the Environmental and Societal Planetary Boundaries," the authors write.
You can read the piece on Medium. To ensure you don’t miss any Global Futures Laboratory Medium posts, follow our Medium channel directly, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn where we announce all new posts.
ASU Now | May 8, 2020
After more than 35 years, David Pijawka, sustainable planning professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, is retiring as full-time faculty. Pijawka has been at the helm of interdisciplinary research at Arizona State University for more than three decades, bringing together policy, sustainability, geographical sciences and urban planning in novel and innovative ways and applying them to community work.
Arriving at ASU in 1982, Pijawka took on a range of critical roles and academic positions over the course of his career. He served as full-time faculty for the School of Public Affairs, the School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, and the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning — establishing a record of excellence in each.
In the mid-1990s, Pijawka served as interim director of the Center for Environmental Studies, predecessor to what is today the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. He took over after Duncan Patten's retirement in 1995 and was succeeded by Charles Redman in 1997. During Pijawka's tenure as interim director, the Center initiated several new interdisciplinary research and outreach programs, expanding relations with other ASU units.
May 8, 2020
ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Faculty Affiliate Garth Paine developed a tool that tracks gunshots in rainforests to stop illegal poaching of wild animals.
This device identifies sonic characteristics of a gunshot from a mile away that reports the location of the shot to local authorities. Originally, wildlife conservationists used camera traps to document illegal poaching. However, if the perpetrators sighted the cameras they destroyed them.
ASU Now | May 7, 2020
Sustainability scholar Gary Moore, an assistant professor in Arizona State University's School of Molecular Sciences and the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Applied Structural Discovery, has just been named one of 14 young faculty nationwide to be honored with a 2020 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. When choosing its teacher-scholars, the foundation seeks those who demonstrate leadership in both research and education.
Moore’s group uses chemistry to build nanoscale materials that are fundamentally interesting and address societal challenges. Research themes include the transduction of solar energy, the synthesis of new materials to catalyze a range of chemical transformations of industrial importance, the design and preparation of novel hard-to-soft matter interfaces, and development of a general improvement in our understanding of molecular structure and function relationships.
May 7, 2020
Our students were surprised to learn that the Phoenix metro area uses less water than it did in 1987. That’s because there’s lots of hard work going on to make water use more efficient, including at the ASU Decision Center for a Desert City where Ray Quay works.
May 6, 2020
Overworked and experiencing health issues, Laura Friedman knew she needed to make major life changes. So, when her son recommended she go to college, she didn’t hesitate.
“I researched online graduate school degrees and learned that Arizona State University was ranked No. 1 in the country for innovation,” Friedman said. “I found the Master of Sustainability Leadership program and I believed combining and expanding the sustainability leadership themes with my technology career would enable me to make a valuable career shift.”
