Dear Members of the Global Futures Laboratory and Sustainability Scientists, Scholars and Fellows,

During several conversations over the past few weeks, we’ve heard comments about the terminology being used to safely distance people during the COVID-19 event we are presently experiencing. Most recently,  we see the conversation shifting from practicing social distancing to practicing physical distancing while staying socially and emotionally connected and supported.

While social distancing and physical distancing are being used to stress the importance of controlling the spread of the corona virus by keeping appropriate space between individuals, we are recognizing the importance of social and emotional connectivity in these challenging times. No matter which terminology is used, it is important to follow the guidelines associated with social distancing, i.e. staying at least 6 feet away from other people.  At the same time, it is also important to find ways to stay in touch with family and friends through the technology that, for example, social media offer.

Continue Reading

COVID-19 is not the end of the world, and that’s what we should be telling our children, say Denise Bodman and Bethany Van Vleet, two Arizona State University lecturers with the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics.

In fact, they say, not only can our children learn resilience from this crisis, but they can pass on these strengths to the next generation. Facing challenges – and boredom – can help children learn, grow and make new connections.

A key aspect of parenting is realistic expectations, not only of our children, but of what is possible and achievable for the parent. Striving for “good enough” as a baseline can reduce our stress and sense of failure, which can actually improve our parenting and connections.

Read more in this Q&A with Bodman and VanVleet.

This message was distributed by Dave White on Monday, April 6, on behalf of Ann Marie Hess, Capture Manager, Global Futures Laboratory, with COVID-19 research updates and resources.

Hello: I am writing to you with the purpose of sharing a few resources that ASU has put together regarding our response to the emerging challenges to our society. This is to offer ways to connect and share/generate both ideas and resources. ASU’s colleges/schools/units are already active with resources and intellectual capacity. Knowledge Enterprise is working to connect these activities across the university, with the goal of offering a method of communication.

They have created a Google Form that will be active through the life of the crisis. They will do a monthly data pull with everyone’s information. Please complete this form. In addition, there has been a Slack channel created: http://covid19-research.slack.com/. This channel offers you the ability to connect with current working groups with specific topics. These working groups will be self-guided and will not be managed by anyone other than the working group teams.

Continue Reading

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has announced a grant to the Arizona State University interdisciplinary project “Apocalyptic Narratives and Climate Change: Religion, Journalism, and the Challenge of Public Engagement.”

Continue Reading

CSPO, ASU's Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, edits Issues in Science and Technology , a science policy journal published in collaboration with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Issues is launching a newsletter, and you can sign up on the journal's homepage at issues.org.

The website's homepage also features articles on the COVID-19 pandemic, including an article by sustainability scientist Dan Sarewitz on the lesson to be learned from coronavirus on the appropriate role of science in helping to guide us toward a better future.

The global pandemic has made digital technology in education more important than it ever has been before. In an April 8 USAID Digi-Know Webinar, sustainability scientists Mary Jane Paramentier and Faheem Hussain will present recent developments in education delivery using digital technologies and the emergence of artificial intelligence in education. They will also highlight the development of an independent, solar-powered, and educational library that provides localized educational content to resource-constrained locations around the world.

If you are interested in learning more about innovative digital initiatives transforming education in underserved and under-resourced areas of the world, or wondering how digital education might be relevant to your work, Register Now for this Zoom webinar.

On Tuesday, April 7, ASU will host one of 52 simultaneous state-by-state webinars as part of a virtual teach-in on climate solutions and justice presented by the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. Sustainability scientist Jennifer Richter will moderate a two-part conversation, first with Patrick Graham of The Nature Conservancy, Hank Courtwright of Salt River Project, and Gary Dirks of ASU; then with youth voices Brian Mecinas and Perla Sanchez of Arizona Youth Climate Strike, and ASU senior Sarah Lucia Barbey representing Local to Global Justice.

The Solve Climate event features webinars with varying start times by state. Faculty and teaching instructors are encouraged to make a class about climate by assigning students to watch their state's webinar, then discuss it in the next class. Solve Climate offers teaching guides for discussion. International universities are welcome to participate.

Visit solveclimateby2030.org for more information. Register to attend the ASU event on our website.

With virtual meetings and classes being the norm these days, the university's Marketing Hub has created several backdrops that you can use for all of your Zoom calls. Download one or more ASU-themed virtual backgrounds and show your Sun Devil spirit!

Not sure how to change your virtual background? Follow these instructions, and happy Zooming!

Sustainability scientist Tom Seager has been part of the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technologies every year since 2013. This year's series on resilient healthcare infrastructure has gone virtual, adding new content related to the COVID-19 response to its ISSST2020 Keynote Series.

You can subscribe to the ISSST YouTube channel to find talks from previous ISSST programs, interviews, discussions, and new content generated by the ISSST2020 Thematic and Sessions Chairs.

As this pandemic unfolds before our eyes, it is clear that it will shape our generation much the way the Great Depression and the World Wars shaped the generations of those times. So says sustainability scientist Mark Roseland and his co-author Ray Tomalty in a new piece published at Medium.com.

Social distancing raises profound questions for our approaches to sustainable cities. Sustainable cities and a suite of related terms such as urban sustainability, smart growth, eco-cities, new urbanism, and sustainable communities share a revulsion toward urban (and rural) sprawl, and a prescription for more compact urban development.

In some ways social distancing can help us see what more sustainable cities could be like. These include reductions in travel and air pollution, and increases in digital connectedness and respect for social institutions. But there are downsides, as well.

One of the most important awards an early-career scientist can receive is the NSF CAREER Award. Arianne Cease, assistant professor in the School of Sustainability and affiliated faculty in the School of Life Sciences, recently received the call telling her that she would be an NSF CAREER recipient for 2020. Besides being prestigious, the CAREER provides funding for five years, giving the principal investigator a solid foundation on which to build their research program.

Cease is the director of the Global Locust Initiative (GLI). Locusts are grasshoppers that migrate together to a new location to exploit fresh resources. A locust plague can devastate local agriculture and bring starvation to untold numbers of people. The GLI is focused on interdisciplinary locust research and management to reduce or eliminate the harm caused by these migrating insects.

Continue Reading

Arizona State University’s Healthy Urban Environments Initiative awarded an innovative team of science students from the Arizona College Prep-Erie Campus with a $50,000 grant for their work on a heat stroke prevention device. With funding, these 9th and 10th graders will build a prototype of the device to test on student athletes.

According to Rachna Nath, a science teacher for the ACP-Erie campus, she and the students have been working with Chandler Innovations on the project since August 2019. After testing the device, they will report all data collected to the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, of which HUE is a unit.

Continue Reading

The research community is facing unique challenges during this crisis, from the unprecedented disruptions to education and academic and research programs, to how to best support public health efforts through our knowledge and expertise.

As we face new and unique challenges in confronting the COVID-19 epidemic, NSF is prioritizing the health and safety of the research community. NSF understands the effects this challenge will have on NSF-funded research and facilities, and they are committed to providing the greatest flexibilities to support your health and safety as well as your work.

In a new announcement, Important Notice No. 146, and a policy implementation guideline document, NSF explains that they are continually updating guidance and online resources to keep you informed. NSF is also accepting proposals for nonmedical, non-clinical-care RAPID research on coronavirus, as our ability to better understand the virus and how to effectively respond will be crucial to public health efforts.

Editor's note: Although this summer's Tokyo Olympics have been postponed due to COVID-19, there is a possibility they will be rescheduled to next summer. With Tokyo's extreme summer heat and humidity, dangers to health would remain. The following information holds true for August in Tokyo, including August 2021.

This summer’s Tokyo Olympics are expected to be one of the hottest Olympic Games on record. According to Jennifer Vanos, an assistant professor in Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, long-term climatology tells us that the question is not if it will be hot and humid in Tokyo, but rather how much hotter than normal it could be. In an effort to obtain more precision on these marginal differences and how the extreme heat will impact athletes, spectators and volunteers, Vanos and an interdisciplinary group of global researchers just published a paper in the journal Temperature.

Continue Reading

Dimensions is a linked research knowledge system that re-imagines discovery and access to research. Dimensions brings together grants, publications, citations, alternative metrics, clinical trials, patents and policy documents in one platform, enabling users to find and access relevant information faster, analyze the academic and broader outcomes of research, and gather insights to inform future strategy.

There is an online toolkit of videos and tutorials on how to navigate the product, several on-demand webinars on how to make the most of Dimensions data, or you can begin exploring the platform right away. Sign up at the bottom of any resource page to receive email updates from Dimensions.

Continue Reading

This month, Pat Gober will be retiring from ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning full-time faculty to focus on research and professional service projects. Gober, a population geographer and demographer, was the founding director of the Decision Center for a Desert City.

Over the course of her 45-year tenure at ASU, Gober held a range of appointments including a term as chair of the Department of Geography, where under her leadership it grew into a nationally-ranked geography doctoral program. She also held appointments as distinguished honors faculty fellow in Barrett, The Honors College; policy research associate, Morrison Institute for Public Policy; senior sustainability scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability; and interim director in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban planning.

Continue Reading

As ASU continues to monitor COVID-19, the university is temporarily transitioning classes wherever possible to remote teaching and learning, starting March 16, 2020. The university’s primary goal is the continuation of classes and the commitment to high-quality delivery of learning. ASU has collected all the resources available to you on one website so that you are prepared to teach, learn and work through digital remote options.

If you registered to attend ASU's Fulbright Day on March 18, you will be contacted about in-person and online workshops now tentatively planned for April. More information can be found in this announcement.

Faculty, students and staff are still eligible to apply for a Fulbright. For questions about Fulbright Scholars or Specialist Programs, contact Karen.Engler@asu.edu.

ASU Knowledge Enterprise has issued recommendations to mitigate the impact of 2019 Novel Coronavirus on the university’s research mission. For the most current information on the virus and the university’s response, visit the university’s information center at coronavirus.asu.edu.

For details on each of the following research guidelines, issued today, visit research.asu.edu/covid-19.

Guidelines to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on research activities:

Continue Reading

Register by March 29 to attend the Project Cities Faculty Open House on Thursday, April 9th from 2 to 4 pm. New faculty are needed to support this innovative program with real-world impact!

Project Cities is a unique, ASU-community partnership that connects students and faculty in project-based classes to local community partners, with the goal of advancing the communities' sustainability goals. Attendees will be the first to choose projects with the community partners.

Continue Reading