Nov. 23: Knowledge Enterprise research development office hosts a kick-off to learn more about the proposal requirements. The session will be recorded and available afterwards; contact Faye Farmer.

An academic career often does not provide the uninterrupted stretches of time necessary for acquiring and building new skills to enhance and advance one's research program. Mid-career scientists in particular are at a critical career stage where they need to advance their research programs to ensure long-term productivity and creativity but are often constrained by service, teaching, or other activities that limit the amount of time devoted to research.

The Mid-Career Advancement (MCA) offers an opportunity for scientists and engineers at the Associate Professor rank (or equivalent) to substantively enhance and advance their research program through synergistic and mutually beneficial partnerships, typically at an institution other than their home institution. Projects that envision new insights on existing problems or identify new but related problems previously inaccessible without new methodology or expertise from other fields are encouraged.

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The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences is initiating a new line of research aimed at strengthening and potentially transforming critical infrastructure in the U.S. The initiative is a collaboration involving all NSF research directorates and is described in a new Dear Colleague letter, Strengthening American Infrastructure.

Strengthening American Infrastructure is a human-centered, cross-disciplinary research activity engaging social and behavioral scientists with researchers from a wide range of fields including engineering, computer science, education, biology, mathematics, physical sciences and geosciences. Strong, effective infrastructure stimulates innovation and job growth, provides safety and security, improves our quality of life and facilitates community well-being for many years into the future.

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A new study published in Restoration Ecology by researchers from Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science found evidence that particulate organic carbon levels are one of the most important factors in determining coral outplant survival. Author Greg Asner is a sustainability scientist and center director.

This new finding suggests that potential coral outplanting sites should be selected in areas where sedimentation levels are low, away from coastal development, or where coastal development is carefully managed for reef conservation.

“New restoration protocols can use remotely sensed data of multiple oceanographic variables to assess the environmental history of a site. This will help evaluate and optimize site selection and give their outplants the best chance of survival,” said Shawna Foo, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the ASU center.

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New for 2021, the foundation's updated application guidelines for research grants on reducing inequality and research grants on improving the use of research evidence provide details about eligibility, selection criteria, and application requirements, as well as tips from our program officers and summaries of recent awards.

2021 application deadlines:

• January 13, 2021, 3PM EST
• May 5, 2021, 3PM EST
• August 4, 2021, 3PM EST

A historic temperature visualization developed by Arizona State University's Knowledge Exchange for Resilience is a tool that shows shifts in temperatures using an interactive heat map and bar graph. It includes historical Arizona temperatures from the 1890s to the present.

"The raw data from the Arizona State Climate Office features 130,000 traces of daily temperature data spanning across three cities over 130 years. It was challenging to transform such an extensive data set into a useful visualization,” said the lead scientist for the tool, Assistant Research Professor Sarbeswar Praharaj, PhD with the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience.

The warm and cool color palette highlights the degree of temperature changes from the baseline number. The data is organized by month, which shows changes over a calendar year and allows users to travel back several decades or just to last summer.

“Since information belongs to all of us, it should be shared by all of us”.

WE Empower UN SDG Challenge Finalist, Saana Azzam - Founder, MENA Women Speakers, United Arab Emirates

2020 WE Empower Finalist, Greater MENA

Equality and equal opportunities for all are fundamental aspects of forging a just and equitable society. Saana Azzam’s MENA Women Speakers is ushering in a new era of equal representation for female speakers not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but across the world. WE Empower intern, Sidney McKee, interviewed Azzam and details how MENA Women Speakers is leading to more equitable, and fair representation amongst female speakers at professional events and conferences.

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The UREx SRN recently supported a pinnacle webinar that profiled two UREx-derived research projects focused on building practitioner resilience. 500 participants attended the day-of event and at least as many will watch the webinar in the archive. UREx SRN member Joyce Coffee partnered with the Innovation Network for Communities on both research projects (Total project amount for the entire team and both reports: $50,000 funded by the Summit Foundation).

The 2019 report Playbook 1.0: How Cities Are Paying for Climate Resilience identifies eight distinct strategies cities are using to pay for large-scale climate-resilience projects, mostly to address sea level rise and flooding.

These strategies amount to an initial approach for deciding who will pay what and how city governments will generate the needed revenue. Our analysis is based on a close look at how eight US cities in seven states have been organizing the funding needed to implement their ambitious climate-resilience plans. They are among a small number of cities that have gotten this far.

Each of these cities has had to find its own way to public and private financial resources, because there is no system in place for solving the problem of how to pay for climate resilience—no cost-sharing arrangements, for instance, for resilience infrastructure across local, state, and federal levels of government. The cities are involuntary pioneers faced with growing climate hazards and exposure that require more money for resilience. Examining these cities’ pathways revealed common strategies that, while only reflecting the leading-edge of urban climate-resilience financing practices, quite likely foreshadow what other cities already or may do.

But the pathways also suggest the limits of what cities are able to do. The acknowledgement that state governments can help local governments invest in climate resilience led to a 2020 report How State Governments can Help Local Communities Invest in Climate Resilience.

This report presents recommendations for how state governments can develop climate-resilience financial systems that help local communities invest in protecting residents, businesses, public infrastructure, private property, and natural resources from climate-driven stresses and shocks. To help states consider and act on the recommendations, we developed a State Climate Resilience Action Checklist that identifies the essential actions that states need to take to build a comprehensive approach to resilience, including a financial system. By “financial system” for states we mean a set of aligned state actions that fund and finance climate-resilience investment, revenue-generating mechanisms for shifting existing revenue or generating new revenue for resilience building, provision of basic state services related to climate resilience, and the administration of federal funding flows that can be used for resilience purposes. Taken together, these support local communities in developing the capacities and actions they need to strengthen their climate resilience in the short- and long-term.

The Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service is ASU’s strategic research and implementation partner for businesses, governments, federal agencies, and NGOs dedicated to contributing to the solutions of a more sustainable world. In collaboration with stakeholders, internal and external from the university, RMWSSS co-develops research projects with the goal of creating complex solutions for the complex problems our planet is facing.

The RMWSSS team recently wrapped up three exciting applied research projects.

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Sustainability scientists Hilairy Hartnett, Everett Shock and Ariel Anbar, with their colleagues Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert and Michael Line are co-investigators on a new NASA astrobiology program research team, one of eight in the agency's new Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (ICAR) program.

Sara Walker is the principal investigator, and Hyunju Kim is deputy PI.

The team will be combining big data, novel high-throughput experiments and models to ultimately determine a way to quantify the universal properties of life and to predict what life should look like in diverse planetary environments.

Spend January 5-7, 2021 engaged in a breadth of activities designed to surface the best in emerging approaches for shaping the future of smart campuses, cities and education -- and life during and after the pandemic. Students, faculty, technologists and business leaders are invited to participate in the first-ever ShapingEDU Winter Games.

Leveraging the unique opportunity presented in these remote times, the annual Smart Region Summit is going global and will take place this year at the Winter Games through a specialized track designed by The Connective. All dreamers, doers and drivers who want to address the pressing question of what comes next are invited to register today and join us for a series of keynotes, breakouts and hackathons

Arizona State University and Devex are hosting a global hackathon. Open to universities from anywhere in the world and based on the model from the PLuS Alliance and Devils Invent, the hackathon calls on students to create solutions to five real-world development challenges aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea.

The event takes place Friday November 13, 2020 at 5PM MST through Sunday November 15, 2020 at 3:30PM MST.

Students at ASU will be competing for a slot to go up against students from around the world and will be creating solutions in 3 of the 5 areas which are related to: business transforming development, data revolution, and innovation at scale. One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea!

Learn more and register.

Among ways being explored to combine biology and engineering to remedy a range of growing global environmental problems, algae-based solutions look especially promising.

The encouraging viewpoint stems from progress in research that is revealing how the properties of algae can be harnessed to become the driving force for a slew of productive biotechnological pursuits.

Some of the research findings have been the result of efforts based at the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation, or AzCATI, embedded in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Read more at ASU Now.

The Infrastructure Misfits (un)Society and Arizona State University's Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering present a three-day forum with presentations on the future of infrastructure. The event is co-sponsored by the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network.

The event, moderated by sustainability scientist Mikhail Chester, features the following presentations.

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Meaghan K. Kramer, staff attorney with Arizona Center for Disability Law, will present the third of four lectures in the School of Social Transformation's Seeking Justice in Arizona Fall Lecture Series. The talk will take place via Zoom, with livestream on YouTube, Thursday, November 12 from 10:30–11:45 a.m.

Meaghan Kramer is a staff attorney at the Arizona Center for Disability Law (ACDL), where she advocates for Arizonans who have a wide range of physical, mental, psychiatric, sensory and cognitive disabilities. Meaghan is currently targeting systemic issues affecting Arizonans with disabilities in the areas of employment, housing, healthcare, education, voting and prisons. The ACDL uses advocacy, lobbying and impact litigation to bring positive change to Arizona’s disability community.

The series, now in its 16th year, brings in experts from our local communities to discuss critical national issues in an Arizona context. Each lecture is followed by a question and answer period and time to interact with the speaker informally. Admission is free and open to the public.

New Orleans, Louisiana faces ecological challenges, but also social challenges in learning to adapt to climate change and to adopt new water management techniques. The existing stormwater infrastructure isn’t cutting it, but new methods have been slow to be implemented. Robert Lloyd (@RL_Grey) discusses why, then interviews Jessica Dandridge, Executive Director of the Water Collaborative, who is one of the people helping to move the Big Easy into a more sustainable and resilient future.

Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan - https://livingwithwater.com/

City of New Orleans Resilience & Sustainability - https://nola.gov/resilience-sustainability/

Listen on iTunes, StitcherGoogle Podcasts, Spotify, or Buzzsprout.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

A new report from OECD, Addressing societal challenges using transdisciplinary research, examines how transdisciplinary research can be used to address complex societal challenges. The report is based in large part on analysis of 28 case studies to identify the key obstacles to effectively implementing transdisciplinary research and make recommendations for best practices.

The ASU Decision Center for a Desert City is featured as one of the case studies (p. 43) and was recommended to OECD by the National Science Foundation as an exemplary project illustrating best practices. DCDC is one of only three case studies located in North America, along with projects at Texas A&M and Purdue University.

The final recommendations for universities and public research institutions reflect several ASU initiatives and principles including the ASU Charter and Design Aspirations, institutional structures such as the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, as well as the university's graduate faculty model and corporate and strategic partnerships.

The ASU Vita is an electronic curriculum vitae builder that supports the reporting of teaching research and service activities. ASU Vita maximizes the quality of personnel data, and streamlines the collection and reporting process. ASU Vita is a product in the Academic Personnel Actions Reporting System (APARS).

To support your research and instructional efforts, the Provost's Office is requiring ASU Academic Personnel to complete your profile with three years of data by Dec. 31, 2020.

Get started with ASU Vita

During the past few years, we at the ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes have had the pleasure of collaborating with The Nature Conservancy’s NatureNet Science Fellows Program and various ASU units to fund two postdoctoral research associates.

The NatureNet Science Fellows Program has continued to expand and again this year they have opened the fellowship to applicants from all accredited universities with the opportunity to receive research grants.

New this year, masters and PhD students are eligible to apply in addition to postdocs. Also, TNC is now fully funding these fellowships. The RFP closes on January 1, 2021.

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The UREx SRN's Scenarios Working Group and each city team have worked tirelessly to create participatory visions of the future for each network city over the past several years. Now that we have rich databases of visions and preferred strategies for each city, the next step is to communicate and promote these visions to catalyze sustainability transitions. This is what several members of the San Juan City Team set out to do in August 2019.

For more than a year, several San Juan City Team members have been working together to design a platform to share the entire collection of scenario visions, narratives, strategies, and timelines for San Juan 2080 in a visual, engaging, and interactive tool. We also wanted to enrich this platform with background knowledge, a diversity of resources, and relevant case studies from other cities to make them more useful. For instance, to connect local stakeholders with the knowledge and financial resources to actually implement some of the strategies.

We used ArcGIS Story Maps as our platform to present these syntheses. The platform includes syntheses for each of the three flood scenarios (coastal floods, riverine floods, and urban floods) as well as the three transformative visions (Connected Municipality, Food and Energy Security, and Just and Livable City) developed during the UREx San Juan 2080 scenario workshops.

We are very excited to share the final version of this platform: Visiones de Ciudad - San Juan 2080. For those who are unfamiliar with the UREx Scenario Workshop process and/or outputs, we have created a landing page ("Inicio") that provides context for this collection of syntheses. We invite you to view the Story Map and share it with anyone who you think would be interested. Please note that it is in Spanish.

This platform is an example of one possible method for mobilizing each city's Scenario Workshop data within their communities, and it will ideally serve as an example for other UREx cities to create similar tools – increasing the knowledge uptake of the many invaluable resources co-produced by the UREx over the past five years.

This project could not have been possible without the gracious support of two NSF INTERN Supplement Awards provided to Robert Hobbins over the past year.

Primary contributors to the Visiones de Ciudad - San Juan 2080 Story Map: Robert Hobbins, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, Ariel Lugo, Juan González Moscoso, Grizelle González, Ingrid Vila Biaggi, Mandy Kuhn, Maria Maurer, and Anaís Delilah Roque. For the full list of contributors, please see the "Inicio" page and credits section of each page.

Sustainability scholar Iveta Silova, director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education in ASU's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, has co-authored a background report for the UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative.

The 15-page paper, Learning to become with the world: education for future survival, was commissioned by UNESCO as background information to assist in drafting the Futures of Education report to be published in 2021.

The abstract follows.

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