The U.S. Department of Energy has announced 36 projects that together have been awarded $80 million to support early-stage bioenergy research and development. Two ASU research teams are among the grantees, with the grants to ASU totaling about $4.5 million.

The two teams are headed by sustainability scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Willem Vermaas, foundation professor in the School of Life Sciences and a member of the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis, and Bruce Rittmann, director of Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology and regents’ professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.

The DOE is investing $80 million to reduce the cost of algae-based, drop-in fuels to $3 per gallon by 2022, providing consumers with affordable, reliable transportation energy choices.

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Tyler Sytsma has not one but two degrees from Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability — a bachelor’s degree and an Executive Master of Sustainability Leadership. He graduated with his EMSL in January 2016 and quickly landed a job as a sustainability coordinator for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Sytsma answered a few questions for us about his journey in sustainability and his experience with the EMSL. Read his Q&A below.

What was your “aha” moment when you realized you wanted to study sustainability?

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If they weren’t so humble, active-duty Army Capts. Natalie and Ed Mallue could serve as the face of a major beer label’s advertising campaign and be dubbed “The Most Interesting Couple in the World.”

They graduated from the grueling U.S. Military Academy. They conquered Ranger school, the Army’s toughest feat of human physical and mental endurance. They returned recently from South Africa where they served as military advisers for a major on-location Hollywood movie production. And they made headlines when former President Barack Obama called them to apologize for disrupting their wedding in Hawaii.

The Mallues are a dynamic duo who have been “stationed” at Arizona State University since the summer of 2017, with Natalie pursuing a master’s degree with ASU’s School of Sustainability and Ed serving as an assistant professor of military science with Army ROTC. They represent the vast diversity and talent found within the ASU community and stand as a physical reminder of why the university organizes Salute to Service each year to recognize those who have served.

Read more about the Mallues in ASU Now.

The proposed addition to the US census of a question regarding the legal status of census respondents poses a major problem for both vulnerability researchers and the vulnerable undocumented immigrant community. Vulnerability scholar and PhD student, Jason Sauer, discusses how the change to the census may interfere with efforts to identify vulnerable communities, and may stymie efforts to make these undocumented communities more resilient to extreme weather events and climate change. He also interviews Masavi Parea of Chispa, an organization advocating for resilience and environmental justice in Phoenix, about his own history as a formerly undocumented immigrant, the ways the undocumented community and Latinos are systematically made vulnerable, and what organizations like Chispa are doing to increase community resilience.

After taking a class on health advocacy in fall 2017, Catherine Daem, now a graduate of Arizona State University's College of Health Solutions, wanted to find a solution to the Valley's local food deserts and swamps by becoming a community garden advocate.

This Saturday, she'll be opening her second community garden plot.

What sets Daem's project apart from other community gardens is the research and solution-oriented approach she has employed, as well as her efforts to involve her colleagues; Students, alumni and faculty will be clearing the plot and planting the garden. The impetus was a video she made last fall about food deserts and swamps in Mesa. It highlights the problem many of our communities experience and the effect on their health.

See Daem's video and read a Q&A about her project on ASU Now.

ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Associate Director for Conservation Evidence Samantha Cheng coauthored a paper titled “Rethinking solutions to seafood fraud” published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment – a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

The paper explains their growing effort to build capacity to detect and trace seafood mislabeling, devise improvements to regulations, and build awareness in the city of Los Angeles.

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According to new research done at Arizona State University, having the right bees "pick up the food" is how honeybees successfully exploit their environments so colonies thrive. Similar to bosses figuring out which of their employees are the most reliable, bees are excellent at distinguishing which of their comrades are best fit to perform each specific task for the hive

To make the most of their time, animals must decide which of their group members must go explore new places for a new source of food and who should stay at familiar places to collect resources. Bees do this by dividing the work between two groups of individuals: scouts for new places and recruits for the old ones.

Chelsea Cook is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Life Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the lead author on a new paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology about the newly discovered bee behavior. She says that due to a constant stream of information occurring within an environment, some are better than others at focusing on one task at a time.

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Around the world, scientists are solving serious issues using modern technology. Whether the solution is genetically modified, malaria-fighting mosquitoes or other gene editing technologies, Arizona State University sustainability scientist James P. Collins is calling for careful risk assessment.

Collins, the Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment at ASU's School of Life Sciences, co-authored a paper published in the journal "Science." The authors urgently encourage global governance to review new technologies on a a case-by-case basis — a decision-making process that must include the local communities that would feel the biggest and most immediate effects.

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Tempe Town Lake has been a part of the city's landscape for over 19 years, and Hilairy Hartnett's lab has been measuring and collecting data there for the past 13.

With over 1,200 samples of water, Hartnett's work with the Central Arizona Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Program hopes to better understand what it takes to maintain the ecological health of a man-made lake in one of the hottest regions of the United States.

The associate professor in Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences spoke with ASU Now about her decade-plus sampling Tempe Town Lake. Read Hartnett's interview on ASU Now.

Antonia Castro-Graham decided to pursue her Executive Master of Sustainability Leadership from Arizona State University after a careful search of different programs. It makes sense that she wanted to invest her time and money wisely — she already had a full-time job, an adjunct professorship at California State University, Fullerton, and a two-year-old.

“I wanted a degree that would propel me to the next level,” she said. “EMSL enabled me to broaden my skill set.”

In the Q&A below, Castro-Graham — who works for the city of Huntington Beach, California as the assistant to the city manager and the energy and sustainability manager — talks about her experience as an EMSL student and explains how the master’s degree has allowed her to become more successful as a sustainability professional.

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Do you think you're social media-savvy? In this digital age, it seems you must be in order to stay on top of the latest trends. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn — these are classics that any seasoned veteran would know at this point. TikTok, Periscope, Marco Polo, Voxer… maybe not so much. In order to navigate this web of social media platforms and procedures, the City of Glendale worked with students from Arizona State University’s fall 2018 Project Cities program on a social media plan.

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Students from opposite sides of the world found themselves competing on a unified front to create solutions to divert waste from landfills and drive new businesses.

A diverse group of 70 interdisciplinary students at Arizona State University and UNSW Sydney created teams at their respective universities as they took part in the inaugural PLuS Alliance Circular Economy ResourCE Hack. The innovation hack was designed to find zero-waste alternatives for transitioning to a circular economy. The winning team from each institution was then judged by an international panel of experts to determine an overall “world champion.”

The grand prize was awarded to ASU’s top team, Farmers’ Friend, composed of Jacob Bethem (PhD, sustainability), Andrew John De Los Santos (MS, sustainability) and Sudhanshu Biyani (MS, mechanical engineering). Their solution to reduce food waste involved developing an app connecting micro farmers in developing countries to consumers at places like schools, programs for the elderly, nongovernmental organizations or restaurants using a guaranteed pricing model. The team plans to apply for ASU Entrepreneurship + Innovation’s Venture Devils program in January.

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On November 2, during Arizona State University homecoming weekend, the School of Sustainability will bestow one alumnus with the 2018 Outstanding Alumnus Award. With so many incredible nominees, it’s going to be a hard decision to make.

If you’re an alumnus, we invite you to join us for the alumni reception mixer at Postino in Tempe from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., where we will announce the winner (please RSVP). But first, check out the seven nominees — in alphabetical order:

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Sam Castañeda Holdren is a Master of Sustainability Leadership student from the U.S. who's now living in Colombia, where he founded Out in Colombia, a travel agency focused on sustainable LGBT tourism.

Arizona State University's Innovation Happens podcast featured Holdren as its guest on Episode 20. In the podcast, Holdren talks about how he started Out in Colombia and continues to grow his business using what he has learned from his online sustainability degree.

Holdren says that Out in Colombia promotes sustainable travel by ensuring that its activities have positive environmental, economic and social impacts.

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Still most widely associated with the invention of velcro, ASU researchers are walking the talk of biomimicry with a newly renovated office space and a new seed exhibit they hope will capture the imagination of innovators seeking solutions for complex human problems.

"Seeds continue to offer a bottomless design and engineering trove for many other innovations," said Heidi Fischer, assistant director at the Biomimicry Center. "We hope that our exhibition can provide new models for some of these innovations."

Titled “Designed to Move: Seeds that Float, Fly or Hitchhike through the Desert Southwest,” the exhibit, opening Oct. 30 in the Design School South Gallery on ASU's Tempe campus is offering viewers an extraordinary look at the beauty of desert seeds as captured through the macro photography lens of Taylor James, an alumni of ASU’s Masters of Fine Arts program.

Red-tailed hawks can live to be up to 20 years old. If a fledging had caught a thermal in 1994 and spent the next two decades aloft above the U.S.-Mexico border, it would have witnessed some startling changes:

Mexican border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana ballooning as thousands streamed north to work in maquiladora factories, assembling products like garage door openers to be sold in the U.S. and Canada. Farmland around American cities morphing into suburbs. Mexican land being turned into agricultural fields.

What would not be visible from the air is the depletion of Mexican groundwater to grow the fruits and vegetables sent north.

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One of the balancing acts faced by conservation agencies is how to conserve and protect as many species as possible from extinction with limited funding and finite resources. In the U.S., conservation agencies are supported and guided by the Endangered Species Act, the seminal wildlife conservation law signed by President Nixon in 1973 that is currently being reviewed by Congress.

Over time, the number of threatened and endangered species added to the ESA has grown faster than the funding for their recovery. As a result, conservation agencies have struggled in making decisions about how to apply the available resources to the greatest effect.

The result of this inadequate funding has been that while the ESA has brought back many species from the brink of extinction, many of those species remain on “life support,” never fully recovering to independence once again. This adds fuel to the debate over the effectiveness of the ESA.

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Martin Pasqualetti, professor with the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, was recognized this weekend as a distinguished alumnus by the University of California, Riverside’s Alumni Association. Pasqualetti was bestowed the honor at the Chancellor’s Dinner on the university’s campus. Pasqualetti, who is also a senior sustainability scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, is known worldwide for his contributions to the field of geography, specifically in relation to energy policy.

With a 40-year career dedicated to studying the geographical dimensions of energy, Pasqualetti’s work has resulted in advancements in many areas: landscape change, issues of energy security and geopolitics, the sense of place, perceptions of energy provision and use, energy education, environmental costs of energy demand, public acceptance of renewable-energy landscapes and the spatial nexus of our need for food, energy and water.

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It was in middle school that Maximilian Christman first thought about how people impact the environment, when his mom showed him an article from People magazine about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “While I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘sustainability’ at the time, I knew that I wanted my life and career to leave a positive mark on the world,” he said.

Fueled by this passion, Christman graduated from Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability in 2014 with a bachelor of science focusing on sustainable energy, materials and technology. He later received a master of environmental management from Duke University. Since wrapping up his studies, Christman worked for two years as the sustainability specialist for the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s health department (UW Health), and he recently accepted a new position as the sustainability manager for the California Institute of Technology.

“We can follow different paths, but each of us sustainability professionals is forging our way ahead towards progress in our field and our world,” he said.

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Between rising temperatures, melting glaciers and intense hurricanes, climate change not only has long-term effects but is also impacting our everyday lives.

According to NASA, sea levels will rise 1 to 4 feet by 2100. Sea rise combined with storm surges can cause flooding in many regions. A community’s economy and migration might be impacted by these environmental effects.

Arizona State University Assistant Professor Valerie Mueller, who's a senior sustainability scientist in ASU's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and Joyce Chen from Ohio State University look into this topic in a recently published paper in Nature Climate Change titled “Coastal climate change, soil salinity and human migration in Bangladesh.”

Mueller, who is part of the School of Politics and Global Studies, spoke to ASU Now about about how sea-level change affects farming communities in Bangladesh. Read her Q&A on ASU Now.