Summer 2020 Remote Research

We’ll be real - it was a tough summer.

Our hearts were heavy with the impact of Corona Virus on communities around the globe, the changes to our programming, and the unrest across the US from civil rights abuses; and yet, GSS Scholars persisted in advancing their academic goals.

As a team, we met weekly to support each other and make progress on our studies. Our GSS Board members visited and shared out on different career related topics during the summer and the students organized, meeting nearly daily with their research projects throughout the summer. We are hugely grateful for our SUGI research partners and their continued support on such meaningful projects during all of this disruption and change.

We launched the summer by joining the international SUGI mid-term meetings, where projects from around the world presented their work. It was exhilarating to learn about the progress and preliminary results of the Belmont Forum Research projects. GSS actively participated by creating this video as an introduction to who we are and our perspectives on the subject - Check it out here!

Preliminary results on our summer research projects.

Below are snapshots of the preliminary results from the student’s research. Next summer, they will continue working with their research partners, building on what they learned from the summer before. The culminating outcome will be a capstone project.

GSS Fellow, Erin Jones - CREATING INTERFACES

The GSS Scholars, Mya Wells, Aishah Brown, Epongue Ekille, and GSS Fellow, Erin Jones worked with Dr. Andrea Pierce, Dr. Pia Laborgne, Dr. Jochen Wandel, and Dr. Monika Heyder this summer, conducting research on food cooperatives and their roles in the food, water, and energy nexus in the USA and Europe.

Erin Jones, spent her fellowship working with Dr. Andrea Pierce from University of Delaware, exploring what community-centered policies can be created to expand access to affordable and healthy foods in Wilmington, Delaware. Through making causal maps, she was able to identify the causes and consequences of the cities' food issue. She wrote a policy brief highlighting the organization's efforts to solve the issue, advocating for expansion of welfare policies and other recommendations for the future.

For more information about the project: Creating Interfaces

GSS Scholar, Darryl Acker-Carter - CITYFOOD

GSS Scholar, Darryl Acker-Carter from George Mason University, worked closely with Ph.D. Student, Erin Horn and Dr. Gundula Proksch at the University of Washington. The CityFood team is assessing the potential for urban integration of farms and food production - keeping it local. The overall goals of the CityFood project is to look at how cities can improve urban agriculture integration, reducing the energy footprint. To do this an understanding of food distribution and agriculture production is needed to begin improving urban agriculture integration. This includes work on community food centers, community gardens, and educational projects based on case study research. Darryl’s work involved research at an urban scale, a farm operation scale, and a building scale. His work with the CityFood project has honed his skills with GIS applications, which was the perfect preparation for his current internship with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA). This past month Darryl has been working at theNOAA Greater Atlantic Fisheries Region office, on science communication projects using ArcGIS story maps.

For more information about the project: CITYFOOD

GSS Scholar, Alena Zhang - FUSE

The Fuse project embedded GSS Scholars Vanessa Villanueva, Mayra Ona, and Alena Zhang into three interrelated projects led by Dr. Raphael Karutz, Dr. Hendrik Zozmann, and Dr. Bernd Klauer i.

Alena Zhang, now senior at Columbia University worked with Dr. Heinrich Zozmann from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research of Germany. Alena investigated the impacts of the solar feeder and solar pump schemes on groundwater usage for irrigation in Maharashtra, India.

Based on a content analysis of government and private company documents, plus available summaries of stakeholder workshops, Alena found that the Green Revolution and Free Energy policy set the stage for a lack of governance of groundwater and a centralized and bureaucratic governance of energy in Maharashtra, India.

She estimates that by 2021, 100,000 solar pumps will be functioning and this number will increase by 67,500 every year after. This is the equivalent of 4835 MW solar to be developed by 2022.

For more information about the project: FUSE

GSS Scholar, Anthony Erebor - Vertical Green 2.0

Both GSS Scholars, Kashia Caljesuseso and Anthony Erebor worked with Dr. Thomas Nehls and Dr. Karin Hoffmann to understand the water consumption of vertical green systems, the supply required for these systems to work, and the potential of these systems to reduce heat stress.

Anthony Erebor from University of Michigan worked with Dr. Thomas Nehls and Karin Hoffman MSc from TUB Germany in research assessing the appropriate building and location in cities of green infrastructure, and the potential of these systems to reduce heat stress. Under the direction of his international mentors, Anthony worked to parametrize the possibility of greening a Baltimore row house front facade surface using available construction and climate data. In this case, the greening system design for a row house is planted Phaseolus Vulgaris L., attached to a climbing grid trellis installed the front facade. Next, this particular facade scenario was run in R studio based on a modified script that measures the temperature and heat flux at nodes (points of measurements) in a wall. An output for the greened wall (test) and bare wall scenario (control) was found. The output calculation saw an average 25ºF +/-4ºF error decrease of the wall surface temperature. Going forward, the greening system design will be tested and discussed with mentors and peers. Also, building and climate parameters will be refined. More information about Anthony’s research is available here.

For more information about the project: Vertical Green

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