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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Fralin Life Science Institute will host a seminar on lab sustainability led by graduate student, Ellen Garcia. Faculty, graduate students, staff, lab managers and campus sustainability advocates are encouraged to attend!

Thursday, August 23rd

1:00 pm

Fralin Boardroom

please email krisrose@vt.edu if you plan to attend!

Ellen, a graduate student in the Cimini lab within the Biocomplexity Institute, will speak about her efforts to introduce sustainable practices and processes to the lab environments at Virginia Tech, as well as her experience initiating the first certified “Green Lab” on campus![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”24554″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_border” border_color=”green”][vc_cta h2=”” h4=”Read more about Ellen Garcia in the March 2018 VT News feature:”]

Leading the green charge: Ph.D. student Ellen Garcia introduces lab sustainability program to campus

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From VT News

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Human health disparities in Appalachia. The Dan River coal ash spill in North Carolina. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Air pollution in urban industrialized areas around the world.

The list goes on.

Now more than ever, U.S. laws designed to protect and improve public health and the environment, such as the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, require federal support and adequate revision.

With drought, pollution, rising temperatures, wildfires, increased severity and frequency of storms, invasive species, and emerging diseases, lawmakers need access to the most up-to-date, accurate scientific information to make informed decisions when revising and enforcing public policies. In other words, they need scientists.

To address this need, the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech created a summer fellowship program to send undergraduate science and engineering students to the nation’s capital to learn firsthand how science shapes policy.

“Science plays a prominent role in the policy deliberation process, but we need young scientists and engineers to pursue careers involving decision-making at all levels of government,” said Bill Hopkins, a professor of fish and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the Global Change Center.

Now, the center’s goal is to send at least two students to Washington, D.C. next summer, which is why it recently launched a 30-day fundraising campaign that will be matched dollar per dollar by the center. During the program, students will earn six academic credits while spending 11 weeks fully immersed in challenging science policy issues that shape communities locally and nationally within agencies, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, The Nature Conservancy, American Red Cross, USAID, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“With assets in the National Capital Region, Virginia Tech is uniquely positioned to nurture the important relationship between science and society, so by placing Hokies on the Hill, we can positively influence public policies that will improve quality of life and preserve the environment long into the future,” Hopkins said.

The Undergraduate Science Policy Fellowship Program, now in its third year, is designed to expose students to the role scientific knowledge plays in policy decisions on issues from human rights and health to water quality and endangered species. It is also designed to expose future scientists to the realities of policymaking, which is based on societal norms and values, economics, and politics in addition to scientific and technical knowledge.

So far, four Virginia Tech students have been awarded fellowships. Kallie Peurifoy of Charleston, South Carolina, and Steven Hall of St. Paul, Virginia, were the two 2017 award recipients.

Peurifoy, a senior majoring in environmental science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, interned at the U.S. EPA’s Enforcement Targeting and Data Division in the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. While there, she was introduced to environmental policies and legal terminology. In turn, she introduced policymakers to the “science side of things,” she said.

From The Atlantic

Four floors above a dull cinder-block lobby in a nondescript building at the Ohio State University, the doors of a slow-moving elevator open on an unexpectedly futuristic 10,000-square-foot laboratory bristling with technology. It’s a reveal reminiscent of a James Bond movie. In fact, the researchers who run this year-old, $750,000 lab at OSU’s Spine Research Institute resort often to Hollywood comparisons.

Thin beams of blue light shoot from 36 of the same kind of infrared motion cameras used to create lifelike characters for films like Avatar. In this case, the researchers are studying the movements of a volunteer fitted with sensors that track his skeleton and muscles as he bends and lifts. Among other things, they say, their work could lead to the kind of robotic exoskeletons imagined in the movie Aliens.

The cutting-edge research here combines the expertise of the university’s medical and engineering faculties to study something decidedly commonplace: back pain, which affects as many as eight out of every 10 Americans, accounts for more than 100 million annual lost workdays in the United States alone, and has accelerated the opioid addiction crisis.

“The growth of the technology around us has become so familiar that we don’t question where it comes from,” says Bruce McPheron, an entomologist and the university’s executive vice president and provost, looking on. “And where it happens consistently is at a university.”

But university research is in trouble, and so is an economy more dependent on it than many people understand. Federal funding for basic research—more than half of it conducted on university campuses like this one—has effectively declined since 2008, failing to keep pace with inflation. This is before taking into account Trump administration proposals to slash the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars more.

Trump’s cuts would affect all research universities, but not equally. The problem is more pronounced at public universities than private ones, and especially at public institutions in the Midwest, which have historically conducted some of the nation’s most important research. These schools are desperately needed to diversify economies that rely disproportionately on manufacturing and agriculture and lack the wealthy private institutions that fuel the knowledge industries found in Silicon Valley or along Boston’s 128/I-95 corridor. Yet many flagship Midwestern research universities are being weakened by deep state budget cuts. Threats to pensions (in Illinois) and tenure (in Wisconsin) portend an exodus of faculty and their all-important research funding, and have already resulted in a frenzy of poaching by better-funded and higher-paying private institutions, industry, and international competitors.

While private institutions are better shielded from funding cuts by huge endowments, Midwestern public universities have much thinner buffers. The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion. Together, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, which enroll about 50,000 students combined, have more than $73 billion in the bank to help during lean times. They also have robust revenues from high tuitions, wealthy alumni donors, strong credit, and other support to fall back on. Compare that to the public university system in Illinois, which has cut its higher-education budget so deeply that Moody’s downgraded seven universities, including five to junk-bond status.

This ominous reality could widen regional inequality, as brainpower, talent, and jobs leave the Midwest and the Rust Belt—where existing economic decline may have contributed to the decisive shift of voters toward Donald Trump—for places with well-endowed private and better-funded public universities. Already, some Midwestern universities have had to spend millions from their battered budgets to hang on to research faculty being lured away by wealthier schools. A handful of faculty have already left, taking with them most if not all of their outside funding.

Read the full article here.

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A comment on this article from Dr. Cayelan Carey:

“This study highlights the importance of studying both land use and climate change simultaneously when predicting future water quality: these two stressors will interact, potentially synergistically, to increase phytoplankton blooms that threaten human health and freshwater ecosystem services. One other take-home message that is important to keep in mind is that there will be large geographic variation in lake and reservoir water quality responses to altered climate and land use.”

Our research team in the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech is leading a new project supported by the National Science Foundation that examines how best to prepare local drinking water reservoirs in southwestern Virginia for these challenges.”

From National Geographic

Researchers anticipate harmful nitrogen outputs to increase as a result of precipitation changes.