UVM Researchers Unpack the Complexity of Snow in Vermont
CEE’s Arne Bomblies and his team of researchers installed a series of snow sensors and meteorological instruments throughout the state, from the top of Mount Mansfield to the shores of Lake Champlain. “What we’re after is a better predictive model of snow in Vermont and in the northeast in general,” Bomblies said. “The goal is to ultimately understand how things like trees, slope aspect, elevation, rainfall, and cloudiness impact snow and be able to model that.”
UVM joins National Science Foundation's interior northeast I-Corps Hub
UVM is now a partner in the newly awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Hub: Interior Northeast Region (IN I-Corps). The Interior Northeast region that stretches from New Hampshire to West Virginia is representative of large portions of the U.S. that are largely rural, economically underserved and working to restore economic vitality. IN I-Corps aims to expand the nation’s geography of innovation by creating a cohesive innovation ecosystem that delivers inclusive models of education and workforce training designed for and by innovators in rural regions and small cities. Read on to find out how Ryan McGinnis, Associated Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering at UVM, is transforming their work because of the I-Corps.
Cultivating Meat for a Sustainable Future
Researchers in the Engineered Biomaterials Research Laboratory (EBRL) at UVM are exploring cultivated meat to address a number of global issues. “We create and test materials that are translatable to look at regenerative medicine, food security, and engineering testing standards,” Rachael Floreani, the EBRL’s director, said. “It's about trying to create additional ways to provide nutritious food for the people of the world.”
Getting From Here to There
New NSF funding aims at reducing transportation emissions where it’s needed most. Thirty percent of U.S. auto-travel occurs in small and rural communities and the average person travels 40% farther than their urban counterparts. However, the vast majority of research that focuses on reducing transportation greenhouse gas emissions has been conducted in urban areas, despite important differences in the physical and social contexts. Dana Rowangould and her colleagues in the Transportation Research Center are poised to eliminate that discrepancy.
Matthew White (third from right) and the team’s host at Yamagata University Prof. Tsukasa Yoshida (right), along with the 2022 IRES cohort, at the Fubo Peace Memorial Park in Miyagi Prefecture in northern Japan. The park memorializes 34 American servicemen who sacrificed their lives for their county in WWII. Fubo, in Japanese, means “unforgotten.”
It Takes a (Global) Village
CEMS’ Matthew S. White and Jihong Ma are UVM researchers that are partnering with colleagues across the U.S. and Japan—through the NSF-funded Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) project—to investigate harvesting, storing, and transferring energy for cost effective applications.
With their 2023 Gund Institute Catalyst Award, Raju Badireddy (CEMS) and Carol Adair (RSENR) with collaborators Andrew Schroth (CAS), Tian Xia (CEMS) will investigate winter nutrient pollution, a significant new threat to water quality driven by climate change. As winters warm, floods are increasing—unleashing harmful pollution into lakes, rivers and streams from soils, including fertilizers, manure and more. With the full effects of winter flooding largely unknown, Adair and Badireddy will use novel microsensors to measure changes to winter nutrient runoff to transform our understanding of how watersheds work in a warming world—and strengthen our ability to predict and prepare for changing winters.
