News

VT EPSCoR and the VT Technology Council are very pleased to announce that Dr. Asim Zia has been appointed Associate Project Director for VT EPSCoR at the University of Vermont, beginning in January 2015.

Dr. Zia has an outstanding career of research, teaching and leadership. He joined the University of Vermont in 2008 and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. He also is a fellow in the Gund Institute. His research focuses on the development of computational and complex-systems based approaches for informing the theory and practice of public policy analysis.

(Elsevier) Bioenergy: Biomass to Biofuels examines all current and emerging feedstocks and the advanced processes and technologies enabling the development of their end products, ranging from solid (wood energy, grass energy, and other biomass) to liquid (biodiesel from oil seed crops, algae biofuel, waste-oil, ethanol etc.) and gaseous/electric (biogas, syngas, bioelectricity). Life cycle analysis, Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI), integrated sustainability assessments, environmental, economic, and social issues are all given thorough consideration. Guest authors from industry and academia contribute their expertise to ensure you obtain the most nuanced, comprehensive information. Quizzes, case studies and project ideas will help you to master the technological details included, and connect theory to real-world implementation.

The College of Arts and Sciences invites you to the 2014-2015 Full Professor Lecture Series. The second lecture in the series will be given by Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Professor of Geography,Tuesday, 27 January at 4:00 p.m. in the Waterman Memorial Lounge:

"Climate Justice and Vulnerability: Learning from Katrina, Irene, and Sandy"

Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy were historic, not only in leading to billion-dollar disasters across the U.S., but also for the vulnerabilities they revealed both culturally and socioeconomically.Ten years later, are we better equipped to prepare for and respond to climate hazards, especially in the face of a changing climate?

On December 18th, 2014, a RACC high school team from Bellows Free Academy-Fairfax presented their research poster at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Science Teacher, Tom Lane, and two students, Rebekah Larose and Sophie Lee, traveled to San Francisco to present their work analyzing data their school has collected over the past three years - which looked at total phosphate and TSS in streams feeding into the Missisquoi and Winooski Rivers.

Diplomacy on Ice - Book Event with RACC Team Leader Asim Zia
January 23, 2015 3PM-5PM Chittenden Room Davis Center UVM

Benjamin Ryan: Climate change migration
vtdigger.org
This commentary is by Benjamin Ryan, who is a University of Vermont senior majoring in community development and applied economics. He is a research assistant to Asim Zia, the director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security. In 2011 ...

Seven Days
Update: Feds Push for Cleaner Lake Champlain
Seven Days
A report out this month from the Vermont EPSCoR Adaptation to Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin project found that 65 percent of Vermonters said they'd be willing to pay $40 a year to improve the health of Lake Champlain, either as part of a ...

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Application season opens for Governor's Institutes of Vermont's upcoming ...
Commons
According to a press release, The Governor's Institutes, an educational non-profit, “is a unique Vermont organization giving high-potential students access to intellectual depth beyond what is available in most schools. Since 1983, more than 10,000 ...

RACC Team members attended the AGU fall meeting in San Franscisco on December 15-19. With nearly 24,000 attendees, the AGU Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world. Now in its 47th year, the AGU Fall Meeting is the best place to present research, hear about the latest discoveries, trends, and challenges in the field.

Lindsay Wieland (VT EPSCoR CWDD Director) met with undergraduate students from Universidad Metropolitana, Universidad del Turabo, and Universidad de Puerto Rico to discuss internship opportunities for the summer 2015.

The VT EPSCoR Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD) held a Macroinvertebrate Identification Workshop for 23 VT EPSCoR Streams Project participants on Thursday, December 18 from 10:00am to 2:00pm at Saint Michael’s College. As participants of the Streams Project, the seven high school teachers and 16 high school students spent the summer and fall of 2014 collecting macroinvertebrate samples and water samples from streams around Vermont. Also present were Jennifer Guarino (faculty at the Community College of Vermont) and Emily Miller (Monitoring Coordinator at the White River Partnership).

Voices
Big Data Arrives on a Small Lake in Vermont
Voices
Nemesis Ortiz Declet, a Vermont EPSCOR intern and senior at the University of Puerto Rico, was the other field assistant that day. Quieter but equally serious about her research, she was outfitted the same as Roy, minus the baseball cap. She was ...

The RACC Policy and Governance Team (Q3) has been working on developing an agent-based model of water quality management in the Lake Champlain Basin. On December 12th, the Team held its third focus group with local stakeholders, this time examining the details of how agricultural technical assistance is being done in the Missisquoi Watershed. This focus group invited a range of representatives from stakeholders, including both providers and consumers of technical assistance. Representatives of the Friends of Northern Lake Champlain, the Farmer’s Watershed Alliance, Fitzgerald Associates, Stone Environmental, and the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery attended, along with representatives of the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), UVM Extension, and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Farms, and Markets. They provided a range of invaluable insights that will help the RACC Team refine their understanding of the use and application of agricultural technical assistance in this watershed as well as how this tool and the policy options related to it fit with the larger goals of improving water quality and responding to climate change. All of this made for a successful event for the RACC Team in their efforts to build and validate a model that will be able to anticipate the outcomes of the policy scenarios that the team has been identifying through other events.

Interdisciplinary Research on Human Impacts in the Lake Champlain Ecosystem - May 31 to August 7, 2015

Our 10-week Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program will provide ten undergraduate students the opportunity to conduct research on the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of humans in the Lake Champlain ecosystem. Funded by the National Science Foundation, REU students will participate in an interdisciplinary cooperative model that promotes integrated thinking across disciplines within and between the natural and social sciences.

Join us to learn more about the various forms of intellectual property protection.
Tuesday, Jan 6th, 10AM-noon.

On Monday, December 1, 2014, Ms. Lindsay Wieland,
Director, VT EPSCOR CWDD, Saint Michael’s College, Vermont,
visited AGMUS Campus to gave the talk
“RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES AT UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT,
SUMMER 2015 –VT EPSCOR” for undergraduate students interested
in internship opportunities at Universidad Metropolitana
and Universidad del Turabocampuses.

According to a recent University of Vermont (UVM) report, those living in Franklin and several other counties are less willing to contribute to clean water costs than Vermonters as a whole.

Invited talk at next week's AGU conference in San Francisco. Available at http://alanbetts.com/workspace/uploads/agu1-land-atmospherecouplingwa-5489ede9abb56.pdf

Alan K. Betts
akbetts@aol.com
http://alanbetts.com
Co-authors:
Ray Desjardins, Devon Worth
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Brian Beckage UVM
Ahmed Tawfik NCAR
Anton Beljaars, ECMWF

Radio Interview: RACC member Alan Betts
The Mark Johnson Show with Alan Betts - 11-12-2014

The University of Vermont Selects FirstLight Fiber for 10G Network Upgrades
Marketwired (press release)
The continuation of this mutually beneficial relationship, which began in 2006, is due in part to the North East Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (NECC) grants UVM received through its Vermont EPSCoR and Vermont Genetics Network (VGN) programs ...

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