News

The Board of Trustees approved the creation of a new UVM Water Resources Institute that will be housed in the Office of the Vice President for Research and led by Dr. Beverley Wemple from the department of Geography and Geosciences. There have long been informal conversations about the possibility of a water institute on our campus, but the discussion began in earnest in Fall 2022 and quickly garnered widespread support. The institute will harness our strength in water research, education, and outreach to advance a sustainable water future. Our water expertise includes more than a decade of National Science Foundation-funded capacity-building grants to Vermont EPSCoR on water-related topics; multiple college-level programs that support water or water-related research; partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology; and more than 100 faculty across 6 colleges and schools and 22 departments engaged in water research.

Vermont EPSCoR kicked off a new chapter with a Strategic Planning Meeting for the NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 award, Harnessing the Data Revolution for Vermont: The Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), which entered its first year in June, 2023. The two-day meeting held on August 24th and 25th at Hula in Burlington, VT gathered the full SOCKS team together, allowing interactive discussion and planning around goals, milestones, and strategic directions of the program. Facilitated by John Riordan, the meeting was also attended by NSF Program Officer, Dr. Eric Lindquist.

Randall Harp, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont, is interested in how non-artificially intelligent beings should make sense of this uncharted ethical territory. Harp, who studies the philosophy of action, moral psychology, and data and technology ethics, has given talks on AI to UVM faculty and the general public.

Oct. 15, 2023
Researchers at UVM are looking into how emerging technology influences people, and they’re urging Vermont to be a leader in regulating artificial intelligence. The automation market is hot, and as companies integrate AI into their systems, the work employees do is being collected with the potential to later automate their jobs. Juniper Lovato, one of the researchers in the complex systems and data science program, describes it as your work being “mined” for profit, and she’s worried about how this will affect women and minorities.

Oct. 10, 2023
Juniper Lovato, a Co-PI for the NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS) award, and Director of Outreach for Complex Systems at UVM, successfully defended her PhD on September 7, 2023. With the presentation of her dissertation "Group-Level Frameworks for Data Ethics, Privacy, Safety and Security in Digital Environments," Dr. Lovato has now earned her PhD in Complex Systems and Data Science.

Chris Danforth, PhD, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at UVM and RII Track-1 SOCKS Co-Principal Investigator, presented the keynote lecture at UVM's National Research Administrator Day observance on September 21, 2023.
 
Research Administrator Day is observed each September to recognize the invaluable contributions made by research administrators to research enterprise. The research administration field includes all staff who support research administration activities at UVM. This includes all phases of the grant lifecycle and beyond, such as research proposal development and submission, award acceptance and negotiation, protocol review and approval, financial oversight, and more.

In July 2023, The Saint Michael's Natural Area was flooded by a historic rain event. Professor Declan McCabe explains to us the impact of these rainfalls, and specifically how it impacted the Saint Michael's Natural Area located directly on our campus in Colchester, VT.

Vermont EPSCoR and the Vermont 4-H program teamed up to present Science Fun Day, a two-hour-long set of activities for elementary students of grades 3-5. Held at the Barre Civic Center on May 21, 2023, this free event focused on hands-on STEM activities that helped students apply scientific learning to many different projects.

In a pair of studies published this spring, researchers sought to figure out when, why and under what circumstances those entities collaborate to try to address the problems plaguing Lake Champlain and the waterways that feed it.

The University of Vermont is proud to announce the appointment of three distinguished individuals to institutes and offices under the Office of Research: Beverley Wemple, Ph.D. will serve as the new Director of UVM’s Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH); Sara Helms Cahan, Ph.D. will serve as the Associate Vice President for Research; and Patricia “Tricia” Coates will serve as the Director of the newly established Institute for Rural Partnerships and will act as the Director of the Office of Engagement.

With a warmer climate creating more humid conditions in the Northeast, extreme precipitation events are projected to increase in the Northeast by 52% by the end of the century. BREE Climate Team members Jonathan Winter at Dartmouth College, former BREE GRA Charlotte Cockburn, Janel Hanrahan at Northern Vermont University — Lyndon, Patrick Clemins and Brian Beckage at the University of Vermont contributed to the study.

This year the university is pleased to announce Payne Hiraldo, M.Ed., and Courtney Giles, Ph.D., as the HERS Leadership Institute for Women’s 2023-2024 participants from UVM. Please join us in congratulating these dedicated and talented faculty and staff members at UVM.

A groundbreaking data science effort to better understand and harness the power of stories has earned the University of Vermont a $20 million research capacity building award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through its Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The five-year Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-1 award, which promotes world-class research nationwide, will bolster research infrastructure at UVM and across the state.

As we near the conclusion of a busy and productive academic year, UVM's President Suresh Garimella is pleased to share a brief video message about UVM’s important role as Vermont’s research university.

Patrick Clemins, PhD, Vermont EPSCoR's Manager of Cyberinfrastructure and Partnerships, participated in a remote discussion with the Campus Research Computer Consortium (CaRCC) on March 1, 2023. With the topic of "Exploring Factors that Impact RCD Strategy," Dr. Clemins presented alongside Don DuRousseau, Director of Research Computing at the University of Arkansas, and Paul Weakliem, Co-Director of the Center for Scientific Computing at the University of California Santa Barbara. The panel was a Zoom forum in which participants had the opportunity to ask questions remotely.

Vermont EPSCoR partnered with Norwich University for the 64th annual Vermont Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Fair on March 25, 2023. The day-long event saw 60 Vermont students from grades 6 through 12 present on 52 different STEM projects. The fair returned to an in-person format for the first time since 2019, after three years of remote participation due to restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Four area students attended the National 4-H Ignite Teen Summit in Washington, DC from March 9th through the 12th, 2023. The summit drew over 900 attendees from around the United States and beyond. The experience was made possible through a partnership with Vermont EPSCoR and allowed student attendees to share projects they have been working on while also networking with other youth groups. This marked the first year that the UVM 4-H program had students in attendance. The Vermont delegation included four high school students giving presentations, chaperones and two other invited teens who were able to participate in numerous workshop sessions while also getting to visit some of Washington, DC’s most famous national monuments.

Vermont State Climatologist and BREE researcher Dr. Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux attended a White House climate change solutions forum on March 8th and 9th. The forum featured representation from all 50 states and the District of Columbia as researchers presented innovative solutions to help address the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Two new studies released by BREE researchers Patrick Bitterman, PhD and Christopher Koliba, PhD debut this month. "A Network Perspective on Multi-Scale Water Governance in the Lake Champlain Basin, Vermont," published in Ecology and Society, and "Engagement in Water Governance Action Situations in the Lake Champlain Basin," published in PLOS ONE take two similar but different looks at the Lake Champlain Basin (LCB) and examine how government action can improve the health of the watershed.

UVM Vice President for Research, Kirk Dombrowski, visits Across the Fence to talk about the upcoming research week on April 17, 2023.