Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

The Water Cooler Series is a monthly event for the water student community planned to bring the community together and share interesting research/ideas/plans with peers from different disciplines and backgrounds. The informal setup for the “Water Cooler Series”  will provide students a platform to discuss brewing ideas about water-related research and get help/support from the peer group. The presentation need not be research focused. If you have some interesting field anecdotes or stories to share, this is the forum for you! 

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA), signed into law by President Biden in August 2022, promotes clean energy technologies, facilitates domestic energy production, and addresses global warming through a package of production and investment incentives paid for through the federal budget. This paper focuses on the IRA’s tax provisions targeted at grid-connected electricity generation. The IRA will affect households through changes in electricity prices and costs, the household tax burden, emissions of CO2 and other air pollutants, and public health.

Department of Geosciences Colloquium Series presents Brandon Johnson, Purdue University

This tour would include two main parts: (i) tour of the Living Filter spray-irrigation sites; and (ii) tour of the Water Reclamation Facility. Penn State currently produces Class B wastewater reuse at its Water Reclamation Facility that is pumped and spray-irrigated at 600 acres of mixed-use fields, known as the Living Filter. These activities have been ongoing since the 1980’s and provide an opportunity to conduct research at a site with a long history of wastewater irrigation.

In this talk I will discuss the paths that I took from an undergraduate interested in promoting economic development in my home state of Maine to an Economics Ph.D. researcher at a Washington, DC think tank providing advice to environmental and energy policy makers in DC and beyond. It’s a story of changing directions, fortunate connections to amazing coauthors, lucky timing and opportunities seized.

The Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy (CELP) and the Hamer Center for Community Design in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School are teaming up to host a one-hour webinar at 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 1 to address the substantial challenges low-income individuals in Pennsylvania face in accessing energy efficiency programs.

Students in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences are holding an event on Wednesday, Nov. 30, to discuss “Elements of Global Change.” The one-hour presentation with additional discussion will occur at 7 p.m. at Sower’s Harvest Café, 421 East Beaver Ave., State College. Discussion will revolve around: "Water: Nutrient Pollution: Too Much of a Good Thing." "Earth: Soil Is Not a Dirty Word." "Fire: Who Started the Fire? Humans and Wildfires."

The annual AAAS Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Lecture was established to honor Charles Valentine Riley’s legacy and vision for enhancing agriculture through scientific knowledge. This year’s lecture will focus on emerging opportunities and challenges in agricultural pest management and technological innovations to support agricultural productivity and food security in the face of changing environmental conditions and feature a keynote address by Dr. Douglas Landis, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Entomology at Michigan State University.

Mounting evidence indicates the importance of cloud–radiation feedback in promoting the upscale development of tropical convection. This feedback is argued to be critical to maintaining the convective envelope of the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) and to accelerating the genesis of tropical cyclones (TCs). Specifically, cloud–longwave radiative forcing (the “cloud greenhouse effect”) provides an additional diabatic heat source in regions where deep convection is already prolific relative to its surroundings, which in turn fosters more convection.

Department of Geosciences Colloquium Series presents Josh Roering, University of Oregon

Jennifer Kraschnewski completed her medical degree at the University of Wisconsin and internal medicine residency training at Duke University Medical Center. Following residency, she completed a NIH-NRSA Primary Care Research Fellowship and Masters in Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a clinician-investigator with a research focus on behavioral interventions to promote healthy lifestyles in clinical and community settings to address health disparities.

The 2022 Embodied Carbon Symposium gathers a group of international scholars passionate about reducing the carbon emissions of the built environments and presents the latest research on embodied carbon at various scales of material, building, and urban. Hosted online by Penn State, 20 speakers will present their studies in five panels on Nov. 28–29, 2022.

Seminar presented by Laura Kaminsky, Penn State

The 2022 Embodied Carbon Symposium gathers a group of international scholars passionate about reducing the carbon emissions of the built environments and presents the latest research on embodied carbon at various scales of material, building, and urban. Hosted online by Penn State, 20 speakers will present their studies in five panels on Nov. 28–29, 2022.

Daniel Allen is co-hosting a Data Carpentries Workshop with Alice Belskis (MS student in Wildlife and Fisheries Science).

Extreme heat is invisible, silent, and deadly, adversely affecting human health, productivity, and well-being globally. Current state-of-the-art modeling and projections of heat-related illnesses or death generally do not account for the complex human factors that shape a person’s heat response and resilience based on diverse vulnerability, adaptive behavior, and varying environmental or built contexts. Dr. Vanos will provide insight into research completed on current and future human exposures to extreme heat in urban areas and considerations when working with data at multiple scales.

Department of Geosciences Colloquium Series presents Angela Marusiak, USGS Earthquake Science Center

For landholders in Australia, feral pigs represent a key natural resource management and pest control issue. Feral pigs destroy landscapes and wildlife habitats, reduce the value and productivity of agricultural operations, and serve as vectors of diseases that threaten other animal and human populations.

As many ecological questions require hard-won data, and resource constraints require ecologists to do more with less, there have been continued debates about whether opportunistically collected data can provide trustworthy information about ecological properties like species prevalence and abundance. Even though opportunistically collected data cannot *replace* systematically collected data for estimating particular quantities of interest, it can *augment* it and shed light on new quantities of interest, this time about the observers themselves.

SSRI is excited to announce a new seminar series highlighting the value and impact of social science at Penn State. The first lecture will be presented by SSRI cofund and PRI Director Jennifer Van Hook, Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology and Demography, on November 17, 12 p.m., at The Bennett Pierce Living Center, Room 110 Henderson Building, and via Zoom.