Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

Since 2014 research in two shelters in the tropical forests of southern Belize has documented well preserved and persistent used mortuary and midden contexts dating from 12,000 to 1,000 Cal B.P. Keith Prufer, University of New Mexico, will outline the broader research goals of the project, technical challenges for dating early human remains from the tropics, evidence for the adoption of maize as a dietary staple, and some future directions for this research.

Join the NSF Geosciences Directorate's Division of Ocean Sciences on Thursday, June 18, 2020, 12:00 PM – 4:30 PM EST for the virtual 2020 Frontiers in Ocean Sciences Symposium. The theme of this year’s Symposium is Partnerships. Four NSF-funded scientists will share their pioneering research, their stories, and how they have fostered and learned from partnerships in their career. A panel of alumni from last year’s Symposium will convene for an update on their research and for an engaging discussion with you.

Building Convergence in Climate Research is a community forum. Participants from across the University community are encouraged to attend and participate. The agenda will be announced.

IEE and Erica Smithwick hosted a community forum on Building Convergence in Climate Science. A brief introduction was followed by three breakout groups: Mitigation: What efforts exist to reduce or prevent the emission of greenhouse gases? Resilience: From local to global, where can we absorb the stresses of climate change or adapt, reorganize, and evolve? Impacts: What are the biggest impacts of climate change on ecosystems and human societies? Each breakout group explored five topics:

Watershed planning can be hard. It is a process that requires an understanding of the physical landscape, processes, and the people. Sometimes in grappling with the inherent complexities of the physical landscape we relegate the “people” portion of the plan into only the implementation phase of the plan. Is there a place for people to come to the preverbal planning table not as stakeholders only, but as content experts, collaborators, and family?

The Office of the Senior Vice President for Research & The Office of Foundation Relations invite you to the

Presently, summed probability densities (SPDs) of calibrated radiocarbon dates are the dominant method of summarizing sets of radiocarbon dates (e.g., to reconstruct demographic trends). Unfortunately, SPDs are incapable of converging on their true generating distributions even as the number of observations gets large. Michael Price describes an alternative, end-to-end Bayesian approach and show via simulations and a statistical identifiability analysis that the end-to-end approach correctly converges on the generating distribution.

The theme of the 2020 symposium is Chesapeake Bay Research and Management: Progress and Future Challenges. The Scope and Aims of the symposium are as follows:

Join us for Effective Environmental Outreach Strategies Webinar to learn new strategies for increasing the impact of your environmental outreach program and cultivating trust among staff and stakeholders.

The Dresden Nexus Conference (DNC) is an international conference series dedicated to advancing research and the implementation of a Nexus Approach to resource management. By bringing together actors from a diverse range of disciplines and sectors, DNC fosters dialogue on how nexus thinking contributes to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  

Extreme solar storms created spikes in the production of radiocarbon in the ancient past. The years in which these events took place are exactly known because the uplifts in radiocarbon are observable in known-age tree-ring archives. Moreover, they are also present in all other plant material that grew at the time. Thus, by matching the signals found in the tree-ring archives with those in archaeological timbers, exact dates may be assigned to ancient structures. Michael Dee, Assistant Professor of Isotope Chronology, University of Groningen:

Sponsored by PPG Industries, the Millennium Café Pitch Competition is an opportunity to pitch your research in TWO minutes or less using no more than four supporting slides.  Graduate students will briefly convey their research to a curious and technically diverse audience in hopes of taking home CASH PRIZES and developing new COLLABORATIONS.

Often compared, both the Baltic Sea and the Chesapeake Bay regions are faced with eutrophication resulting from a number of factors. Governments in both regions have enacted a system of incentives and enforcement mechanisms to achieve target reductions for nutrients and total dissolved solids. This seminar seeks to explore the similarities and differences with law and governance in both regions: what is working and what lessons have been learned.

This webinar is part of a unique series of conversations that provides the opportunity to go beyond the headlines and hear directly from experts in sustainability and social impact about how COVID-19 is changing the business landscape and making obvious the need for ethical leadership.  

This talk follows a research thread that began with attempts to date various types of paper documents. There are generally two motivations for this: the forensic determination of age of documents of legal import, and; the determination of age of works of art on paper. The approach I explored was to combine radiocarbon measurement on the paper substrate with measurement of the radiocarbon content of the gelatin from the photographic emulsion. Dr. Gregory Hodgins, Director of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab at the University of Arizona

With the adoption of open data initiatives and increasing mandates from funders and publishers, data are increasingly being shared via publication in data repositories. This session will provide information on how to prepare data for publication, including an examination of metadata standards, best practices for data documentation, and methods for selecting a data repository, as well as a discussion of ways to get credit for your data products.

The energy sector is facing unprecedented challenges, with a globally spreading COVID-19 pandemic and historically low energy prices, on top of a difficult transition towards a low carbon future that has been on-going before the crisis. Human kind will meet the challenge and hopefully come out of the other side in a better shape. Some of the key elements to achieve that is smart collaborations in technology development and innovation, and MIT is leading the way.

Our Homes, Our Health: Advancing an Inclusive Agenda for Building Performance Webinar Series Part 1: Context Matters

Dr. Christopher Jazwa will discuss the benefits of setting up a radiocarbon sample prep lab for both research and education. He will present case studies from his archaeological research in California and Morocco along with collaborative projects with archaeologists, geologists, and forensic anthropologists. 

Please join us at 10:00 am on 5/19 for a unique edition of the Millennium Café where we’ll welcome Roger Williams and Clive Randall to discuss “Resilience in Times of Crisis  - Lessons from the First 100 Years in Penn State History.”  As we navigate the challenges and opportunities brought about by our current pandemic we’ll reflect upon past examples of PSU leaders and strategies, many within the sciences, which brought the University through multiple global crises.  In doing so, the foundations were laid for our transition into a world-class university.