Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

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.

This year’s Commonwealth Campus Sustainability Forums will be hosted virtually by the Sustainability Institute on May 15 & 19. This year’s forums will focus on The Decade of Action: Transformational Sustainability at Penn State. The schedule is flexible and attendees can attend sessions on one or both days.

EESI EarthTalk: The current coronavirus pandemic has caused the price of oil to drop and education to happen remotely. How should institutions like the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State, which offers degree programs in petroleum and natural gas engineering as well as renewable energy and climate, adapt? Susan Brantley, director of the Earth and Environmental System Institute, and Lee Kump, John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, will lead a panel discussion on the future of energy education.

Join the Penn State EnvironMentors Poster Symposium for presentations of their STEM research. Register: https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_prEi3UJ9S3ycVk69XiH67g

This session will introduce graduate students to geospatial data from U.S. and international sources, along with information on geospatial software access at Penn State including ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS ArcMap, and ArcGIS Pro. A highlight of online geospatial resources available to graduate students will be included. Additional resources will be provided to help participants manage geospatial projects remotely.

The Analyses of Step Rate Tests for Estimating Maximum Injection Pressure live webinar will describe testing procedures that cause anomalous pressure responses that lead to inconclusive or incorrect maximum injection pressure estimations.