Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

Microbial communities in tropical pitcher plants: the role of plant-regulated factors presented by Kadeem Gilbert, Ph.D., Penn State

Seminar: Bombus huntii - a promising commercial pollinator for Western North America with Jonathan Koch, University of Hawaii

Energy for the Future Seminar: Assessing the impact of shale gas development on water resources presented by Susan Brantley, Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, Director of Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State

Chloe Gustafson, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University to present ​Imaging groundwater systems beneath ice sheets and oceans.

What happens to us when we die -- not to our souls, but our earthly remains? For most, we will be buried, cremated, or entombed in a method that releases chemicals into the environment. When Duke University psychiatrist Clark Wang finds out he has terminal leukemia, he decides he wants a different fate – a green burial. This beautiful, uplifting film with amazing access to Wang in the final years of his life raises many questions about how our attitudes to death affect how we see our place in the environment and our use of resources in life (and death).

Recent decades have seen dramatic advances in our fundamental understanding of the climate system, with increasingly finer-scale projections and improved process representation. At the same time, work on the science of climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation has seen explosive growth, with a corresponding emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration.

Pricing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions involves making tradeoffs between consumption today and unknown damages in the (distant) future. While decision making under risk and uncertainty is the forte of financial economics, important insights from pricing financial assets do not typically inform standard climate–economy models. Here, we introduce EZ-Climate, a simple recursive dynamic asset pricing model that allows for a calibration of the carbon dioxide (CO2) price path based on probabilistic assumptions around climate damages. Atmospheric CO2 is the “asset” with a negative expected return.

Nicole Gasparini of ​Tulane University​ will present Evolution of the South Fork Eel River watershed: The known unknowns. ​Host: Roman DiBiase

The Population Research Institute (PRI) present flash talks on population and environment:

Water Insights Spring Seminar: The Multi-layer Network Structure of Virtual Water Flows in the United States presented by Alfonso Mejia, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Penn State,

The Plant Mating System and the Evolution of Resistance presented by Regina Baucom, University of Michigan

How do scientists study climate, and how do they make projections about future climate? What is the role that statistics plays in climate science? Murali Haran provides answers to these questions, with examples from collaborative research between Penn State statisticians and climate scientists. His research focuses on the future of the Antarctic ice sheet, which has an important role to play in the future of the planet. Haran explains how statistical thinking is central to science, especially now, as we have access to an unprecedented amount of new scientific data.

It is well known that manufacturing operations can affect the environment, but hardly any research explores whether the natural environment shapes manufacturing operations. Specifically, we investigate whether water scarcity, which results from environmental conditions, influences manufacturing firms to lower their toxic releases to the environment. We created a dataset that spans 2000-2016 and includes details on the toxic emissions of 2,540 manufacturing facilities in Texas. Additionally, our dataset includes measures of the water scarcity experienced by these facilities.

Seminar: "A Jewel of a System: demonstrations of color and pattern data analysis to inform taxonomic investigations of a colorful and speciose lineage of jewel beetles (Coleoptera: Buprestidae)" with Nathan Lord, LSU

CLIMA Center for Climate Risk Management: A nonstationary and non-Gaussian moving average model for solar irradiance downscaling with Wenqi Zhang, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder

Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Brown Bag Series: Interfaces, scaling and variability: elements of a unified framework of hydrologic transport at the catchment scale with Kevin Roche, Fulbright Research Scholar, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research, Spanish National Research Council, Barcelona, Spain

Energy for the Future Seminar Series: Pennsylvania Desert: Historical Perspectives on our Energy Future with Dr. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences, Penn State

Clinical outcomes of cell therapies and regenerative medicine have shown their great potential in treating human diseases and the cell therapy global market is projected to grow at 36.52% yearly. However, two technical challenges must be addressed to achieve the full potential of cell therapies. The first is to manufacture cells at large scale and with high quality and affordable cost. Currently, consistently producing >1011 cells is still very difficult. The second is the low in vivo homing, survival, function and immune tolerance.

Emerging technologies capable of producing fuels and chemicals are often touted as environmental panaceas. However, systems-level modeling and analysis of such technologies using life cycle oriented approaches is essential for guiding their sustainable development and avoid unintended consequences. This presentation will discuss our recent work on systems-level modeling and analysis of two emerging technologies.

This interactive webinar presented by Sanford “Sandy” Smith features a new and novel teaching method that anyone can use. Last year, another webinar entitled, “Heard in the Woods…,” showcased this method for forest landowner education, and this new webinar will present how to use the same method more broadly to cover topics such as trees, forests and forestry for the public, teachers, and forest landowners. Involving peer-to-peer learning, the method is adaptable to a variety of audiences and settings.