Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

In this talk, we will discuss the multiple seed grant initiatives in the Materials Research Institute (MRI), that aim at seeding new and multi-unit collaborations. In particular, the special focus of these opportunities is to expand productive research collaborations across OSVPR, by promoting partnerships across the Institutes. A second focus is to advance Penn State’s strategic goal in stimulating and enhancing international research collaborations by seeding joint research opportunities with international partnering institutions.

This conference is one of the most diverse and inclusive conferences in water resources management. New! All Workshops and Technical Trips are included in the full conference registration (excludes the AIH HIT exam). AWRA provides you with innovative, practical, and applied water resource management solutions, management techniques, and current research. Enjoy the Community, Conversation, & Connection that is #AWRA2023!

Join us at our Fall 2023 event, an interdisciplinary methods workshop on November 6th from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. in 214 Hammond Building. Many of the pressing challenges today around water are complex and multifaceted. PAWS is hosting an interdisciplinary workshop to facilitate the exchange of ideas and methodologies from one field to another. This is also a networking opportunity for both undergraduate and graduate students to think about projects where we can collaborate with one another to propose innovative and sustainable solutions to tackle issues surrounding water.

Join EMS researchers, staff, students, and the public for the premiere showing of The Earth Systems Science Center Made "EESI" a historical documentary on the people that put Penn State at the forefront of Earth System Science research and education. Featuring: Richard Alley, Jenn Baka, Eric Barron, Seth Blumsack, Sue Brantley, Rob Crane, Ken Davis, John Dutton, Bill Easterling, Bernd Haupt, Charles Hosler, Chris House, Sara Ivory, Jim Kasting, Lee Kump, Diana Liverman, Doug Miller, Dave Pollard, Erica Smithwick, and Alan Taylor.  

This conference is one of the most diverse and inclusive conferences in water resources management. New! All Workshops and Technical Trips are included in the full conference registration (excludes the AIH HIT exam). AWRA provides you with innovative, practical, and applied water resource management solutions, management techniques, and current research. Enjoy the Community, Conversation, & Connection that is #AWRA2023!

The 18th River Symposium will be held on Friday, November 3 and Saturday, November 4, 2023 at the Elaine Langone Center on the campus of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The symposium brings together academics, consultants, state, federal, and regional agencies, conservation groups, and the public to discuss ongoing scientific research and innovative projects, to share ideas, and to increase awareness of conservation efforts to restore watersheds throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

The 18th River Symposium will be held on Friday, November 3 and Saturday, November 4, 2023 at the Elaine Langone Center on the campus of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The symposium brings together academics, consultants, state, federal, and regional agencies, conservation groups, and the public to discuss ongoing scientific research and innovative projects, to share ideas, and to increase awareness of conservation efforts to restore watersheds throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

Geovanni Siquihua is a Kichwa Indigenous Leader from Sani, a Kichwa community located in Oil Block 15 in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. Sani community struck against the Occidental Petroleum Corporation (OXY) to force its officials to sit at the table of negotiations in 2004, causing the transnational to pay better seismic compensation than initially offered to the community. After extraction proved unsuccessful in Sani, the community decided to resist further exploration and engage in alternatives to extraction.

Electricity markets are functioning around the world. This talk will cover fundamentals of wholesale electricity market operation, focusing on integrated power system and electricity market operation, using PJM market, the largest wholesale electricity market in the world, as an example. Hot topics, such as uncertainty, gas-electric coordination, renewable, storage, Distributed Energy Resources (DER), demand response, and system operation under extreme weather, will also be discussed.

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! 

Precipitation is the input to the hydrologic cycle and a critical component of water availability and sustainability studies at the local, regional, and global scales. Yet, precipitation is one of the most difficult variables to accurately measure from space globally, and difficult to predict at the subseasonal to seasonal scales. Climate change is also accelerating the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation, changing its seasonality and interannual variability, with impacts for hazard prediction and water resources management and planning.

Theresa Weston, founder of The Holt Weston Consultancy and a building science research professional specializing in the durability and energy efficiency of buildings, will deliver the 2023 Hankin Distinguished Lecture, hosted by the residential construction program and the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, which is housed in Penn State’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her talk, “Residential Innovation Challenges and Opportunities,” will be held at 4 p.m. on Nov. 1 in the Freeman Auditorium in the HUB-Robeson Center at University Park.

Gal Hochman introduces a political-economic framework to compare upper bounds with taxes to control externalities. His work models policy design in democratic regimes, assuming heterogeneous firms use polluting capital-intensive technologies but can reduce pollution by adopting cleaner technologies. If policymakers realize that policies are irreversible, they may prefer intensity upper bound over taxation to regulate and mitigate pollution.

Department of Geosciences Colloquium Series Fall 2023 Cailey Condit University of Washington Host: Tushar Mittal Deep slow earthquakes during subduction: constraints from rocks to models

Materials characterization is often performed under standard laboratory conditions.  However, this can lead to an incomplete view of the structure, chemistry, and overall properties of a material system under their eventual “real-world operating conditions”.  To address this gap researchers may employ strategies to collect their data under “in situ” conditions where temperature, pressure, and chemical composition of atmosphere are controlled. The insight gained via “in situ” characterization are critical to developing further understanding for advanced materials, catalysts, polymers, etc.

Throughout October one of the two talks at the Millennium Café each week will provide a unique perspective on atmospheric particulates. 

Virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) influences the way people interact, communicate, and collaborate, and holds great potential to enhance learning and training, strengthen social connections, and improve our health. A critical step is to establish an immersive networking and computing platform that delivers unparalleled user experiences. In this presentation, I will introduce basic VR/AR concepts and various collaborative VR/AR applications. Moreover, I will discuss the main technical challenges that need to be addressed in collaborative VR/AR.

Most media coverage of climate breakdown focuses on humans. Very little attention is paid to its effects on the millions of wild species that share the planet with us, even though most of them are far more vulnerable than us. Welz will talk about why he wrote his new book, The End of Eden, and engage in robust discussion with the audience about the book’s vital subject. First 10 attendees will receive a free autographed copy!

A growing body of evidence shows that women’s leadership, across sectors, results in more favorable environmental decisions and outcomes. GCSE is launching the Network for Women-Inspired Leadership, a group of people from member institutions who will think together about the qualities of environmental decision-making by women that lead to more favorable results, and the paradigm changes needed to have the world benefit from women’s environmental leadership in higher education, public governance, business, and civil society.   

Block off October 26-27 on your calendar for the 2023 Materials Day, Penn State’s marquee event for the materials research community. This year’s theme is “Materials. Research. Workforce. Innovations for Future Manufacturing.” With this theme in mind, the event will feature keynote speakers, breakout sessions, graduate student poster sessions, industry-sponsored tabletops, lunch and several networking opportunities.