Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

This paper examines the effects of three large, coal-fired power plant closures on student absences and achievement in the Chicago area. We find that schools near the plants experienced a 7 percent reduction in absences relative to those further away following the closures. Math achievement in these schools increased following the closures, although our estimates are imprecise. Using data on wind, air conditioning, and magnet schools, we show that schools with higher baseline pollution exposure experienced the greatest gains from the plant closures.

Addressing water quality in the Chesapeake and its watersheds, including Pennsylvania, has been a long-standing challenge. The need for further action has been highlighted by a recent set of lawsuits by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and a set of states against the Environmental Protection Agency for its failure to address water quality concerns in Pennsylvania and New York.

Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Brown Bag Series: Investigating Interdecadal Variability in the North Atlantic Using a New Time-Evolving Self-Organizing Maps Method Sharon Gu, Ph.D. Graduate Student, Department of Meteorology & Atmospheric Science, Penn State https://psu.zoom.us/j/95545207606

The PHRC welcomes Brett C. Singer, staff scientist, head of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Systems and lead of the Indoor Environment Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as the 2020 Hankin Distinguished Lecturer. His lecture is entitled Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities for Indoor Air Quality in U.S. Homes. 

Department of Geosciences Colloquium: Pyrite oxidation in the global sulfur and oxygen cycles: Insight from triple oxygen isotopes of sulfate Jordon Hemingway, Geochemist, and Postdoctoral Fellow, Hoffman Laboratory, Harvard University https://psu.zoom.us/j/95676460061   

Feedstocks for the Future by Armen Kemanian, Michael Jacobson, Charlie Anderson  This session is part of the Penn State Future of Bioenergy and Biorenewables Workshop, presented by Penn State Center for Biorenewables

This lecture introduces the Baltic Sea, one of the largest brackish water bodies on Earth, as a time machine to preview the evolutionary and ecological consequences of major environmental perturbations on marine life. Already today, many anthropogenic pressures in the Baltic have reached unprecedented levels, predicted for other ocean areas only for the distant future, including ocean acidification, warming, deoxygenation, desalination and overfishing. These pressures not only elicit physiological stress and community change but also constitute strong selection pressures.

The Water Insights Seminar Series engages the University and broader community in collaborative learning and discussion about critical water challenges from local to global scales.   All seminars are scheduled for Tuesdays from 12:00 - 1:00 pm and will be held via Zoom. Zoom room open from 11:30 for setup and log-in. Meetings (video, audio, and chat) will be recorded. No waiting room, and no passcode. Participants will be muted automatically upon entry.

Following open relationships with global nations that started in 1778, Hawai'i experienced a rapid decline in the Hawaiian population and their agroecological management systems. As part of efforts to redefine the contemporary food system of Hawai'i - one that relies on 90% imported foods and a weak local agricultural sector - we have worked to bring indigenous knowledge and practices regarding sustainable agroecosystems forward.

Please join us as we discuss the New York Times Bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi. Discussion will focus on chapters: 1–5, 7 and 8. Panelists: Joshua Inwood, Associate Professor of Geography and African Studies Cierra Chandler, Ph.D. candidate, Materials Science and Engineering Bryttani Wooten, Senior, Meteorology and Atmospheric Science Password for event: 217040

Sustainability Series for Commonwealth Employees The series is intended to give commonwealth employees opportunities to hear from subject matter experts and receive updates on each topic to enrich their knowledge while engaging in group conversations.  The series is intended to give commonwealth employees opportunities to hear from subject matter experts and receive updates on each topic to enrich their knowledge while engaging in group conversations. 

Energy for the Future Seminar: Modelling Multiphysics Gas-EOR Process in Tight Oil Reservoirs with Yu-Shu Wu; Reservoirs Modeling Chair and Director of (EMG); Colorado School of Mines, USA

The Science and Values in Climate Risk Management Speaker Series hosts invited speakers to generate discussion bridging the scientific and ethical sides of climate change research. The speakers will present new ideas designed for an interdisciplinary audience. This series is organized by the Center for Climate Risk Management and the Climate and Sustainability Ethics Initiative in the Rock Ethics Institute, which is convened by Casey Helgeson, Klaus Keller, and Nancy Tuana.

State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations and Its Benefits webinar will introduce Ryan Steadley, the Executive Director of STRONGER, an acronym for State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations. STRONGER is a multi-stakeholder nonprofit organization whose mission is to enhance protection of human health and the environment by educating and providing services for the continuous improvement of state upstream oil and gas regulatory programs.

Decoding Enhancer Function In The Developing Mammalian Brain with Alexander Nord, University of California, Davis

Civil and Environmental Engineering Virtual Seminar Series: Scientific Machine Learning for Efficient Computational Design of Engineering Systems with Hadi Meidani, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This talk will detail the methodology used to generate a physics based country-wide probabilistic flood and hurricane risk model comprised of 50,000 years of statistically simulated precipitation and hurricane events.  This model is appropriate for use in establishing material risk at high resolution in the continental US (10m x 10m resolution), a model which is in use by the insurance industry and by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  In addition to providing general comments on the methodology, we will also discuss how climate change effects losses and model verifi

The short-term interests of some financial actors can conflict with the long-term objectives of companies. In this presentation we explore the world of activist hedge funds. Results from a series of studies show that activist hedge funds unequivocally detract from the pursuit of business sustainability. Activist hedge funds tend to target more socially responsible companies, including those with more demographically diverse boards.

Madagascar figures prominently in debates over contemporary and past human exploitation of island biomes. It has long been argued that initial human arrival on Madagascar precipitated catastrophic changes in local ecologies, including, famously, the extinction of a suite of megafauna. Despite this starkly portrayed shift from an uninhabited island to one devastated by human settlement, our diachronic understanding of Madagascar’s coupled human-natural systems remains limited.

Fall 2020 ESSC Brown Bag Series with Xingchao Chen (XC), Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, Penn State To maintain social distancing as much as possible during the novel coronavirus pandemic, seminars will be conducted via Zoom this semester. A hyperlink to the Zoom meeting for each seminar is given in the schedule below in the row corresponding to that seminar. Unless otherwise noted, all seminars are from 11:15am - 12:30pm Zoom link: https://psu.zoom.us/j/98035610152