Weekly Newsletter

January 12, 2021

Dear colleagues-

Welcome back all! Yes, it’s a bit cold, gray, and challenging, but off we go, heading into the new year with lots of plans and accomplishments already on the books.

First, a shout out to the Nexus team for several accomplishments and project milestones. Last semester, as you can read about here, our Nexus university partner, UNSA, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the start of activities for the Science and Technology Park of Arequipa (PCT), modeled after Purdue’s Discovery Park, which will house headquarters for the Arequipa Nexus Institute, underlining the continued impact and long-term nature of the collaborative project. UNSA also signed a five-year extension agreement that will enable additional projects to be developed.

Fall also saw numerous publications from the current Nexus teams, including a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education (JCWRE) that highlights the projects of the water research team, as highlighted below.

Read on for more information about upcoming Center events, our thanks to outgoing associate director Laura Zanotti, updates on new website features for faculty, and upcoming opportunities for funding.

Thank you Laura!

On behalf the Center, we’d like to thank Laura Zanotti for her terrific work as associate director over the last two years. In January, 2019, Laura took on the role of associate director following her tenure as convener of the Building Sustainable Communities Signature Research Area (BSC SRA). In her time as associate director, Laura helped lead our revisioning process and was closely involved in our visioning sessions that took place in spring 2019, which led to our open call for new signature areas and research clusters that fall. Laura also helped set the groundwork for the Purdue Latin America Network (PLANET), a program to support and scale Purdue’s international collaborations that address complex environmental and societal challenges across the Americas. In 2020, Laura took the lead in efforts associated with environmental justice activities both in ‘real life’ and virtually. These efforts led to her applying for receiving a grant from the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence to organize, in coordination of a wide group of co-sponsors on campus, a conference, Next Steps – Environment Justice, Climate Change, and Racial Justice, which will take place virtually on March 25-26 of this year. As of the beginning of this year, at the end of her two-year commitment to this role as associate director, Laura will be taking on the role of graduate advisor in her home department of Anthropology. She remains an active member of the BSC SRA and the Center at large and will continue to help support EJ activities for the Center moving forward. Thank you again, Laura, for your dedication to the Center!

Web Updates and New Services for Center Affiliates

Many of you may have seen our updated directory, or have been biding your time to update your profile, but we are excited to be in the last stages of designing and updating our website to a new layout and design. Scheduled to roll out in early February, the site will be easier to navigate, more robust in content, and add a few new areas of information including the posting of research positions and job opportunities for undergrads, grads and post-doc positions with Center affiliates.

We are currently designing an ingestion form to enable Center affiliates to post these positions and they will be displayed on the website as well as promoted via twitter (for post-doc opps), the weekly newsletter (encouraging faculty to pass these on to appropriate folks) and, for undergrads, we will post information in our undergraduate newsletter and social media (Instagram). We will also share opportunities with the Office of Undergraduate Research. If you have immediate needs for this service, please reach out to Lynne at ldahmen@purdue.edu.

Upcoming Events

BIPOC Farmers in Sustainable Agriculture

Noon to 1:30 p.m. EST | Thursday, Jan. 28

The Center for the Environment has partnered with the College of Agriculture and the College of Health & Human Sciences to present this panel discussion as part of the colleges’ joint observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Diversity Awareness Week. In America and around the world, farmers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color face unique challenges in equitable access to grow food while practicing environmental stewardship. Representatives from Purdue faculty, Purdue Extension’s Urban Agriculture program, Purdue’s Center for Global Food Security and Indiana’s BIPOC farming community will outline these challenges and potential solutions. Currently scheduled panelists include:

Gary Burniske, managing director of the Purdue Center for Global Food Security
Zhao Ma, professor, Purdue University Department of Forestry and Natural Resources
Sharrona Moore (CEO / garden manager), Lawrence Community Gardens in Indianapolis
Nathan Shoaf, urban agriculture coordinator, Purdue Extension
Ariana Torres, assistant professor, Purdue University Department of Horticulture & Landscape Architecture / Department of Agricultural Economics
Curtis Whittaker, Sr. (owner / founder) and Freida Graves (farm manager), Faith Farms in Gary, Indiana

Tamara Benjamin, assistant program leader for Purdue Extension’s Diversified Farming and Food Systems program, will moderate this event.

Save the Date - Environmental Justice Conference

The Center for the Environment is working with several organizations on campus and in conjunction with several other institutions of higher education in Indiana (Notre Dame, IUPUI, IU Bloomington) to organize a free two-day virtual, regional, symposium entitled, “Next Steps – Environment Justice, Climate Change, and Racial Justice,” on March 25-26, 2021. This effort is being led by professor of Anthropology and recent associate director of the Center for the Environment, Laura Zanotti. Zanotti received financial support from Purdue’s Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership as one of five grant recipients for project proposals enabling inclusion at Purdue. More information here.

News

Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education - Special Issue

The latest special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education (JCWRE), Challenges and Opportunities of International University Partnerships to Support Water Management, highlights numerous projects by the Arequipa Nexus Institute's Water Research Team. The projects include examinations of smart irrigation systems, hydrometeorological monitoring infrastructure, remote sensing of human-environmental water resource dynamics, as well as opportunities and effects of international university-led water research partnerships. All featured research involves numerous affiliates of C4E, Nexus, and UNSA.

Deforestation drove massive Amazon rainforest fires of 2019
Purdue Ag Comms | December 2020

In 2019, unprecedented wildfires destroyed thousands of square miles of Amazon rainforest, roughly the size of New Jersey. The loss of biodiversity and invaluable habitats, release of carbon from the fires, and other socioeconomic and environmental consequences have concerned scientists around the world.

Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, often for agricultural purposes, creates conditions that are conducive for fires. Researchers at Purdue University, the University of Lleida and the Forest Sciences Centre of Catalonia in Spain used remote sensing technology to show that 85% of the Amazon rainforest fires of 2019 were in areas that had been deforested just the year before. C4E affiliates Jingjing Liang, Bryan Pijanowski and Mo Zhou co-authored the paper, along with Sergio de Miguel and Adrián Cardil of the University of Lleida. Read more.

Purdue-developed sorghum safer for grazing animals and takes stress off producers
Purdue Agronomy | January 2021

C4E affiliate Mitch Tuinstra, a professor of plant breeding and genetics, has developed a sorghum that contains no dhurrin, a compound that combines with plant enzymes to create hydrogen cyanide, known more commonly in the livestock industry as prussic acid. Without dhurrin, the modified plants do not produce hydrogen cyanide, reducing the risk of cyanide poisoning in grazing animals no matter the weather. Continue reading.

Purdue Professor to receive 2021 Society of Toxicology Education Award
Purdue HHS | January 2021

The Society of Toxicology (SOT) has chosen C4E affiliate Wei Zheng, professor of health sciences in Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences, to receive the 2021 SOT Education Award for his significant contributions to education in toxicology and his training of toxicologists for more than 25 years as a researcher and educator. Zheng will be honored during the Virtual 2021 SOT Annual Meeting and ToxExpo, March 12–26, 2021.

Funding Opportunities

COVID-19 Funding Opportunities – This list is updated frequently.

NSF Center for Advancement and Synthesis of Open Environmental Data and Sciences
NSF seeks to establish a Center fueled by open and freely available biological and other environmental data to catalyze novel scientific questions in environmental biology through the use of data-intensive approaches, team science and research networks, and training in the accession, management, analysis, visualization, and synthesis of large data sets. The Center will provide vision for speeding discovery through the increased use of large, publicly accessible datasets to address biological research questions through collaborations with scientists in other related disciplines. Deadlines: April 1 – LOI; April 29 – Preliminary proposal; September 15 – Full proposal
**Please note: The Center will be organizing a callout/discussion for this opportunity in early February. Please begin considering if you are interested in this program.

NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier: Core Research (FW-HTF)
The overarching vision of this program is to support multi-disciplinary research to sustain economic competitiveness, to promote worker well-being, lifelong and pervasive learning, and quality of life, and to illuminate the emerging social and economic context and drivers of innovations that are shaping the future of jobs and work. Technological innovations should be integrated with advances in behavioral science, computer science, economic science, engineering, learning sciences, research on adult learning and workforce training, and the social sciences. Proposals that address the impact of large-scale disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic on the future of jobs and work are also of interest. Deadline: March 23

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