ReGenerate, a company started by Erb students Paul Davis, Nolan Orfield and Hunt Briggs, along with chemical engineering Ph.D. student Bobby Levine, won $100,000 in the 2011 Rice Business Plan Competition on April 16. ReGenerate designs, markets and leases on-site waste management systems called Compact Organic Waste System (COWS) that reduce the cost and environmental impact of organic waste disposal for food manufacturing, retail, and service operations.
The ongoing spread of non-native mussels in the Great Lakes has caused "massive, ecosystem-wide changes" throughout lakes Michigan and Huron, two of the planet's largest freshwater lakes, according to a new University of Michigan-led study. The blitzkrieg advance of two closely related species of mussels—the zebra and quagga—is stripping the lakes of their life-supporting algae, resulting in a remarkable ecological transformation and threatening the multibillion-dollar U.S. commercial and recreational Great Lakes fisheries.
April 13, 2011
Rosina M. Bierbaum, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, has been named to the National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee to plan the nation's next assessment report.
Rosina M. Bierbaum, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, has been appointed a Fellow at The World Bank under a new global fellowship program designed to bring expertise into the Bank's development work. Dean Bierbaum co-directed The World Bank's 2010 World Development Report, which focused on climate change. In her role as Fellow (an advisory position that is not full-time), she will remain based in Ann Arbor while working with the Bank's climate-change team to develop screening tools for lending operations in low-income countries.
Doctoral student Baruani Mshale received the prestigious International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The fellowship will support his forest-related dissertation work in Tanzania.
SNRE Professor and Associate Dean Arun Agrawal was one of 180 recipients of the 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation supports scholars, artists and scientists selected from 3,000 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Professor Agrawal will use the fellowship support to complete a book called "Poverty and Adaptation."
Biologically diverse streams are better at cleaning up pollutants than less rich waterways, and a University of Michigan ecologist says he has uncovered the long-sought mechanism that explains why this is so. Bradley Cardinale used 150 miniature model streams, which use recirculating water in flumes to mimic the variety of flow conditions found in natural streams. He grew between one and eight species of algae in each of the mini-streams, then measured each algae community's ability to soak up nitrate, a nitrogen compound that is a nutrient pollutant of global concern.
Andy Winkelman, a doctoral student at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, has been named a Presidential Management Fellow finalist. Presidential Management Fellowships (PMFs) are highly competitive two-year post-graduate fellowships with a federal agency. Fellows are selected for their exceptional leadership qualities, and agencies groom them to be future leaders. Fellows have the opportunity to rotate to other agencies, are eligible for accelerated promotion potential, receive 160 hours of formal classroom training (on leadership, management, policy and other topics), and can receive an immediate appointment to a position in the competitive or excepted service.
Sara Hadavi, a Landscape Architecture doctoral student at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and fellow U-M team members won the top $50,000 prize this week for a redevelopment plan for a Seattle neighborhood. More than 153 teams from 60 universities competed in the 2011 Urban Land Institute Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. This year, the competition addressed Seattle's traffic congestion and network of auto-oriented neighborhoods and infrastructure.
When local residents are allowed to make rules about managing nearby forests, the forests are more likely to provide greater economic benefits to households and contain more biodiversity, two University of Michigan researchers and a colleague conclude from an analysis of forest practices in tropical developing countries of East Africa and South Asia. Lauren Persha and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan and Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois used evidence from more than 80 forest sites in six tropical countries to test how local participation affects social and ecological benefits from forests.