Editor's Note: The StudGov ticker is a short summary of the weekly StudGov meeting (7 pm Tuesday, 1028 Dana). The meeting is open to the SNRE community, but for those who are unable to attend, these notes provide a brief synopsis of the meeting. Posts will be weekly.
Careers Team: Career Week is well underway and funding is nearly secured.
Still Needed:
Editor's Note: This blog post was written by Jenny Cooper (MS Environment & Natural Resources, Sustainable Systems, 2014). Cooper completed Climate Ride last week, and was invited to share this experience with the SNRE community.
The legacy and future of the field of environmental justice is the focus of a conference organized by the University of Michigan Oct. 4-6 at the Ann Arbor Sheraton Hotel. The event also celebrates the contributions to that field by Bunyan Bryant, who is retiring after a 40-year career as an activist, researcher and mentor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.
Calling all students to the first SNRE town hall of the year! We want your feedback!
Please join us to share your views on the first weeks of the fall semester and to discuss paths forward for our fair institution. StudGov representatives will be in Dana 1040 at 4:30pm on Sept. 19 to facilitate a discussion on any and all matters regarding the SNRE student experience.
Students are strongly encourage to attend. Weather and can-do spirits permitting, we'll likely head to Dominick's following the meeting (~6pm) to kick back and continue the conversation.
At its meeting this month in Honduras, the Council of Ministers of the Central American Commission for Environment and Development (CCAD) named SNRE Professor Ivette Perfecto as a founding member of its new biodiversity science council. The Scientific Council on Biodiversity for the Central American Integration System will ensure the technical quality of work plans of the Regional Institute of Biodiversity, the technical body of the CCAD.
The Center for Geospatial Medicine at the University of Michigan is working to reduce death and disability from Type 2 diabetes under a grant announced today as part the nation's 2010 health care law. The center is part of a multi-state research team examining Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, in at-risk populations in four, underserved counties in North Carolina, Mississippi, and West Virginia. The Center for Geospatial Medicine, which uses systematic, spatially-based methods for analyzing environmental threats to people and communities, is housed within the Children's Environmental Health Initiative at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment.
Four substantial, student-led sustainability projects are gaining momentum on campus, thanks to financial support from the new Planet Blue Student Innovation Fund. Three of the four, focused on reusable takeout food containers, a sustainable food kiosk and a U-M campus farm, were developed by students at SNRE. Announced by President Mary Sue Coleman last fall as part of her larger campus sustainability address, the Planet Blue Student Innovation Fund offers grants of up to $50,000 annually for projects that reduce the university's environmental footprint and/or promote a culture of sustainability on campus.
SNRE Professor Dorceta Taylor has received the HR Johnson Diversity Service Award. Taylor is a professor in the Environmental Justice field of study at SNRE and director of the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, a research and outreach center she founded and which is housed within the school. In 1992, she received a Rockefeller-Ford post-doctoral fellowship at Michigan's Poverty and the Underclass program. She joined SNRE in 1993 and is dually appointed with the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. In 2010, she was honored with the Outstanding Publication Award for Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change by the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.
Minority professionals have historically been underrepresented in major environmental organizations. A long-term study by SNRE Environmental Justice Professor Dorceta Taylor, published this winter in Environmental Practice, parses apart the stereotype that the field has been slow to diversify because minorities are generally disinterested in environmental careers.
Out of 10 Michigan Society Postdoctoral Fellows selected university wide this year, two—Kimberley Kinder and Elizabeth Pringle—are affiliated with the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Each is finishing their first of three years as an assistant professor and using funding from the Fellows program to pursue research projects.
The 112th Congress matches the 111th as including the largest number of Hispanic representatives in U.S. history with 31 members: two in the Senate and 29 in the House. According to recent research published by SNRE doctoral student Kerry Ard and Professor Paul Mohai, this diversification may bode very well for pro-environmental policy-making.
Marie Lynn Miranda began her term as dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment Jan. 1. Dean Miranda has devoted much of her professional career to research directed at improving the health status of disadvantaged populations, particularly children. To inaugurate her tenure, she sent the following email to faculty, students and staff Jan. 1.
Improving health outcomes and quality of life for people living with type 2 diabetes are the goals of a project between a new research center at the University of Michigan and university, health and public officials in North Carolina. The Center for Geospatial Medicine, which recently moved from Duke University to U-M's School of Natural Resources and Environment, is a partner in a $6.2 million grant announced today by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation as part of its national diabetes initiative, Together on Diabetes. The project's other partners are the Duke University Medical Center and the Durham County Health Department. The project will focus on residents of North Carolina's Durham County, home to Duke.
President Mary Sue Coleman higlighted several programs of the School of Natural Resources and Environment in her address yesterday unveiling the progress and new goals behind the university's sustainability initiatives.
A merry-go-round that generates electricity to light a rural African schoolhouse is among the sustainability projects tackled this summer by a team of University of Michigan graduate students working with villagers in Liberia. With colleagues from Clemson University and the University of Liberia, the U-M student group also designed and installed a toilet system that creates biogas to fuel the school's kitchen stove and a solar-powered produce dehydrator that allows the villagers to keep dried mangoes, tomatoes and eggplant for up to a year without refrigeration. "The developing countries are a key to global sustainability," said Jose Alfaro, a doctoral student at the School of Natural Resources and Environment and co-founder of the U-M student group, Sustainability Without Borders.