Eleven more faculty at the School of Natural Resources and Environment have become part of winning MCubed projects funding by the university under a new interdisciplinary program.

The 11 faculty recognized in the second round join six recognized in the first, which were announced in November. The faculty in the newest round are Dan Brown, Allen Burton, Bilal Butt, Ray De Young, Johannes Foufopoulos, Rebecca Hardin, Ines Ibanez, Greg Keoleian, Bobbi Low, Ivette Perfecto and Tom Princen.

They join six SNRE faculty from the first phase: Brad Cardinale, MaryCarol Hunter, Shelie Miller, Paul Mohai, Joan Nassauer and Josh Newell.

MCubed is a two-year seed-funding program designed to empower interdisciplinary teams of University of Michigan faculty to pursue new initiatives with major societal impact. The program minimizes the time between idea conception and successful research results by providing immediate startup funds for novel, high-risk and transformative research projects.

The funds are intended to generate data for groundbreaking, high-impact publications or preliminary results for new, innovative research proposals. The program also includes high-visibility, campus-wide research symposia to showcase the resulting groundbreaking research.

MCubed characteristics are:

• Multidisciplinary – Taking advantage of UM’s excellence across breadth.
• Collaborative – Three researchers from at least two different units.
• Unreviewed – No formal review; peers approve by agreeing to “cube.”
• Bold – Drives risk-taking in innovative and interdisciplinary research.
• Exciting – High-profile, campus-wide symposia to present results.
• Distributed – Funding from PIs, units, Provost, and Rackham.

Here are the 11 projects funded in the second round that included SNRE faculty as at least one of the three faculty members:

Project title: “Environments and Activity: GPS-Based Collection of Real-Time Perception and Behavioral Data to Support Modeling”
Faculty: Professor Dan Brown:
Description: Obesity levels have increased dramatically over the past three decades.= The increased prevalence of obesity is likely due in part to changes in the built environment, which have contributed to inadequate physical activity levels and poor diet. This study aims to examine the role of the built and social environment on physical activity behavior using novel data and methodology. In particular, this study will refine and test methodology to capture survey data on mobile phones where surveys are triggered based on a sensor (e.g., GPS, accelerometer data). Surveys will be automatically triggered under two conditions 1) when a respondent enters an area of interest, such as a park and 2) when the participant changes locations (data akin to a travel diary). The surveys will be designed to provide data that will be useful for agent-based models of walking behavior in both children and adults.

Project title: “Unintended Consequences of Technology in Development: A Cross-Sectional Analysis”
Faculty: Assistant Professor Bilal Butt
Description: The use of technological innovations in development and governance projects is often assumed to be both positive and uniform in its efficacy across disparate social groups, environments, and its relationship with the state. However, there are growing understandings about the ways in which these technologies have differential effects on people and their livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries. Few studies have tackled how these technologies often lead to unintended consequences. Using case studies from Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Kenya, this project will investigate three questions” (1) How prevalent is the use of technology in rural and urban livelihood strategies among the poor in low- and middle-income countries?  (2) What are political, economic and social contexts associate with the use of these technologies in these livelihood strategies? (3) In what ways, and under which contexts, do the use of technologies reinforce, erode or maintain pre-existing social relations of production and exchange?

Project title: “Digital Humanities Approaches to Popular Periodicals: Quantifying Reading Trends with Time Series Analysis”
Faculty: Assistant Professor Ines Ibanez
Description: This project uses distant reading and digital humanities techniques to study mainstream German periodicals between 1850 and 1918. Cheaper and more widely read than books, these periodicals shaped the thinking of broad segments of the population just when Germany was developing into one of the leading nations in Europe. Yet because of the tens of thousands of pages in just one periodical run, scholars today cannot possibly close read in the holistic fashion necessary to understand how people read the periodicals in the nineteenth century. The computer-based techniques to be employed range from the generation of index databases and the digitization of texts to programming, statistical analysis, and dynamic visualization of the data.

Project title: “Learning how to make liquid fuels from algae oil under water”
Faculty: Professor Greg Keoleian
Description: This project aims to develop a better understanding of the chemistry of hydrothermal catalytic deoxygenation of fatty acids over early transition metal carbide based catalysts. The research objectives are to synthesize and characterize several different catalysts, test their activity for several different fatty acids, and then determine the reaction products, pathways, and kinetics for deoxygenation over the most promising catalysts. We also desire to determine the life-cycle environmental impacts of this potential process technology.  The sustainability assessment will evaluate feedstock sources and resource constraints for alternative production pathways.  The research will add significantly to our knowledge regarding hydrothermal heterogeneous catalysis, a field becoming increasingly important with increased attention on biofuels and green chemistry/engineering. It could also lead to new approaches for converting plant oils to fungible, renewable liquid transportation fuels.

Project title: “Tracking water and biodiversity resources in the Great Lakes”<
Faculty: Professor Allen Burton
Description: This project seeks to understand impacts of climate change, invasive species and toxicants on key water and biodiversity resources in the Great Lakes, which hold approximately 20% of the world’s surface fresh water and support diverse biological communities of ecological and evolutionary significance.  We will investigate how changing environmental factors influence microbial mats in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a local extreme environment that is a reservoir of globally unique biodiversity and a representative of ancient ecosystems.  Second, we will investigate the impacts from metals and synthetic organic chemicals in sediments, along gradients of environmental conditions and human impact.  Research aimed at understanding the sources, transformations, and bioavailability of toxicants in sediments will inform diverse scientific topics such as how they impact the biodiversity of the unique microbial mats and other aquatic communities, and how the toxicants and affected communities interact with other stressors (e.g., climate and invasives).

Project title: “Complex Systems Approaches to Comparing and Contrasting Life Histories of Rhesuses and Humans”

Faculty: Professor Bobbi Low
Description: In order to understand diversity within primate species and commonalities across species, we will construct and analyze models of the life histories of rhesus monkeys and humans, both using classical life history techniques (Leslie matrices, life history tables) and more recent complex systems techniques (networks, dynamical systems, agent-based models). These models will explore causes and effects of varying parental, nepotistic, and social scenarios and different environments, backgrounds, and social structures. We will parameterize our models with data from rhesus monkeys (Steve Suomi’s NIH-sponsored Virginia facility) and humans (Bobbi Low’s life history work). As outcomes, we plan to understand better determinants of diverse behaviors within species and commonalities across species, the effects of various model structures on disease transmission, stress, success in tasks, and changes in social structures. In a sense, the monkey models will act like toy models for understanding human life histories.

Project: “Urban Gardens: constrained auto-generation of spatial pattern and consequences for ecosystem services”
Faculty: Professor Ivette Perfecto
Description: Urban gardens represent a vibrant and growing element of the global food system, throughout the world.  While they take a variety of specific forms, they generally are small-scale, organic and frequently coordinated by some form of community organization. Despite the fact that there is little coordinated effort to plan these gardens at a macro level, it is evident that they do not occur at random in most urban landscapes, but rather seem to form loose clusters.  It is reasonable to expect that secondary consequences will emerge from this spatial pattern. In this proposal we aim to (1) determine the underlying ecological/sociological/economic dynamics that generate spatial patterns of urban farms in general, (2) examine the ecological dynamics that determine the dynamics of pest species in the gardens, and (3) examine the consequences of this pattern and these dynamics for ecosystem function, specifically with respect to autonomous biological control function.

Project: “Urgent transitions: Responding to emerging biophysical limits”
Faculty: Associate Professors Ray De Young and Tom Princen
Description: A growing consensus posits biophysical limits to perpetual growth. Emergent circumstances have energy supplies beginning a long descent, food security once again a major challenge, and defensive expenditures rising to address problems caused by past resource consumption. Consequences include changes at the psychological, community and national level, with simultaneous changes in institutions, infrastructure and security. One plausible response includes increased focus on place-based social interactions, decentralized settlements, personal proficiency and community self-reliance. Even less dramatic responses involve urgent transitions. Furthermore, no single response will work everywhere, forever, or for all people. Thus, while many social experiments already exist, many more are needed. While we must respond to emerging biophysical limits, the details of our response are not clear. This research explores transitions and related processes that need to occur. It is future oriented, grounded in both biophysical trends and human capabilities, and pays special attention to local sources and impacts.

Project: “Effects of land management on interspecies transmission dynamics in rural Kenya”

Faculty: Associate Professor Johannes Foufopoulos and Associate Professor Rebecca Hardin
Description: This project aims to understand the impact of rapid social and ecological change on disease ecology in Africa’s drylands. In Laikipia County, Kenya, wide-ranging wildlife move freely among private commercial and pastoral community-owned management systems, providing a unique human-livestock-wildlife interaction. Change forces include social and environmental factors. Our pilot studies have revealed Q-fever in various species of Laikipia’s livestock, a disease transmitted by animals to humans. This research examines the effects of land and animal management on the transmission of Q-fever in Laikipia among wild and domesticated animals, human residents and visitors. While this project has benefited from internal pilot funding we are in the process of applying for external funds. This cube will benefit from a combination of social science, animal ecology and public health. We seek a post doc to help bridge fields and move the research forward through the development of interdisciplinary frameworks and methodologies.