Environmental Science and Design Research Initiative
Congratulations to Raissa Mendonca-PhD student in the lab of David Costello. One of our Biological Sciences graduate students (Raissa Mendonca ) has been selected for the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Chris Lee Award: https://www.setac.org/page/SETACAwardSICA. They only give one of these out a year to an outstanding...
The Environmental Science and Design Research Initiative (ESDRI) was excited to be able to offer competitively awarded seed grant funding to research teams in Spring semester 2018. ESDRI was established in 2017 to support faculty efforts to achieve continued scholarly success in areas of research concerning both natural and built systems. The...
The greenhouse effect is one of the most widely known causes of global climate change. It is currently caused by an excess of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere due to burning of fossil fuels. Some natural processes can help slow climate change by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. For example, plants filter CO2 out of air and transfer carbon...
Two days and 50 miles. That is how long it will take kayakers to paddle the Cuyahoga River from Kent State University to Kent State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative for the 5th annual Crooked River Commute. The event is intended to promote the river as a shared asset for education, recreation, and sustainability. ...
For anyone who has traveled to Kent State over the summer, the Summit Street construction project has been quite an inconvenience for drivers. For Lauren Kinsman-Costello, though, it’s an opportunity to make the campus more ecologically friendly and establish trends in biology, chemistry, geology and ecology. The assistant professor of...
Biologists and Architects Innovate Vegetated Rooftops to Link Cities With Natural Systems What some call a sustainable answer to urban flaws, Anna Droz calls research. As a biological sciences doctoral student in Kent State University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Droz’s curiosity has developed into a passion, maybe even an obsession, to...
Like a financial analyst who pores over numbers to predict the next big trend, Joseph Ortiz, Professor of Geology at Kent State University, is an expert at crunching earth data. An oceanographer, Ortiz’s most recent efforts are focused on the harmful algae blooms that plague Lake Erie and pose a threat to the safety of lake-front communities and...
Arctic permafrost typically functions as a vast freezer that preserves decaying plant matter for thousands of years, but rapidly warming climate is thawing permafrost and accelerating decomposition. Increased plant growth is needed to capture carbon that is released from decomposing organic matter, but plant growth depends on whether plants can...
Innovative Solutions to Treat Dredged Material From Lake Erie Open water placement of dredged material in Lake Erie will be banned in the State of Ohio after July 1, 2020. However, eight federal navigation harbors built along Ohio’s Lake Erie coast still need to remove more than 1.5 million cubic yards of sediment. What to do with this large...
The toxic algae bloom crisis in Toledo in 2014 put the issue of water treatment front and center, and problems like those in Flint, Michigan, and Sebring, Ohio have only added more weight to the discussion. Xiaozhen Mou, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, is working with colleagues at the University of Toledo to help cities keep...