2006 — 2010 |
Wentz, Elizabeth Razdan, Anshuman Wonka, Peter |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Sei(Geo): Visual Geo-Analystics @ Arizona State University
Many visualizations of the output of computer simulations use geometry relationships. These are currently created manually using 3D modeling software or by direct programming. This project uses new methods to model a visualization and specify how large sets of objects can be aggregated when the scale of the visualization changes. This will also allow for real-time visualization of urban simulations on PCs and large immersive virtual reality installation. As world populations and urbanization grow explosively, urban planning has become increasingly important: in Phoenix, the average low temperature in the summer has increased by almost 14 degrees due to the urban development and resulting urban heat island; long and slow freeway commutes in cities like Los Angeles or traffic gridlock in Delhi or Mexico City are examples of the urgency and necessity of urban planning. Large urban areas need sustainable planning to ensure the availability of sufficient resources for future years. Smaller cities growing into large urban areas need effective planning to become habitable and provide reasonable quality of life. This project develops modeling and visualization tools that will contribute to planning a better future for urban environments and make our cities more livable. The team addresses two major problems: developing a systematic effort to develop methodologies to specify a visualization of simulation data of geometric and semantic urban data and developing algorithms to compute visual representations for multiple scales based on ideas from cartographic simplification. In addition to training of students, the work will be the basis of both graduate and undergraduate course being developed.
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0.915 |
2010 — 2012 |
Wentz, Elizabeth Myint, Soe Win (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
International Workshop On Geospatial Solutions to Analyze Rapid Urbanization @ Arizona State University
Worldwide demographic changes have resulted in shifts from predominantly rural lifestyles to ones with a much stronger emphasis on urban living. With more than 400 cities with populations exceeding 1 million persons, urban areas represent one of the most significant alterations that humankind has made to the surface of the earth. Professor Elizabeth Wentz in the Department of Geography at Arizona State University will host a workshop that explores the use of remotely sensed data and technologies to better understand the drivers and consequences of rapid urbanization on the biophysical and social environment. Urban remote sensing has proven to be a useful tool for cross-scale urban planning and urban ecological research. Using remote sensing to document and analyze rapid urbanization can facilitate planning and new policies to better protect the natural environment, human life, and built structures. Urban remote sensing can be applied to create practical models and products for tracking farmland conversion, land use and land cover changes (LULC), floodplain analysis, urban heat island modeling, and vegetation monitoring - from crop types to urban green spaces or forest ecological changes, for example. LULC classifications can be incorporated into local and regional ecosystem models to assess the effects of urban change on carbon cycling and source/sink relationships.
The present project aims to better understand the social and physical dynamics of cities worldwide including the political, social, economic, and physical elements. To initiate a research plan to meet this challenge, the project will involve bringing together a team of scholars and practitioners worldwide to build a suite of data and analytical tools to characterize the range of dimensions of global cities. The present project funds 18 participants, including senior scholars, PhD students, and city practitioners to participate in a 3-day workshop in Arizona. The workshop is organized around six themes -- Theme 1: track urban area growth and change: speed, density, direction, structures, impervious surfaces, land consumed; Theme 2: assess the spatial arrangement of green/open space within cities and at the periphery: amount, distribution, connectivity; Theme 3: monitor changes to peri-urban regions: farmland conversions, wetland infringement, biodiversity threats; Theme 4: track land-cover and land-use changes that influence urban climatology and atmospheric deposition: impervious surfaces, vegetation cover, dust; Theme 5: monitor urban growth as it intersects with areas of potential environmental hazards: earthquake, subsidence, mudslides, floods, tsunami;Theme 6: map environmental parameters (microclimate, heat island, access to open space, percent of impervious surface, percent of green space), assess the geographic differences within the region, and identify correlations with social, economic, and ethnic divisions.
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0.915 |
2016 — 2019 |
Gober, Patricia (co-PI) [⬀] Semken, Steven [⬀] Wentz, Elizabeth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Gp-Impact: Collaborative Workforce Training in Geoscience and Social Science For Natural-Hazards Preparedness and Mitigation (Hazpm) @ Arizona State University
Part 1: Nontechnical Description of the Project
Natural hazards exist in all parts of Earth, and pose risks to humanity, human institutions, and infrastructure. These risks are rendered even more extreme, more complex, and more difficult to manage by global climate change. Effective preparation for and mitigation of natural hazards is not simply a problem for natural scientists and engineers, but also for social sciences, since hazards originate and occur in the interfaces between natural systems and societies. Research has demonstrated that better-educated societies with better-educated decision-makers are best equipped to prepare for, mitigate, and recover from natural disasters. While hazards-related public and professional education are common missions for many universities and colleges, the HazPM project will improve on this model by drawing on expertise from both the social and the natural sciences of hazards to design and implement an undergraduate workforce-training program that integrates both realms from start to finish. Our design plan is fully supported by current research and will result in an innovative, fully accessible, and rigorously tested undergraduate curriculum that will be implemented regionally and disseminated nationally. Through parallel collaboration with faculty at regional two-year colleges that serve major populations of Native American and Hispanic/Chicano/Latino students, the HazPM project team will also increase access and professional opportunities in the sciences for underrepresented minority students.
Part 2: Technical Description
The overall goal of the HazPM project is to better prepare undergraduate students in geoscience and many other relevant fields, such as engineering, planning, management, pre-law, and sustainability, for careers or post-graduate studies related to natural-hazards preparedness and mitigation. Drawing on a research-based design plan that integrates natural and social sciences and employs a nimble partnership of expert professionals and educators from industry, government agencies, and academia, we will develop and bring to fruition an innovative, sustainable, and readily transferable workforce-training program that will be implemented locally and disseminated nationally and globally to enable wider adoption. The primary deliverable will be an innovative, online-native, fully accessible, rigorously assessed, modular curriculum for an undergraduate certificate program. Collaboration with agency and industry professionals will ensure program validity and relevance to career opportunities. HazPM will also increase access and professional opportunities for underrepresented students (including Native American and Hispanic/Chicano/Latino students in the U. S. Southwest) by means of pedagogy that addresses the impacts of socioeconomic inequality on vulnerability to hazards in underserved communities; direct partnership with regional two-year colleges that serve significant numbers of underrepresented students; and collaboration with minority professional STEM organizations (e.g., SACNAS, AISES, NABG) in dissemination of products.
Drawing on the diverse collective expertise of the principal investigators and collaborators, the HazPM project will integrate geoscientific principles and current geospatial, remote sensing, and monitoring technologies with social science principles and practices to inculcate a far broader understanding of the human, scientific, and engineering dimensions of hazards in students. Full collaborative participation of agency and industry experts in curriculum planning, development, and evaluation will ensure the validity of the program. Formative and summative assessment will maintain academic rigor. Partnering with regional community colleges will allow for the recruitment of a diverse cadre of students who reflect the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of the Southwest, and who will apply their expertise where it is most needed, especially in underserved areas. Students will be able to enter the program at these partner institutions and transfer to ASU to complete their studies. Impacts of the program on diverse students will be tracked and measured by means of institutional demographic data. The undergraduate certificate program will be fully available and accessible online, and formalized in the academic programs at ASU and collaborating community colleges to ensure its sustainability. All HazPM curriculum resources and research findings will be broadly disseminated among the academic and professional communities by means of conference presentations, refereed publications in journals of education research and teaching practice, and web hosting with links to community digital libraries such as SERC, DLESE, and UCGIS. Adoption and implementation of the program resources by other institutions will be encouraged.
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0.915 |
2018 — 2023 |
Camacho, Erika Dai, Lenore (co-PI) [⬀] Wentz, Elizabeth Regier, Philip Gaughan, Monica |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Asu Advance Institutional Transformation @ Arizona State University
The ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in areas such as policy, practice, culture, and organizational climate. The ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (ADVANCE-IT) track supports the development of innovative organizational change strategies within an institution of higher education to enhance gender equity in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) academic workforce.
The Arizona State University (ASU) ADVANCE-IT project will build on its successful transition to an interdisciplinary institutional structure and extend their operating theory of public values-based institutional design thinking to issues of equity for STEM faculty. Public values-based institutional design employs design thinking at all levels of the institution to enact policies and practices that forward goals in the public interest. The project will focus on improving outcomes for mid-to-late career STEM faculty at ASU through three initiatives to: 1) ensure that procedures on recruiting, promotion, evaluation, and retention explicitly address how to improve equity and diversity in an interdisciplinary structure; 2) provide appropriate and accessible professional development and mentoring opportunities; and 3) design, implement, and evaluate digital administrative systems to monitor equity-related processes, and empower administrators to intervene to ensure equitable opportunities and outcomes. This work is important since challenges in science and engineering require new approaches and it will be important to ensure all faculty - both traditionally disciplinary as well as those who operate as interdisciplinary scholars - can be successful and are not disadvantaged as STEM research moves toward more interdisciplinary structures.
ASU ADVANCE takes a life course approach to support professors from the beginning of the career, into the middle, and through senior and leadership positions. The social science research component of the project will use a mixed-methods approach to investigate how intersectionality and an interdisciplinary institutional structure play out across the academic life course. ASU is a strategic research site uniquely well-suited to study how disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship may change over the academic life course. ASU ADVANCE will enable the analysis of how known bases of difference in the academic life course - gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, foreign-born status, disability, rank, and discipline - interact with the interdisciplinary context to create opportunities and barriers to academic career advancement.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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0.915 |
2022 — 2027 |
Wentz, Elizabeth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Graduate Research Fellowship Program (Grfp) @ Arizona State University
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is a highly competitive, federal fellowship program. GRFP helps ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and in STEM education. The GRFP provides three years of financial support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements in STEM and STEM education. This award supports the NSF Graduate Fellows pursuing graduate education at this GRFP institution.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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0.915 |