Qiong Zhang - US grants

It is accepted that water is at the foundation of our economic, societal, and environmental well-being. It is also well known that nearly every product in global commerce is dependent on water for its production and delivery to the marketplace. The objective of the proposed project is to determine, through integrated physical and economic models and under various scenarios of population growth, climate change, land use, and emissions, the impact of direct and indirect drivers on water quality, quantity, and availability in the Great Lakes region. The project will emphasize quantifying the stocks and flows of fresh water, analyzing the underlying factors affecting water use and allocation decisions, and developing cost frameworks for capturing the value of having a specific amount of water available at a given purity, time, and location. The Great Lakes region is chosen due to its large volume of available freshwater (but low rate of replacement), high economic impact, complex governance issues, increasing competition for on water quantity among water-use sectors (e.g., domestic, industrial, agricultural, recreational, and ecosystems), and existing and future threats water quality deterioration.

This project will result in several advances in the analysis of water management issues, including (1) development of new, physically-based modeling approaches to simulate quantity and quality in the Great Lakes region; (2) creation and testing new, empirical models of the energy embodied in water delivery and treatment for the Great Lakes context; (3) selection of relevant future climate, population, land use, and emissions scenarios to use as input to water quantity and quality predictions and in analyses of uncertainty in those predictions; (4) prescription of data and methods required for economic valuation of water resources in each of the major sectors of water use in the Great Lakes basin; (5) identification of the most significant current and future withdrawals and consumptive uses of water in the basin; (6) collection of data on the prices, benefits, and costs of water consumption in each major water use sector; (7) estimates of opportunity costs to determine where water use minimization and elimination will have the most significant and sustainable benefits; (8) identify policy innovations (e.g. pricing policies to address vulnerabilities in the Great Lakes water system under future scenarios; and (9) identify areas where technological innovations are most needed to protect vulnerabilities in the Great Lakes systems. Results from this project will aim to demonstrate that the proposed frameworks for assessing the value of water as a material can be extended to other regions in the U.S. and the world for informed water use decision-making and policies promoting a sustainable future.

Engineering - Civil (54)

This project is collaboration among California Polytechnic State University, Michigan Technological University, and Yale University. It is working to integrate sustainability into engineering education by creating effective learning materials and teaching strategies that enable engineering faculty to incorporate sustainability approaches into their courses. They are working to test the value of Fink's significant learning taxonomy and the accompanying assessment methodology as they develop their educational design and assessment tools. The key elements of this project include a textbook in environmental engineering, adaptable course modules on sustainability for science and engineering disciplines, engineering courses with team-based, open-ended, inter-university projects, faculty workshops to disseminate these innovative teaching and learning practices, and an assessment study including the development of new assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of these approaches. Although the curriculum is specifically targeted at the civil and environmental engineering community, it can be generalized to other engineering programs. They will be disseminating their material and results by publishing their textbook, by promoting their instructional modules, and by providing several faculty workshops on their material and instructional strategies. In evaluating their project, they are using an assortment of existing and new assessment tools to determine the effect of their new materials and strategies on student learning and retention. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the material, primarily through their textbook and workshops, and the increased awareness of engineering graduates to sustainability issues.

In this International Research Experience for Students (IRES) project supported by the Americas Program of the Office of International Science and Engineering, Dr. James R. Mihelcic of Michigan Technological University will involve an international investigation led by the PI, to be held at a site in La Paz, Bolivia, Coroico, in partnership with Dr. Nathan Reents of ACDI/VOCA Bolivia, a non-profit organization, and Dr. Santiago Morales, of the Bolivian Technological University. The research focuses on sustainable development engineering education. This experience will allow students to engage sustainability and appropriate technology principles in a way that is useful and meaningful, and to collaborate with students and community members in a developing country, fostering values of global community service while forging collaborative relationships of the future.

This project directly benefits society through the project's focus on community needs. The goal of the project is to foster the development of engineering students who value service to local and global communities while creating innovative and appropriate ideas, technologies and services for people in need of safe water, sanitation, air quality and affordable technology.

This Conceptual Development and Planning project integrates sustainability concepts throughout undergraduate computing education. An interdisciplinary team of faculty from engineering, computer science, and cognitive science plans to test, develop, implement, and evaluate an educational model for sustainability integration into the curriculum. The team plans to develop models, projects and courses for beginning and upper level students, including a new course in green computing. The group envisions a focus on the power consumption of large data centers aspects of sustainability. The goal is to prepare students with the computing competencies, multi-disciplinary knowledge, and computational thinking methodologies to create a sustainable future.

The intellectual merit of the project lies in the importance and currency of the topic and clear need for such changes in computing education to prepare the upcoming generation of computing professionals. The cross-disciplinary project team includes researchers with significant expertise in both the computing discipline research that underlies the implementation and in educational innovation. The project has the potential for providing new research models in an emerging field critical for future generations as well as the current one.

The broader impacts of the project lie in the potential to address changing demands on computing professionals and to attract a diverse audience of students. The project has the potential to provide innovative models for transforming computing education that are of value to other colleges and universities across the nation.

This scholarship program provides up to eighteen need-based scholarships to an integrated community of academically talented MS and PhD graduate students who are educated in the economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability, well prepared to transfer research techniques and knowledge from their different graduate perspectives.

Engaging women and underrepresented groups in engineering builds additional capacity in these fields that are critical to advancing sustainability goals. The project explicitly provides scholarships to recruit, educate, and retain students into STEM fields (including underrepresented groups). It will facilitate knowledge sharing among MS and PhD graduate students and their faculty advisors. This project focuses student and faculty educational efforts on some of the most pressing challenges facing our global society, and catalyzes the development of the next generation of engineers with global awareness and the skills necessary to lead true change by engineering for a better future.

This project is providing need-based scholarships over four years to 18 graduate students (5-10 MS students and 4-8 PhD students) in the Civil and Environmental Engineering programs at the University of South Florida. The project is designed around the theme of sustainable water and transportation infrastructure. The project team includes teaching faculty members, each of whom has an active research program. A full-circle mentoring plan is being implemented between faculty and doctoral students, as well as between PhD students and MS students. Efforts are being made to recruit and retain a diverse cohort of graduate students (with and without first degrees in engineering) into advanced engineering programs and to prepare students to be globally competitive by promoting knowledge transfer between students and faculty that have different global perspectives while integrating the most appropriate knowledge, methodologies, techniques, and practices from both the developed and developing worlds.

1511439
Ergas

Management of the nitrogen cycle was identified by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) as one of the grand challenges of the 21st century. High ammonia strength wastewaters, such as anaerobic digestion effluents, are difficult and costly to treat in conventional biological nitrogen removal systems due to their toxicity and high oxygen requirements. The PIs overall goal is to investigate nitrogen metabolism in algal-bacterial shortcut nitrogen removal and identify the optimum conditions needed to sustain this novel process. The proposed research is significant because it has the potential to reduce the costs, energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions associated with nitrogen removal from wastewaters. The guiding hypothesis is that the close association of algae and bacteria and light/dark cycles results in conditions within biological particles that favor shortcut nitrogen removal.

Through interdisciplinary and international collaboration, the PIs propose to: 1) investigate the effects of varying operating conditions and substrates on system kinetics and performance, 2) investigate the microbial consortium, which includes algae, ammonia oxidizing bacteria, nitrite oxidizing bacteria, and denitrifying bacteria using molecular tools, 3) optimize the system design through coupled process-optimization modeling, and, 4) develop global competency in US students though an international collaboration. The interrelationships between nitrogen loading, light penetration and oxygen production will be studied using bench-scale SBPRs operated at varying illumination, temperature and loading rates. The presence and activities of algae nitrogen metabolizing microorganisms will be tracked via measurements of key chemical constituents and by using molecular biological tools to target functional genes encoding steps in the N cycle relevant to nitrification/ denitrification. Additional experiments will investigate the use of volatile fatty acids harvested from livestock waste fermentation as an electron donor for denitrification and coupling of partial algal-bacterial ammonia oxidation with anammox technology to improve system economics. A framework that couples an algal-bacterial shortcut nitrogen process models and an optimization models will be used to minimize system footprint with target total nitrogen removal as a constraint. The optimization model will allow the PIs to find the optimal operating conditions to minimize reactor footprint for different geographic regions. The PIs have assembled a team of researchers in the US and Netherlands with expertise in biological nitrogen removal and algae production, autotrophic bacterial physiology, and wastewater process and optimization modeling. Graduate and undergraduate students, secondary science teachers and HS students will receive training in interdisciplinary, globalized science and engineering research in developed and developing world contexts. We will build on student exchanges between University of South Florida and UNESCO-IHE in Delft, the Netherlands and University of South Florida's Peace Corps Masters International Program to gain additional resources (students, facilities, and research expertise), build developing world sustainable water treatment capacity and continue co-development of the shortcut algal-bacterial nitrogen removal process.

1454559 (Zhang). Increasing water demand, accompanied by water scarcity and the likely impact of climate change on water supplies, has created complex challenges for sustainable water management, demonstrating the need for integrated wastewater management that promotes and facilitates resource recovery. This research aims to determine the optimal sustainable configurations for integrated wastewater management under a given context through an innovative decision framework that integrates multi-discipline methods and tools and context-based learning. The objectives of this research are to (1) innovate a decision framework, WasteWATER, that integrates methods and tools from multiple disciplines including reverse logistics, life cycle analysis, and economic valuation; (2) examine the impact of demographics, geography, climate, and urban form on the optimal degree of decentralization; and (3) create context-based learning to train future practitioners.

The WasteWATER framework considers wastewater systems as a reverse supply network in which nodes are treatment facilities, pumping stations, and pipe junctions and links are pipelines. The framework uses compact model formulation through unique process and distribution pipeline mode representation. Triple bottom line sustainability indicators (specific net present value, carbon footprint, eutrophication, and social value of recovered resources) are formulated in the objective function to optimize the trade-off and identify the most sustainable configuration of integrated wastewater systems. Placement-based and hypothetical scenarios will be generated and simulated to identify the factors impacting the optimal degree of decentralization. The Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) approach will be used to develop a web application of the WasteWATER framework and redesign two existing engineering courses using microblogging and utility partnerships as a stakeholder communication platform. The CDIO learning outcomes will be evaluated using several assessment methods.

Past research has identified that a primary challenge for integrated wastewater management is the lack of a planning and design methodology to evaluate and identify the most sustainable solution under a given context. This project addresses this critical challenge and will advance knowledge in (1) quantifying the sustainability of integrated wastewater systems driven by resource recovery; (2) understanding factors that impact the degree of decentralization; and (3) effectiveness of context-based learning environment for students' proficiency in disciplinary knowledge, interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills. The project also will develop a new framework through the perspective of reverse logistics, a web tool, and a microblogging communication platform for stakeholder participation. Realization of integrated wastewater management will provide societal benefits that enhance community well-being in terms of reliable water supply, resource conservation, environmental restoration, and regional and local economic development. The project will leverage support from the Alfred P. Sloan Minority Ph.D. program to recruit and support under-represented minority graduate students. The research and education activities will be woven together to provide a context-based learning environment to train postdoc, graduate and undergraduate students. Stakeholder participation and wide dissemination of research and education findings and products will be achieved through microblogging, a web tool, and utility partnerships.

The reliable functioning of infrastructures is critical to national security and fundamental to social, economic, and environmental well-being. This CRISP project will advance our understanding of the effects of different types of interdependencies on the resiliency of critical infrastructures (CIs), targeting water, transportation and cyber infrastructures. Instead of focusing on different infrastructures, this project focuses on different interdependencies including physical-based (primarily co-location), virtual-based (primarily information), and socioeconomic-based (primarily resource management). The project will enhance the resiliency of interdependent critical infrastructures and transform infrastructure management by the integrative decision framework developed for the evaluation of design, operational and organizational strategies. The integrated research and education provides a fun self-learning environment and wide dissemination of project findings and products through the interactive website hosting the competition-based learning game.

The objectives of this project are to: 1) develop and validate models considering physical-based and virtual-based interdependencies and examine the infrastructure resiliency associated with design strategies; 2) develop an integrated mathematical model considering socioeconomic-based interdependencies and examine the infrastructure operational strategies; 3) understand influential factors and organizational strategies in managing critical infrastructures; 4) develop a multi-method adaptive simulator for high-level stakeholders to identify/quantify the failure impacts and potential strategies for addressing failures; and 5) develop a Resilient Infrastructures Learning Game (RILG) for public participation and dissemination to build awareness, knowledge, and capacity for recognizing interdependencies among critical infrastructures. The projected framework uses a hybrid system dynamics and agent-based modeling approach to integrate outcomes from different methods including: multi-layer network modeling (focus: design aspects of CIs); infrastructure prognostic and health management taking into account the physical, virtual, and socioeconomic-based interdependencies among infrastructures and considering both continuous degradation of performance measures and the discrete occurrence of critical events (focus: operational aspects of CIs); and consensus analysis and Monte Carlo simulation of decision making outcomes (focus: organizational aspects of CIs). The alternative infrastructure design, operational and organizational strategies will draw from the models and organizational resiliency studies using surveys and interviews. A simulation game platform will be developed to allow different teams of students and practitioners to evaluate their developed strategies by weighing associated transaction costs.

With 40% of the world's population residing within 100 kilometers of a coast, these environments are critical to local and global economies. In China, the world's largest exporter, more than half of the country's population lives along its industrialized coastlines. Population densities in the United States are highest in coastal counties, representing 39% of the U.S. population. In such densely populated areas, human activity related to the generation and use of food, energy and water has been linked to impacts such as nitrogen pollution that degrades the quality of coastal waters. This degradation affects reef ecosystems, fisheries, and people's economic livelihoods and health. Replenishment requires innovative systems thinking and better consideration of the way food, energy, and water systems are integrated in terrestrial and coastal environments. Systems thinking considers the whole system including engineered infrastructure, the environment, and sociocultural aspects, rather than an assembly of isolated parts. Integrating sociocultural dynamics and meaningful engagement of community stakeholders is fundamental to this approach. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of South Florida (USF) and the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) will develop a community-engaged training and research program in systems thinking. Graduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students will design innovative, holistic solutions (e.g., technological, organizational) to better manage complex and interconnected food, energy, and water systems in coastal locations. The project will train 109 graduate students, including 23 funded PhD-level trainees from engineering and applied anthropology at USF and 6 MS-level trainees from marine and environmental sciences from the Historically Black University partner, UVI in four locations: Tampa, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Barbados and Belize. This award will prepare students to create innovative systems to address complex problems and will serve as a model for training a STEM-focused workforce.

The research supporting this training program focuses on the leverage points (technological, policy, and organizational) in designing food-energy-water systems in a specific geographic context to improve the sustainability of the overall system across different scales. This NRT will advance graduate training through: 1) a transformative research training framework guiding students to conceptualize the interactions between food-energy-water systems and define their research questions from a systems perspective; 2) a context based interdisciplinary training approach including newly developed co-taught courses, multi-discipline field-based training and research experiences that take place in the U.S. and internationally, and strong partnerships with local practitioners and community-grounded organizations; and 3) learning outcomes of our program in terms of interdisciplinary, 21st century, and local and global competency skills of graduate students and impactful research in the management of resources for food, energy, and water security.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The Traineeship Track is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas, through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.

This project is co-funded by the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program. The LSAMP program supports comprehensive, evidence-based, and sustained approaches to broadening participation of students from racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in STEM.

Marginalized communities in the US (e.g., majority black and Hispanic urban-outskirt (peri-urban) communities and smaller rural municipalities with low levels of economic and technical resources) are less likely to have access to critical environmental health infrastructure, such as centralized drinking water or sewer lines. They also rely more on small and onsite systems and have less access to technological advances. Multiple studies show that current onsite systems pose higher health risks than regulated community water and sewer services. Marginalized communities also bear the brunt of ecological habitat shifts and natural disasters and lack financial and local resources to embrace and adapt technological innovations. By focusing on marginalized communities, the Convergent Engineering Research Center for Sanitation and Water Infrastructure of the Future for Marginalized Communities (SWIFt-MC) will unlock innovations that can serve the >60 million US citizens that rely on decentralized onsite sanitation, the 8% of the US population served by small drinking water systems and private wells, and the billions of people in emerging markets without access to acceptable water and sanitation.

The proposed Engineering Research Center (ERC) SWlFt-MC will embrace a convergent research approach that will lead to: 1) novel and improved context-adapted technologies for small and on-site water and wastewater/sanitation systems, 2) new sensors and techniques for quantifying chemical and microbial contaminants, 3) new systems- based models and frameworks that deepen our understanding of exposures, and 4) new solutions and interventions that incorporate social, economic, and behavioral factors. SWIFt-MC will lead to research and education that is transformative through advancing fundamental understanding of basic sciences, environmental sciences, and public health sciences to develop and test public health infrastructure technologies and solutions for marginalized communities. This understanding will cut across and push the boundaries of physical, chemical, biological, social, and computational sciences in the area water and sanitation. SWIFt-MC will also catalyze the re-thinking of engineering education. By defining the beneficiaries of engineering advances, SWIFt-MC will empower underrepresented K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students to address problems affecting the disadvantaged, and emphasize community engagement and systems- and long-term thinking. SWIFt-MC will lead to research, education, and outreach that is translational, as the findings will impact practices and solutions that will be tested and evaluated in several marginalized communities in the US and around the world. SWIFt-MC?s vision is to change the current public health infrastructure within the next ten years, advancing small and on-site systems from the 1970s to 21st century technology. This planning grant will convene the necessary stakeholders and thought-leaders around this collective vision through face-to-face discussions and workshops that feature Systematic Inventive Thinking (e.g., TRIZ) and the science of team science.

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.