tony | Page 3 | Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation

iSEE Seed-Funds Two New Projects

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) is providing seed funding for two new research projects at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will use automation to enhance waste sorting for campus recycling efforts and reduce manual labor costs in small urban farming operations.

Both projects are funded through iSEE’s 2023 Campus as a Living Laboratory (CALL) program, which supports research teams that tackle interdisciplinary sustainability issues on campus or in neighboring communities. They focus on leveraging campus infrastructure and enhancing researchers’ capacity to address critical knowledge gaps and ultimately secure major federal, foundation, or private funding.

“U of I researchers are applying the latest advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to overcome environmental challenges confronting our communities and the world at large,” said Jeremy Guest, iSEE Associate Director for Research. “Through these grants, our engineers, scientists, and university staff will tackle the pervasive problem of municipal waste and help make sustainable farming more accessible to all, using our own facilities as a model.”

The U.S. EPA estimates that half of municipal solid waste ends up in landfills, contributing to significant methane emissions that harm our climate, and the problem is growing with the spread of urbanization. New refined resource recovery methods are needed to expand recycling and meet the demands of global recycling firms for higher-quality material. Robotic systems with mechanical arms and machine learning can sort waste more efficiently, reducing processing time and turning waste into treasure.

A new project led by Nishant Garg, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will use advances in computer vision to more efficiently classify the more than 5,000 tons of waste generated on campus each year, which is now sorted by hand for recycling. Using cameras installed at the Waste Transfer Station, a machine-learning model will classify waste on a conveyer belt into six categories: paper, plastic, food, metal, glass, and yard waste. It will feed that data into a live dashboard, to motivate the campus community to follow best practices for waste disposal and recycling and to help meet zero-waste goals in the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP).

Another new project addresses the manual labor costs associated with high tunnels — curved metal structures covered with greenhouse plastic that are ideal for growing plants on small urban farms. Cost-effective and adaptable, these high tunnels can extend the growing season, protect against severe weather, increase crop yields, and improve the quality of fruits, vegetables, and cut flower. But they are labor-intensive, requiring an extra layer of management to ensure quality crops.

The Robot Integrated High Tunnels (RobInHighTs) project will use AI-powered robotics to automate operations for high tunnels at the Sustainable Student Farm – leading to improved crop yields, reduced manual labor costs, and higher profits. Led by Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the team will also evaluate the profitability of RobInHighTs and identify barriers to their use by urban and minority farmers. RobInHighTs can ultimately help transition amateur urban gardeners and growers into profitable long-term farmers, enabling efficient and fresh local food production and opening up new income streams for small and underserved communities.

Seed-funded teams are expected to work with iSEE to submit proposals for external funding of at least $1M.

“We are excited to work with these teams to help grow these projects into full-fledged interdisciplinary research programs,” Guest said.

— News release by Julie Wurth, iSEE Communications Specialist

iSEE Seeking Proposals for Research on Next-Gen, Low-Carbon Transportation

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) is announcing a call for concept notes to catalyze research on sustainable transportation modes in the Midwest, thanks to a $1 million gift from the 2019 settlement of a consumer class-action lawsuit. iSEE funds will be used to launch a Research Initiative awarded $300,000 for a three-year period to develop an interdisciplinary research program with faculty from across campus that will improve their potential for attracting external support.

“We are pleased to invest in research into holistic, next-generation transportation systems that sustainably and equitably serve the mobility needs of both urban and rural communities,” said Madhu Khanna, iSEE’s Alvin H. Baum Family Fund Chair & Director. “This new initiative is aimed to address a range of open questions related to infrastructure design and planning, energy sources, multi-modal service integration, effectiveness in reducing emissions and other environmental impacts, the economic and behavioral incentives to adopt alternative modes of transportation, and the design of policies needed to accelerate this transformation.

“The goal of this Research Initiative is to coalesce expertise on campus to advance the frontiers of knowledge and be competitive for external funding.”

iSEE seeks to identify and build a curated, interdisciplinary team of three to five full-time University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty-level researchers to form a group and lead this initiative.

Proposals for short concept notes are invited from tenured/tenure track faculty for the iSEE Research Initiative on Sustainable, Low Carbon Alternatives for Meeting On-Road Transportation Needs. The first step of the application process is to submit a two-page concept note and other brief information by Feb. 27, 2023. iSEE will then organize a workshop to develop and coalesce ideas further and support a research group to lead this effort.

You can find a full description of the program and the requirements — as well as the application form — here >>>

Researchers interesting in applying are asked to notify Basia Latawiec (latawic2@illinois.edu) of their intentions. For questions, please contact iSEE Associate Director for Research Jeremy Guest (jsguest@illinois.edu).

— News release by iSEE Communications Specialist April Wendling

$5M USDA Grant Funds Illinois-Led Innovative Cover Cropping Project

A robot plants cover crops during the summer growing season for corn. Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Urbana, Ill. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that it is funding a new project led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will address major obstacles to adoption of cover crops in the United States.

Titled “iCOVER: Innovated Cover-crop Opportunity, Verification, and Economy stimulating technology for underserved farmers using Robotics,” this $4,999,999, four-year project is funded through the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program and was facilitated through the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at Illinois. The project will scale up robotic cover crop planting and verification of soil carbon through innovative radiological robotic sensing technologies, creating markets for climate-smart products for minority underserved farmers growing specialty crops and animal products.

“Cover cropping is hugely beneficial to farmers and the environment by ensuring more carbon in the soil year-round, keeping nutrients where they belong and out of the atmosphere,” said Primary Investigator Girish Chowdhary, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering and Computer Science. “But there are three major bottlenecks in cover-crop adoption: high cost and hassle of planting; slow and expensive soil carbon measurements; and low return on investment for farmers.

“iCOVER will scale up autonomous farming and sensing technologies to help reduce the cost and labor burden of cover crop planting, to enable accurate, rapid, low-cost soil measurements, and to explore the market linkages for climate-smart benefits to a diversity of farmers.”

Other U of I project members include Co-PI Angela Di Fulvio, Assistant Professor of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering (NPRE), and Shadi Atallah, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics. Chowdhary, Di Fulvio, and Atallah are all part of the Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). External partners include Tuskegee University, EarthSense, Inc., Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Corteva, and Indigo Ag.

At sites in Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa, the team plans to scale up robotic cover-crop planting from 1,000 acres in Year 1 to 20,000 in Year 4 — bringing the cost to less than $10 per acre. Additionally, the team will work with Tuskegee, a Historically Black land-grant university, to enable robotic, high-resolution measurements of soil carbon and to create markets for climate-smart projects for minority, underserved farmers growing specialty crops and animal products.

“And we will work with supply chain partners such as ADM, Cargill, and Nori to quantify the impact of reduced cover-crop planting costs and increased verifiability and certifiability of carbon benefits on farmers’ income in the short run — and increased price premiums for the climate-smart commodities and produce in the long run,” said Chowdhary, who also holds affiliations with Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois. “I am grateful to iSEE, CDA, and NCSA for their logistical and proposal support; to the College of ACES for securing us farm space; and to Tuskegee and our corporate partners for their commitment to this project.”

Read the Dec. 12 USDA announcement >>>

— iSEE Communications & Public Affairs Director Tony Mancuso

iSEE Receives $1M Gift to be Used for Low-Carbon Transportation Research

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) will catalyze research on sustainable transportation modes in the Midwest thanks to a $1 million gift from the 2019 settlement of a consumer class-action lawsuit.

“We will use the funding to invest in interdisciplinary research into holistic, next-generation transportation systems that sustainably and equitably serve the mobility needs of both urban and rural communities,” said Madhu Khanna, iSEE’s Alvin H. Baum Family Fund Chair & Director. “This new initiative is aimed to address a range of open questions related to infrastructure design and planning, energy sources, multi-modal service integration, effectiveness in reducing emissions and other environmental impacts, the economic and behavioral incentives to adopt alternative modes of transportation, and the design of policies needed to accelerate this transformation.

“The projects we fund will advance the frontiers of knowledge and be competitive for external funding.”

Energy consumption is by far the biggest source of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for a whopping 73% worldwide — more than half of which stems from transportation, she said.

“The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has developed significant expertise in advanced biofuels from bioenergy crops that offer one possible solution to decarbonize transportation,” Khanna said. “We now aim to coalesce and channel the capacity to develop a portfolio of innovative approaches, including electric, autonomous, and hydrogen vehicles, ride-sharing, and other low-carbon transportation modes.”

The campus has experts who are uniquely poised to develop science-based tools for efficient next-generation mobility solutions, quantify economic and environmental benefits, and inform enabling policies. “We have a breadth of expertise across disciplines such as engineering, computing, economics, urban planning, and environmental sciences,” Khanna said, “and iSEE is well-positioned to team up these experts to creatively solve a complex societal challenge.”

iSEE, which received the gift in late Fall 2022, expects to announce a Request for Proposals to seed-fund this faculty-led research initiative in January 2023.

— iSEE Communications & Public Affairs Director Tony Mancuso

Shifting to a More Sustainable Campus

Campus Bike Center Coordinator Jacob Benjamin at work. Credit: Gabe Lareau, iSEE Communications

There was really one way I could’ve gotten to the Campus Bike Center, literally and metaphorically. Time, the environment, my sanity, and a healthy dose of potential irony were at stake. I rode my bike.

The ride was easy. The Campus Bike Center is on Gregory Drive, sandwiched in between First and Oak streets, surrounded by roads with dedicated bike lanes for (mostly) safe passage — a rare commodity in the Quad Cities, where I hail from.

At the University of Illinois, however, providing safe cycle routes has been a mainstay of campus transportation for decades, and the Campus Bike Center reflects another shift toward sustainable transportation geared to bike repair and education. After locking up my steed at the Center — bike racks were appropriately legion — I was greeted by the Coordinator, Jacob Benjamin.

Evidenced by his lubricant-stained Illini-orange shirt, Benjamin is a lifelong cyclist. He started out as a volunteer and has held his current position managing the Center’s many operations since 2016.

Campus Bike Center employees are happy to teach members how to build and/or repair bikes.

Initially, the concept was to offer a bike-sharing program for the university and larger community. “They realized pretty quickly that that model puts a lot of strain on the maintenance side of things and keeping a bike operational,” Benjamin said. “It was a better model and idea to really create a space where people can learn to keep up their own bike.” This idea evolved into The Bike Project of Urbana-Champaign, a 501(c)(3) organization and the university’s collaborator in managing the Bike Center.

Originally starting out in a poorly ventilated, unmarked campus garage, the Center transferred over to Campus Recreation from Facilities & Services in 2018 and moved in 2020 to its current air-conditioned space at 51 E Gregory Drive in Champaign. Since then, the Bike Center has cemented itself as a university staple, serving “the community, students, faculty, staff — everybody who needs a bike fixed up and wants to learn how to do it themselves,” as Benjamin puts it.

The Bike Center has continued to grow in popularity. By Benjamin’s count, the Center sees 30 to 40 people a day this time of year. A few weeks ago, Benjamin said, “we were only open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and we had around 110-115 people in over those three days. Only being open four hours a day, that’s about 10 people an hour.”

With such a large influx, it’d be nearly impossible for Benjamin, the student staff, and the Center’s volunteers to manage every repair. That’s why the Campus Bike Center is education-focused.

Learning to fix a bike or putting one together through the Center’s Build-a-Bike program is accessible for a $30 membership fee or eight hours of volunteer service. All parts are provided, courtesy of the university, community donations, as well as the haplessly forgotten, easily salvageable cornucopia of bikes and partial bikes abandoned at the end of every spring semester.

In addition to helping cyclists become self-sufficient at caring for their bikes, the Bike Center is equally committed to its community service mission.

On Friday afternoons, the Center hosts community rides. Annual traditions include the popular “Light the Night” bike light giveaway as well as the winter Kids Bike Giveaway where “upwards of 80 bikes are given to kids, free of cost,” Benjamin said.

The case for bicycles as the most sustainable transportation option is almost inarguable. No emissions result from a bike’s locomotion and the little carbon that is expended in its actual production is offset immediately after its 430^th mile, according to Trek’s #GoByBike campaign. Any subsequent miles render your bicycle carbon negative. The Campus Bike Center, embodying this principle through its reuse and recycling of bicycle parts, makes it an exemplar of sustainability for campuses and communities nationwide.

The new Campus Bike Center building at 51 E. Gregory Drive, Champaign, has plenty of space.

Walking around the Center that morning, looking at all of the bikes lined up waiting to be fixed by those who will ride them, Benjamin directed my attention to a cluster of old, frameless wheels. He saw their potential as reusable, their jobs as unfinished.

That’s how the Bike Center takes sustainability a pedal stroke further. It finds value in every potentially recyclable part. It reminds us that teaching and serving others sustains sustainability. It serves as a living example of how we are capable — of fixing our bikes and much larger things.

As our time wrapped up, I took Benjamin outside to show him, in a moment of shameless pride, my green Fuji America that my dad and I built together. After talking about our various bike trips, Benjamin affirmed, almost under his breath, “Bikes can take you all over.”

Benjamin is right, literally and metaphorically. Commuting by car or on foot literally cannot compare to bike rides. But the Campus Bike Center is here to suggest a larger idea: that bikes have the ability to take us even further toward a service-oriented, more environmentally sustainable community.

— Article by Gabe Lareau, iSEE Communications Intern

Madhu Khanna Named Alvin H. Baum Family Chair, Director for Institute

USDA NIFA Funds ‘Farm of the Future’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today that it is funding a new collaboration between two institutes and a research center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will create an integrated farm of the future in the U.S. Midwest.

Titled “I-FARM: Illinois Farming and Regenerative Management,” this $3.9 million, three-year project is funded through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The Illinois-led study will develop an 80-acre agricultural testbed, where commodity crops (corn and soybean) and livestock are farmed using synergistic and sustainable practices.

“We will accelerate creation, maturation, and adoption of new management technologies that are fundamentally more sustainable, profitable, affordable, and scale-neutral. The new practices will be enabled by maturing digital agriculture technologies developed in wide-ranging research efforts at the University of Illinois,” said Primary Investigator Girish Chowdhary, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering and Computer Science.

NIFA’s “Farm of the Future” proposal process was extremely competitive, and only one was awarded from across the nation, said Co-Investigator and Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) Co-Director Vikram Adve, the Donald B.Gillies Professor of Computer Science.

“This grant is a major endorsement of our growing strengths in digital ag,” Adve said.

The I-FARM is a unique partnership between CDA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at the U of I. Over three years, the I-FARM testbed will feature improved precision farming with remote sensing; new under-canopy autonomous robotic solutions for cover-crop planting, variable-rate input applications, and mechanical weeding; and artificial intelligence-enabled remote sensing for animal health prediction, nutrient quantification, and soil health.

“With the data gleaned from this project, the MyFarm app will provide farmers with an integrated dashboard that can be customized to the needs of their farm,” Chowdhary said. “Our focus on scale-neutral technologies can provide a solution to the worsening labor crisis for small farms and improve the sustainability of large and spatially heterogeneous farms.”

I-FARM technoeconomic simulations and farmer surveys will clarify barriers and incentives to adoption of sustainable technology to industry and farmers. Integrated extension activities will be conducted in a research space that is open to farmers, with demonstrations and training, easing the adoption of new technologies and opening new markets. The I-FARM team will also help the ag industry create new data-driven products and services for farmers, and an Industry Advisory Board and a Farmer Advisory Board will help the optimize impact on farming practices.

“Together, this integrated suite of solutions will lead to sustainable ways of meeting growing demand for agriculture in a changing climate,” said Co-PI and iSEE Interim Director Madhu Khanna, the ACES Distinguished Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics. “The CDA, iSEE, and NCSA built the strongest research proposal by reaching across disciplines and bringing together expertise from all over the University of Illinois — from computer science to economics to crop science and animal science, we are exploring as many aspects as possible as we seek to build a farm of the future.

“We look forward to a fruitful collaboration with this project — and similar multidisciplinary work in the future because it is the best way to solve most of the wicked problems this world will face.”

As the only “Farm of the Future” nationwide, “all eyes will be on this project as we lay the foundations for the future of agriculture,” Adve said. “We are excited to begin this venture and grateful for the support from across campus.”

Other U of I project members include Co-PI Kaiyu Guan, Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences and Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center; and Co-Investigators Isabella Condotta, Assistant Professor of Animal Sciences; Deepak Vasisht, Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Shadi Atallah, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics; Hamze Dokoohaki, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences; Salah Issa, Assistant Professor of Agricultural & Biological Engineering; Andrew Margenot, Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences; DoKyoung Lee, Professor of Crop Sciences; and Bin Peng, Senior Research Scientist at iSEE and NCSA.

The Illinois team will partner with Olga Bolden-Tiller, Dean of the College of Agriculture, Environment and Nutrition Sciences and Professor of Animal Sciences, and Gregory Bernard, Assistant Professor of Plant and Soil Sciences, at Tuskegee University.

“This is an exciting time to embark on this project, and it is a credit to our team, their expertise, and the thriving research programs we can bring to bear,” said Chowdhary, who also holds affiliations with Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois. “I want to thank the institutes, CDA, our departments and colleges, and our Tuskegee partners for their help, the College of ACES for securing us the farm space, and especially those from the farming industry who graciously offered letters of support.”

Read the NIFA announcement >>>

— Article by Tony Mancuso, iSEE Communications and Public Affairs Director

U of I SMARTFARM Researchers Use Novel AI to Model GHG Emissions

Researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind knowledge-guided machine learning model for agroecosystems called KGML-ag, which includes less obvious variables such as soil water content, oxygen level, and soil nitrate content related to nitrous oxide production and emission. Credit: iStock

University of Illinois researchers were part of a multi-institutional team that has significantly improved the performance of numerical predictions for agricultural nitrous oxide emissions using novel modeling that combines artificial intelligence and process-based knowledge.

According to a release from the University of Minnesota — home of the corresponding author and Digital Agriculture Group lead Zhenong Jin — the team developed a first-of-its-kind knowledge-guided machine learning model for agroecosystem, called KGML-ag, which is 1,000 times faster than current solutions and also significantly improves the modeling accuracy of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

The research was recently published in Geoscientific Model Development. Researchers involved were from Minnesota, Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Pittsburgh. According to the Minnesota news release, KGML-ag was constructed by a special procedure that incorporates the knowledge learned from an advanced agroecosystem computational model, called ecosys, to design and train a machine learning model. In small, real-world observations, the KGML-ag turns out to be much more accurate than either ecosys or pure machine learning models.

“This is revolutionary work that brings together the best of observational data, process-based models, and machine learning by integrating them together,” said Kaiyu Guan, a coauthor of the study, Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and Blue Waters Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences (NRES) at Illinois. Guan is the Project Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Systems for Monitoring and Analytics for Renewable Transportation Fuels from Agricultural Resources and Management (SMARTFARM) project that funded the study.

“We are really excited to continue this collaboration with the University of Minnesota team led by Zhenong Jin to explore and realize the full potentials of KGML,” Guan said.

Jin, Assistant Professor of Agroecosystem Modeling at Minnesota, and Vipin Kumar, Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering at Minnesota, are co-authors who work on the SMARTFARM project led by Guan. ASC and SMARTFARM team member Bin Peng and ASC team member Wang Zhou, both from NRES at Illinois, also were among the article’s 16 authors. Guan and Peng are affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. ASC is a collaboration between the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation.

“There is a lot of excitement around the potential for agriculture to contribute to carbon drawdown, but unless we have accurate and cost-effective measurement tools to assess what is happening both above- and below-ground, we won’t see the market incentives we know are necessary to facilitate a transition to net-negative agriculture,” said David Babson, an ARPA-E Program Director. “I’m looking forward to the teams further expanding this research.”

Read the journal article in Geoscientific Model Development >>>

iSEE Names 8 Levenick Teaching Fellows

Urbana, Ill. — The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) has selected eight faculty instructors to be part of the 2022-23 Levenick iSEE Teaching Sustainability Fellows cohort.

Funded by a generous endowment from Illinois Alumnus Stuart L. Levenick and his wife Nancy J. Levenick, this fourth cohort hails from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus — and beyond. One of our fellows represents a collaboration with the Zhejiang University International Campus; another will offer a class jointly with the University of Manchester, UK. All eight Teaching Fellows will incorporate sustainable thinking into existing classes or create entirely new courses built around eco-friendly elements.

“We are excited about the breadth of courses that will emerge from this year’s program,” iSEE Associate Director for Education & Outreach Luis Rodríguez said. “From sustainable concrete in architecture to emerging environmental issues to a look at sustainability trends in Urbana-Champaign, these courses will provide a wealth of knowledge to students.”

Applications continue to pour in each year for the Levenick Teaching Sustainability program — and iSEE prides itself that applicants from academic units across campus are interested in adding sustainability thinking into the curriculum. Levenick Fellows will meet throughout the year to trade ideas on sustainability education and to benefit from the educational resources and expertise at iSEE.

“We are grateful to the Levenicks for the generous donation that sustains this program,” Rodríguez said. “As part of our educational commitment to the Illinois Climate Action Plan, iSEE is striving to incorporate sustainability into as many classes as possible. And with a majority of the Levenick fellows working on 100- and 200-level courses, we are doing our part to reach as many students as possible.”

The 2022-23 awardees and the projects they will undertake:

Kate Abney, Associate Director of Intercultural and Global Learning in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, who will incorporate human-caused climate change discussions into LAS 291-292 “Global Perspectives” courses for students participating in education abroad programming;
Benjamin A. Bross, Assistant Professor of Architecture, who will create a new 200-level course on regional and urban-scaled environmental, social, and economic sustainability;
Niloufar Emami, Assistant Professor of Architecture, who will create a new course, ARCH 571 “Additive Formwork for Complex Concrete,” to explore new, sustainable fabrication methods for designing and making concrete building components;
Ryan Flanagan, Senior Lecturer of Rhetoric at ZJU-UIUC Institute in Haining, China, who will update the department’s Rhetoric 101-102 course by implementing sustainability as the central concept (and coordinating student participation in the Eco Club on the ZJU campus);
Surangi Punyasena, Associate Professor of Plant Biology, who will update IB 105 “Environmental Biology” with existing and emerging solutions to environmental issues;
Mark Taylor, Associate Professor of Architecture, who will create a new class, ARCH 576 “Solar Decathlon: Past, Present, and Future,” in which students will learn about sustainable housing design and develop schematics for affordable, energy-efficient homes;
Gretchen Winter, Clinical Assistant Professor in Business Administration, who will create a new 100-level global classroom course, “Evaluating Energy Sources of the Future Using a Professional Responsibility Lens,” which will challenge students to think about how companies and countries can develop an energy transition plan for a lower carbon future. (Colombia is the setting for the case, and the course will blend classroom learning, field trips to area non-fossil fuel energy research sites, and guest lectures from business leaders and professors. The course is expected to be jointly offered with the University of Manchester — students from there will visit campus for two weeks, and all students will complete UIUC-Manchester team presentations); and
Jinhui Yan, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, who will enhance CEE 360 “Structural Engineering” with sustainability awareness and materials, and add analysis of environmental, energy, and economic impacts.