Sustainability Scholars
One destination. Many roads.
The University of Dayton is home to scores of faculty members and other researchers all across campus with scholarly interests in sustainability. The Sustainability Scholars program brings these scholars together to learn about, and celebrate, each other's work. The initiative seeks to foster new collaborations to understand and respond to humanity's grand challenges in sustainability in ways that are only possible by working across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
A Community for a Cause
Joshua Ambrosius
Ambrosius is interested in sustainable communities, governance structures, and public policies. His work explores sustainable urban neighborhoods, housing policies including historic preservation, environmental attitudes among the public, regional government collaboration, and speculation about a sustainable future for humans on earth and in outer space.
Joshua Ambrosius bio
David Ashley
David Ashley bio
Ashley's professional interests in large-scale, complex capital projects include energy-efficient design, lean construction processes, and natural ecosystem restoration. His primary focus on project risk management helps ensure that these major projects achieve their performance and sustainability goals.
Zelalem Bedaso
Bedaso is interested in understanding the effect of climate change on water resources (water quantity, quality and sustainability). He also is interested in studying Earth's past climate from terrestrial sedimentary deposits and its perspectives on climate change. His research involves both field data collection and geochemical/isotope laboratory analyses.
Zelalem Bedaso bio
Janet Bednarek
Bednarek is interested in exploring how cities, especially so-called Legacy Cities (like Dayton), can become sustainable (environmentally, but also socially, economically and politically). She also is concerned with that sustainability extending to all city residents, not just the young and the affluent.
Janet Bednarek
Steve Bein
Bein's primary research interest regarding sustainability is how we think of ourselves, at the individual and societal level, in the face of climate change. Since individuals are products of their cultures and cultures are products of the natural environment where they arise, responding to climate change requires a rethinking of who and what we are.
Steve Bein bio
Jana Bennett
Bennett's focus is primarily on food sustainability in relation to Christian practices such as fasting and abstaining from meat. She also researches other Christian ascetic practices that enable environmental sustainability.
Jana Bennett bio
Justin Biffinger
Biffinger's sustainability interests involve understanding and manipulating Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes to remediate and recover metal ions from wastewater streams, fabricate fuels cells using electrochemically active bacteria, demonstrate biochemical pathways used in the dark fixation of carbonates in saltwater, design and formulate next generation anti-biofouling polymeric coatings, and create environmentally friendly enzyme-based polymer degradation formulations.
Justin Biffinger bio
Ömer Bilgin
Bilgin's sustainability interests are sustainable structures, foundations, and geomaterials under various loading and environmental conditions.
Ömer Bilgin bio
Robert Brecha
Brecha has been publishing research related to sustainability for the past decade, ranging from topics of fossil fuel availability and how this impacts climate change scenarios, to building energy efficiency scenarios and the integration of fluctuating renewable energy resources into existing power systems. Most recently his focus has been on access to and consumption of energy in developing countries and the connections between energy use and Sustainable Development Goal targets.
Robert Brecha bio
Sarah Cahalan
Cahalan is interested, broadly speaking, in the intersections of sustainability and climate change with cultural heritage work. This includes disaster planning, sustainable preservation practices, reassessment of best practices including professional travel, collaborative work to preserve endangered materials, and collecting the stories of endangered communities.
Sarah Cahalan bio
Dong Cao
Cao works on Renewable Energy, Energy Efficiency, Electric Vehicle, and Electrified Airplane Systems.
Dong Cao bio
Don Chase
Don Chase bio
Chase's areas of interested are varied, but generally revolve around applying computer simulation models to evaluate the behavior of water resource systems. He is interested in applying low impact development techniques to reduce stormwater runoff and improve stormwater runoff quality and in applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to water resource systems.
Faisal Chaudhry
As a legal scholar and a historian with regional expertise in South Asia and connected parts of the Islamic world, Chaudhry's sustainability interests are rooted in questions about the comparative and long-term relationship between law and capitalism. His academic interests are, themselves, sustained by involvement in popular democratic efforts to connect issues of environmental justice to the rights of labor and the creation of a more just global political economic order.
Faisal Chaudhry bio
Ying-Ju Tessa Chen
Chen has interests in sustainability due to her broad interdisciplinary network from a variety of fields such as mathematics, ergonomics and safety, computer science, information systems, business analytics, healthcare and engineering.
Ying-Ju Tessa Chen bio
Andrew Chiasson
Chiasson's interests in sustainability lie with High Performance Buildings, which encompasses cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency, safety and security, accessibility, functionality, occupant comfort and productivity, and historic preservation and aesthetics of the built environment.
Andrew Chiasson bio
Jun-Ki Choi
Choi's sustainability interests are in Sustainable Engineering Design and Manufacturing, Life Cycle Management (LCM) and Assessment (LCA), Energy Policy and Systems Modeling, Macroeconomic Energy Modeling, and Entrepreneurial Mindset Learning.
Jun-Ki Choi
John Clarke
John Clarke bio
Clarke is interested in how visual communication can promote awareness and practical knowledge of issues involving sustainability. His course “Design|Science|Synthesis” engages graphic design majors to address and understand scientific content toward an end of creating thorough, clear, and stimulating visual and textual representation. He and his students are currently working to design and implement an informative and educational system of signs for the Solar Prairie at Curran Place.
Trevor Collier
Trevor Collier bio
Collier is interested in optimal governance structures for common pool resource extraction. His current research uses experimental economics to evaluate the effectiveness of institutional arrangements commonly found in commercial fisheries.
Garry Crosson
Crosson's sustainability interests are mostly related to studying the environmental fate and transport of contaminants (and emerging contaminants) in soils. An additional component of his environmental sustainability interest involves designing, synthesizing, and testing solid-phase materials for removing dissolved contaminants from drinking (and presumably waste) water.
Garry Crosson bio
Kenya Crosson
Crosson's sustainability interests include sustainable water filtration (development and application of sustainable adsorption media) and the food-energy-water nexus.
Kenya Crosson bio
Matthew Currie
Matthew Currie bio
Currie’s sustainability interest centers on the praxis of social justice law and the solidarity economyy. As a practicing lawyer and educator, he focuses on how to create systemic change; specifically the role of attorneys in supporting community driven efforts to replace our capitalist economic model with one that centers people and the planet.
Diana Cuy Castellanos
Castellanos' interest in sustainability is in the connection of our food system and dietary behavior and their effect on the environment.
Diana Cuy Castellanos bio
Carola Daffner
Coming from the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, Daffner strongly believe that the pressing issues of climate change and the protection of our environment require a dialogue across the disciplines. She is particularly interested in exploring different ways in which the growing need for environmental awareness can be reflected in the global humanities curriculum.
Carola Daffner bio
Mary Ellen Dillon
Dillon's sustainability research examines the problem of antibiotic resistance through a transdisciplinary approach (economic, production, health), specifically the effects of the FDA's Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD). Her sustainability experience and interests include developing sustainability education curriculum (all levels: middle school through graduate school) and promoting awareness of local issues, especially those involving the intersection of human, economic, and ecosystem health.
Mary Ellen Dillon bio
Joseph Duggan
Duggan is an economist interested in market design and regulation, particularly with respect to the study of wholesale electricity markets. As renewable generation becomes increasingly common, this poses certain challenges in rethinking existing market designs in light of these technologies. Economics can help us better understand important aspects of these challenges, while the unique problems raised by renewable integration generate questions that can better inform our economic models.
Joseph Duggan bio
David Dunn
Dunn's interests are in researching and transitioning sustainable energy solutions. Within the Power and Energy Division at UDRI is research developing and improving sustainable energy generation, storage and distribution approaches.
David Dunn bio
Deogratias Eustace
Eustace's interest that relates to sustainability is promoting sustainable transportation that includes walking, cycling, public transportation, car sharing, bike sharing, and green vehicles.
Deogratias Eustace bio
Sean Falkowski
Falkowski is pursuing sustainability in industry as it pertains to processes. Her current research has taken her to looking at sustainability as it pertains to Industry 4.0 and specifically how it relates to the retail space.
Sean Falkowski bio
Curtis Farnsel
Major corporations and their executives play a key role in addressing global sustainability challenges. Much of Farnsel's research focuses on investor demand for corporate sustainability and understanding the channels through which sustainability creates value to shareholders.
Curtis Farnsel bio
Felix Fernando
Fernando's interests are on the human dimensions of sustainability planning and action. He explores questions such as how do people make decisions around sustainability and how such information can be used in planning.
Felix Fernando bio
Giacomo Flora
Flora's interests are in pollution formation and cleaner burning fuels. His work embraces combustion studies on alternative transportation fuels to identify chemical formation pathways for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and soot. More recently, Flora's interests extended to the optimization of sulfur removal processes from aviation fuels.
Giacomo Flora bio
Anya Galli Robertson
Dr. Galli Robertson's research centers on social and political debates about clean energy and climate change. Her most recent work includes qualitative analysis of the discourse around coal-fired power and the 2016 election and content analysis of energy policy debates in Ohio.
Anya Galli Robertson bio
Susan Gardstrom
Gardstrom's interest in sustainable practices has manifested primarily in an initiative to reduce plastic use and collect compostable material during departmental events (such as luncheons). Additionally, for the past several years, she has donned her gloves and gone "dumpster diving" for re-usable items; She stepped up these efforts in 2018 to initiate a student neighborhood porch collection process with the moniker "Divert From the Dumpster and Channel to Charity."
Susan Gardstrom bio
Elizabeth Groppe
Elizabeth T. Groppe is a Catholic constructive theologian. Her areas of scholarship include theological responses to ecological degradation with particular attention to climate change, biodiversity protection, and agriculture.
Elizabeth Groppe bio
Kevin Hallinan
Hallinan's interests in sustainability include the following: (1) equitable distribution of the benefits of sustainability; (2) big data approaches for reducing building related energy consumption and increasing the penetration of renewable energy; and (3) broadening the participation of women and under-represented minorities in energy related jobs.
Kevin Hallinan bio
Umesh Haritashya
Haritashya's research includes studying cryosphere around the world to determine the sustainable future of glacier and water resources along with natural hazards in the mountainous environment. He uses satellite remote sensing, field-collected data, mathematical modeling, and artificial intelligence techniques.
Umesh Haritashya bio
Jennifer Hellmann
Hellmann uses aquatic organisms, particularly fish, to understand how the environment experienced by one generation influences behavioral, physiological, morphological, and life-history traits in future generations. This transgenerational plasticity can benefit organisms by allowing them to develop phenotypes that match future environmental conditions, and help organisms cope with environmental change, both natural and human-induced.
Jennifer Hellmann bio
Josh Heyne
Heyne is interested in the limits of a responsible energy budget, with a focus on markets that are the most difficult to decarbonize like aviation.
Josh Heyne bio
Tom Hirunyawipada
Hirunyawipada's sustainability interests include corporate commitment to sustainability, particularly examining the effects of companies’ sustainability practices on various aspects of their performances, including financial outcomes, customer satisfaction and brand equity.
Tom Hirunyawipada bio
Jeanne Holcomb
Dr. Holcomb's sustainability-related work is primarily related to food justice. Specifically, she has been working with an interdisciplinary team to explore food insecurity on college campuses.
Jeanne Holcomb bio
Leanne Jablonski
Leanne Jablonski bio
Jablonski's sustainability interests are in education, outreach and advocacy while engaging the general public and faith communities on climate change issues, working with faith communities on environmental concerns and spirituality, and climate change's impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and plant reproduction.
Glenna Jennings
Glenna Jennings bio
As a photographer, Jennings is interested in how art and visual culture inform our notions of landscape and identity, and how these notions influence our active relationships to both the built and natural environment. As a socially-engaged artist, she is passionate about art used in the context of social change, with a specific focus on issues of food justice and immigration.
David Johnson
Johnson's interests in sustainability include the areas of alternative and renewable energy sources, increased efficiency in chemical processes through well-designed catalysts and alternative fuels and lubricants including biofuels, biolubricants and synthetic alternatives. He also is interested in alternative refrigerants with both low GWP and ODP.
David Johnson bio
Kelly Johnson
Johnson is a scholar of theological ethics whose work explores, among other things, truthful practices of gratitude, hope, and joy in the midst of the climate catastrophe.
Kelly Johnson bio
Moshan Kahandawala
Moshan Kahandawala bio
Kahandawala's interests are in energy and environmental sustainability. On the energy front, most of his work has been on bioenergy, biofuel, waste to energy and alternative energy technologies such as solar and hydrogen production. On the environmental sid, most of his interests and work have been identifying opportunities for waste disposal and repurposing and for pollutant formation, mitigation and remediation.
Brad Kallenberg
Brad Kallenberg bio
Sustainability is both a material and a moral issue. On the material side, Kallenberg teaches engineering ethics with an eye to sustainability as related to both engineering and manufacturing (extraction of raw materials, production and use of energy, our cultural addiction to petroleum-based plastic, etc.). On the moral side, his research in virtue ethics deals, in part, with a kind of cultural moral myopia that prevents us from seeing and attending to the urgency of climate change and its fallout.
Jeff Kavanaugh
For 15 year, Kavanaugh's ecology laboratory has been conducting research projects on stream restoration, wetland restoration and monitoring impacts of low dams and kayak chutes on the biodiversity of fish, macroinvertebrates and birds in the Great Miami River Watershed. He has had Honors Thesis students, Environmental Interns, and he specializes in working with students across departments and disciplines.
Jeff Kavanaugh bio
Hongjo Kim
Dr. Hongjo Kim is interested in sustainability of deteriorating infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and tunnels that suffer from lack of funds to maintain their service performance. He is investigating computer vision and machine learning technologies to automate infrastructure condition assessment and optimal maintenance and repair planning to make numerous existing infrastructures more sustainable in terms of the economic perspective.
Hongjo Kim bio
Masha Kisel
Kisel has written on sustainability issues and is an activist in Oakwood to raise awareness about plastic waste. She collaborated with Dayton Regional Green to start the No Straw Initiative at local businesses and participated in the planning of BYO: Bring Your Own program to reduce plastic waste in the Miami Valley. She co-teaches ASI 320:Cities and Energy with Dr. Bednarek, where she focuses on the future of sustainable cities.
Masha Kisel bio
Benjamin Kunz
Kunz has a sincere interest in environmentalism and sustainability issues broadly, but a particular interest in the ways in which people's sensory experiences influence their attitudes and behaviors regarding the environment and issues of sustainability. He's also interested in the application of virtual reality technology to the challenges of educating people about environmental issues and promoting sustainable behaviors.
Benjamin Kunz bio
Erin O'Mara Kunz
Erin O'Mara Kunz bio
Kunz is interested in the application of social psychology to sustainability. In particular, how do our own self-views impact our views of sustainability-related issues and our own sustainability-related behaviors?
Suki Kwon
As a working designer and an educator, Kwon has been exploring various media in her efforts to fuse nature and design. Her long-standing interest in using traditional Korean designs led her to her interest in Korean traditional crafts and natural hand-dyeing techniques. She's been working with traditional natural dye techniques and incorporated into her own installational textile art and liturgical banner design work.
Suki Kwon bio
Eric Lang
Lang's interests include renewable energy in all forms (wind, solar, biomass, ethanol, biodiesel), regenerative agriculture (he has a 10-acre organic farm/orchard), and biochar production and use. He also is an electric vehicle enthusiast with three EVs including an electric tractor.
Eric Lang story
Kevin Leske
Leske's interest is sustainability stems from his background and experience in environmental science, law, and policy. He's spent his life protecting the environment, fighting climate change, and promoting sustainability.
Kevin Leske bio
Robert Liang
Liang's interests relating to sustainability include:
Robert Liang bio
Li-Yin Liu
Liu’s current research focuses on environmental nonprofit organizations’ influence in the policy making process and citizen engagement in environmental policy implementation. Liu’s teaching interests are in advanced/introductory public administration theory, Public Policy, Non-Profit management, research methods, and environmental governance and policy.
Li-Yin Liu bio
Joy Losee
Losee's interests in sustainability stem from her research in social and cognitive psychology. Her research examines both people's perceptions of uncertain threats (e.g. climate change) and people's intentions to engage in behaviors (e.g. sustainable behaviors) that minimize threat.
Joy Losee bio
Geno Luketic
Sustainability concerns are woven throughout Luketic's studio-based research practice, courses and labor within the University and wider community. His explorations in clay and functional ceramic production have intersected with craft theory, performance art, theater, geology, deep adaptation, ceramics, site specificity, land art, woodfiring, mining, ecoart, objects old and new, storytelling and spirituality.
Geno Luketic bio
Theophile Majka
Majka has been a long-time environmentalist and is enthusiastic about the Hanley Sustainability Institute. In his Sociology of Human Rights class, there is some emphasis on environmental rights, such as the conditions that create environmental migrants. One of the books has a series of short articles on environmental issues, including one on energy democracy with an emphasis on several elements of sustainability such as resisting the continued use of fossil fuels, ballot initiatives and more public investments in renewables.
Theophile Majka bio
Ben McCall
McCall's research interests stem from a deceptively simple question: How can we build a future that is sustainable and resilient? Put another way, what changes can we make at the household, organizational, and societal levels in order to live in a way that can be sustained and that will be resilient to the increasingly severe impacts of climate change?
Ben McCall bio
Scott McDaniel
Working at the intersection of religion, cultural studies, and philosophical theory, McDaniel approaches the concept of "sustainability" with a focus on the existential weaving of humans, animals, plants, and stones in their common materiality and shared environment(s). The fundamental question that orients my thinking is, "What do we seek to 'sustain' when we advocate for sustainability?"
Scott McDaniel bio
Ryan McEwan
The McEwan Lab focuses on environmental sustainability as it relates to natural resource management with a particular emphasis on forests and streams. Research in the lab is based in tropical, temperate and arctic systems and is interwoven with management questions in the Miami Valley. More information at www.mcewanlab.org.
Ryan McEwan bio
Paul McManamon
Paul McManamon bio
McManamon's interests involve where optics and photonics interact with sustainability including autonomous vehicles, lidars for oil, gas, and water exploration, monitoring fracking for safety and environment, plus solar cells and monitoring wind around wind turbines.
Vincent Miller
Vincent Miller has written and lectured extensively on Laudato Si’ and Climate Change. In partnership with HSI, he organized an international conference on the encyclical at UD in 2016 “Everything Is Connected” and edited the resulting volume The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’ (Bloomsbury, 2017). In 2017 he was writer in residence at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Blue River, Oregon as part of its Long Term Ecological Reflections project.
Vincent Miller bio
Alex Morgan
Dr. Morgan’s research interests in sustainability focus on ensuring fire safety performance against current and new fire risk scenarios in a changing climate and built environment. This includes development of new environmentally friendly flame retardant materials as well as enabling the design and implementation of recyclable/sustainable fire-safe materials.
Alex Morgan bio
Rydge Mulford
Rydge Mulford develops passive technologies that enable sustainable building thermal control. He is also interested in exploring the impact of basic behavioral changes as a method to improve energy conservation.
Rydge Mulford bio
Raul Ordóñez
Raul Ordóñez brings his expertise in mathematical systems theory, systems analysis, and feedback control design, to the analysis and simulation of social systems. Ordóñez is particularly interested in teaching mathematical systems theory to a large audience, in order to help students better understand the connections between this body of knowledge and a multiplicity of social issues and environmental phenomena, with a focus on sustainable development. Ordóñez believes that the powerful engineering and scientific tools available to us should be broadly applied to try to better understand and solve social and environmental challenges via a methodical study of policy-making.
Raul Ordóñez bio
Yue Pan
Pan's current sustainability-related work focuses on companies' environmental commitment, the impact on firm performance and the boundary conditions under which sustainable initiatives can boost business bottom line.
Yue Pan bio
Viorel Pâslaru
Viorel Pâslaru bio
Sustainable development presupposes ecological explanation of why certain actions are acceptable while others must be avoided. One of Pâslaru's research projects examines the implicit and explicit standards of ecological explanations, some of which inform decisions for sustainable development.
Michelle Pautz
Pautz is interested in the implementation of environmental regulations, particularly at the subnational governmental level. Her research explores the interactions between government regulators and members of the regulated community to pursue regulatory compliance and sustain compliance motivation.
Michelle Pautz bio
Francisco Peñas-Bermejo
Peñas-Bermejo developed the course Sustainability in Spanish to facilitate the development of students’ Spanish language and intercultural skills to engage Spanish-speaking communities actively and effectively on issues of sustainability in the U.S. and in the world. Peñas-Bermejo's interests include food justice and sustainable agro-food systems, particularly in indigenous, local and vulnerable communities, as well as the intersections of poetry and the environment.
Peñas-Bermejo bio
Zachary Piso
Piso investigates the ethics of interdisciplinary environmental research, proposing better practices of stakeholder engagement that ensure more just and democratic science, policy, and management. His work focuses particularly on social-ecological systems and the values at stake in social scientific explanations of environmental change and resilience.
Zachary Piso bio
Rebecca Potter
As the Sustainability Program Director, most of Potter's current work and research on Sustainability is in the area of education and curricular development. However, her research also considers discourse and narrative through the lens of eco-criticism, focusing on the use of story to comprehend and respond to harmful environmental impacts such as climate change, environmental risk, and food insecurity. She is currently working on a book manuscript: The Cassandra Effect: What Stories Teach Us About Climate Change.
Rebecca Potter bio
Chelse Prather
Dr. Prather is interested in the sustainability and ecology of food systems, particularly in rangeland ecosystems and the potential for using insects as a sustainable protein source. She also studies the ecology and restoration of grassland ecosystems, particularly focusing on the insect communities in grasslands.
Chelse Prather bio
Shazia Rahman
Shazia Rahman bio
Rahman is interested in the ways in which stories can affect our relationships with and impacts on our environment. As a literary scholar, she applies ecofeminist theoretical frameworks to the narratives she studies in order to imagine a more environmentally just future.
Sri Ramamoorti
Dr. Sri Ramamoorti has a keen interest in sustainability governance, particularly its (accounting) measurement and reporting aspects. Sustainability accounting metrics allow for transparency and accountability and, in a sense, are accountability metrics that ensure sustainability governance and provide credibility.
Sri Ramamoorti bio
Roger Reeb
Dr. Reeb’s interests revolve around nutritional benefits of the farm for shelter residents, therapeutic benefits and vocational opportunities for shelter residents who volunteer on the farm, and civic-related development of service-learning students who assist with the project. Dr. Reeb's research project helped establish and sustain an urban farm at a homeless shelter in a food desert.
Roger Reeb bio
Lis Regula
Dr. Regula's interests in sustainability parallels his research as a biologist centering on intersections, whether those intersections are various populations and communities in an ecosystem or intersections of biology and other disciplines such as politics, social justice, art, geography, etc. Besides research and teaching, Dr. Regula has been heavily involved in creating resilient and sustainable communities through both governmental and non-profit mechanisms. His husband is the communications assistant at the Ohio Environmental Council.
Lis Regula bio
Andrew Rettig
Andrew Rettig bio
Rettig's interests include research and development of Internet of Things for both resource efficiency and conservation beginning with the Smart Campus, and including Internet of Things in all disciplines for student enablement from applied experience.
Joseph Saliba
Saliba's focus is in rethinking sustainable design not just in civil infrastructures but also in every design.
Joseph Saliba bio
Andrew Schrader
Schrader is interested in developing sustainable, solar-thermal energy and thermal sciences technological solutions in support of humanitarian challenges. He said these technologies must be developed while accounting for real-world economic and political systems, societal norms, and individual responsibility.
Dalindyebo Shabalala
Shabalala works on the intersection of technology regulation and sustainability. He focuses on the role of technology regulation (intellectual property, procurement, trade) in enabling the generation, commercialization and diffusion of technologies to address environmental challenges, especially climate change.
Dalindyebo Shabalala bio
Jesseca Simmons
Simmons is interested in sustainability communication through media production and documentary filmmaking.
Jesseca Simmons bio
Todd Smith
Dr. Smith is interested in all aspects of sustainable systems, with a special interest in alternative energy solutions and the science of climate change.
Todd Smith bio
Andy Strauss
Strauss is interested in sustainability issues generally, however his particular academic research areas have included: international trade and the environment, litigating the climate emergency in international forums, and the international legal ramifications of geoengineering.
Andy Strauss bio
Donna Street
Professor Donna L. Street serves as a founding member of the Accounting Research Network of the UNCTAD ISAR (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development - Intergovernmental Working Group on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting). Her research interests include disclosures associated with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the UNCTAD ISAR Global Core indicators.
Donna Street bio
Emily Sullivan Smith
Sullivan Smith's scholarly research explores the push and pull between the natural world and human behavior. The work she produces visualizes the reality of what has transpired and provides an invitation for introspection and imagination of what could be.
Emily Sullivan Smith bio
Yvonne Sun
Dr. Sun is invested in contributing to the global effort of solving the antibiotic resistance crisis. The discovery of antibiotics has revolutionized medicine and healthcare, making the recent increase in incidents of antibiotic resistant infections extremely alarming. Dr. Sun and her research team are looking for environmental signals that influence bacterial antibiotic susceptibility and the development of antibiotic resistance to better sustain the efficacy of antibiotics.
Yvonne Sun bio
Denise Taylor
Denise Taylor bio
Taylor is interested in improved focus of engineered treatment effort, with the goal of finding sustainable practices away from the extremes of no control vs. high cost treatment for all (dilute and highly contaminated water treated as similar). Her past projects include preliminary work on use of biochar generated from local products for capture and return of phosphorus to crop land; and targeted treatment of storm water currently carried through combined sewers. In the future, she would like to explore barriers that inhibit or discourage waste diversion practices.
Misty Thomas-Trout
Thomas-Trout is interested in sustainability and its role in the graphic design discipline. She uses cartographic language and information design to engage and inform the public on ways one can insert themselves into the community; celebrate the rapport between people and place; promote local endeavors; reveal places in need of food access and other critical resources while educating the public in an effort to preserve information and promote equal economic opportunity.
Misty Thomas-Trout bio
Adam Todd
Todd is a law professor and former legal services attorney with a long-standing interest in and commitment to public interest and international human rights law - both of which are inextricably connected to sustainability. He teaches courses in human rights, internet regulation, and torts law (among others) all of which include modules addressing aspects of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
Adam Todd bio
Elias Toubia
Toubia is interested in the sustainability of construction materials and integrating both fire safety and sustainability in material selection.
Elias Toubia bio
Muhammad Usman
Muhammad Usman bio
Usman's sustainability research interests include computational methods to approximate the solution of models from climate change, water waves, engineering, biology and medicine. Most realistic models involve nonlinear differential or partial differential equations. He says in order to simulate the outcome of a model it is important to develop algorithms to solve the model.
Dan Vandersommers
Vandersommers examines how Americans conceptualized animals and ecologies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Employing environmental history, animal studies, science studies and posthumanism, his research seeks to extend ecological thinking to show how all categories of thought are always interconnected. His research focuses on zoological parks and aquariums from 1840-1920.
Dan Vandersommers bio
Erick Vasquez
Erick Vasquez bio
Dr. Vasquez is interested in developing value-added products from waste materials by using green chemistry approaches.
Alan Veliz-Cuba
Veliz-Cuba is interested in using computational and mathematical models to study interactions in populations and ecosystems. He also is interested in how external intervention affects the behavior of populations and ecosystems.
Alan Veliz-Cuba bio
Maria Vivero
Vivero's interest in sustainability for research purposes resides in the areas of financial development and inclusion. She is interested in understanding whether access to financial services and markets has an effect on the alleviation of poverty and the reduction of economic inequality. In addition, she is interested in understanding how financial markets can be used to develop and fund projects that can address society's most pressing problems.
Maria Vivero bio
Blake Watson
Watson was once an attorney in the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the U.S. Justice Department. He is interested in environmental law, oil and gas law (including hydraulic fracturing), and water law.
Blake Watson bio
Joy Willenbrink-Conte
Willenbrink-Conte is interested in sustainable and equitable health-care practices; particularly how our climate crisis impacts individual and community health, specifically marginalized individuals and groups.
Joy Willenbrink-Conte bio
Shuang-Ye Wu
Wu's research focuses on the potential impacts of climate change on the hydrological cycle, and its regional impacts on precipitation, extreme storms, floods and droughts.
Shuang-Ye Wu bio
Takahiro Yamada
Takahiro Yamada bio
Yamada's interest and research areas include: chemical and electrochemical conversion of CO2 to hydrocarbons; hydrogen production, storage, and fuel cell technology; incineration and emission control technology; and remediation of perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) contamination of ground water, soil, and biosludge. He recently obtained funding from the United States EPA for a study about PFAS and their contaminated biosludge incineration, an issue possibly confronting Dayton and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.