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Announcement: 7th Symposium of the Resilience Engineering Association

Poised to Adapt:   Enacting resilience potential through design, governance and organization

In a world of changing pressures, relationships, interdependencies, and possibilities, past performance and safety records, however successful, need to be adapted and new approaches innovated. A key is the ability to continuously anticipate and adapt to keep pace with change. But what does it mean for teams and organizations to be poised to adapt as tempos of change vary?

The program for the 7th Symposium of the Resilience Engineering Association will  engage participants in an energetic exploration of what it means to be poised to adapt in a turbulent world and how to resolve the conflict between adapting to be resilient versus the pressures for compliance with standards.

Today’s organizations focus on ensuring compliance to a model of success embodied in plans, procedures, quality indicators, and automation.  The assumption is that the model of success already accounts for uncertainties and minimizes the unexpected.  This assumption fails in our interconnected and turbulent world.  Compliance oriented systems are very brittle when facing unexpected events and changes.  They experience surprising, sudden collapses in performance, such as dramatic service outages, occur regularly despite a backdrop of improving scores on indicators. Instead of `trying to eradicate the unexpected, today’s organizations need to anticipate and prepare for unexpected challenges and opportunities — in other words, they need to be poised to adapt in a world where surprising challenges and innovative opportunities are normal.  We suspect that being resilient and ensuring compliance are two forces in conflict in today’s world. So, how do we balance these pressures, when the pace of change accelerates, the scale of activities jump, and the complexity of interdependencies overwhelms analysis?

The symposium will be held at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Liège, Belgium, from the 26th to the 29th of June 2017, hosted by Université de Liège.  The discussions will take place in a city where marks of challenge, surprise, collapse, and regeneration are visible from a dramatic history of industrial changes. Yet from this experience the people of the city offer wonderful hospitality (and excellent craft beers).

Let us take up the challenge of the Symposium  theme, spark syntheses across diverse disciplines, and stimulate innovative practical approaches that address the societal need for resilience.  Directions for submitting your proposals are available at the Symposium website:  http://www.rea-symposium.org/

Mark Weick Visit

On September 21, 2016, Mark Weick, Director of the Sustainability Program Office at Dow Chemical, spoke with Ohio State students and faculty. His first stop was to an Intro to EEDS (ENR 2500) class taught by Dr. Jeremy Brooks and Dr. Brent Sohngen. There, he talked about the growing sustainability career field, as well as Dow’s sustainability initiatives. Later in the day, speaking to SRE Faculty and older EEDS students, Mr. Weick spoke in-depth about Dow’s sustainability history, goals, and initiatives.

SRE would like to thank Mr. Weick for sharing his knowledge and experience with our faculty and students!

For Students: Class Opportunities

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS (Philos 2342)

Prof. Corey Katz

Spring 2017 | TR 12:45pm – 2:05pm

Are all ethical claims relative? Is ethics even real? || What do we owe to future generations? || Are the emissions of industrialized countries unjust? || Do we have moral obligations to animals, plants, species, and ecosystems? || What can perspectives of aboriginal people and women tell us about environmental issues? || Is capitalism fundamentally unsustainable? || Explore these questions and more in Philos 2342 with Prof. Corey Katz.

 

WATER: A HUMAN HISTORY (History 2704)

Prof. Nicholas Breyfogle

Spring 2017 | Lectures MW 12:40pm – 1:45, Recitations

F 11:30am, 12:30pm, 3:00pm

Throughout human history and across this very diverse planet, water has defined every aspect of human life: from the molecular, biological, and ecological to the cultural, religious, economic, and political. We live on the “blue planet.” Our bodies are made up primarily of water. Without water, life as we understand it could not exist. Indeed, water stands at the foundation of most of what we do as humans: in irrigation and agriculture; waste and sanitation; drinking and disease; floods and droughts; fishing and other food supply; travel and discovery; scientific study; water pollution and conservation; dam building; in the setting of boundaries and borders; and wars and diplomacy. Water lies at the very heart of almost all world religions (albeit in very different ways). The control of water is at the foundation of the rise and fall of civilizations, with drought and flood perpetual challenges to human life.  Water serves as a source of power (mills, hydroelectric dams), and access to water often defines (or is defined by) social and political power hierarchies. Water plays an important symbolic role in the creation of works of literature, art, music, and architecture, and it serves as a source of human beauty and spiritual tranquility. Thus, to begin to understand ourselves as humans—our bodies, minds, and souls, past and present—we must contemplate our relationship to water.

At the same time, water resources—the need for clean and accessible water supplies for drinking, agriculture, and power production—will likely represent one of the most complicated dilemmas of the twenty-first century. The World Water Forum, for instance, reported recently that one in three people across the planet will not have sufficient access to safe water by 2030. As population grows, glaciers melt, hydrological systems change, and underground aquifers are depleted, many analysts now think that the world will fight over water more than any other resource in the coming decades. The moral and logistical question of how to ration water (who gets access and for what purposes) will be a foundational ethical question of the twenty-first century.
In this class, we will examine a selection of historical moments and themes to explore the relationship between people and water over time and place. The format of the course will be a combination of lectures, in-class discussions, workshop activities, and presentation of your work to fellow classmates.

ALAN RANDALL: SRE’s Integrated Assessment Modeling Team

ConveAlan Randallning the Integrated Assessment Modeling team has been important component of my duties in the first year of my rather modest part-time appointment as SRE Resident Scholar. The idea can be traced back to a 1-day workshop of SRE affiliated researchers at the beginning of summer, 2015: perhaps SRE should aspire to developing an Ohio State integrated assessment modeling (IAM) platform that can be applied to a wide range of potential applied studies in sustainability and resilience. Because there are quite a few IAM platforms already up and running, some of them very well known, an Ohio State IAM platform makes sense only if we can leap-frog the competition – that is, recognize the key limitations of existing state of the art IAMs and develop a platform that resolves some of the those issues.

So we assembled an IAM team – Bhavik Bakshi, Jeff Bielicki, Antonio Conejo, Joseph Fiksel, Elena Irwin, Alan Randall, and Brent Sohngen – and recruited several GRAs willing to work part-time with the IAM team: TJ Ghosh, Nicolas Irwin, Jonathan Ogland-Hand, and Shaohui Tang. First-year tasks included

  • IAM modeling: reviewing the state of the art in IAM – objectives, approaches, successes and limitations – with particular attention to recent developments, perhaps generating publishable review articles in the process; deciding on modeling approach(es) that we might pursue; and getting started.
  •  Taking a leading role in developing two proposals to NSF’s Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems, INFEWS, program: on energy systems and CO2, and land-lake implications of food and energy systems in the Maumee Basin.

At the end of Spring semester 2016, we agreed to form sub-groups to pursue four mini-projects, recruiting colleagues as necessary from among SRE’s affiliated researchers:

  •  LCA-CGE: endogenizing prices and introducing equilibrating features into life cycle assessment models, by integrating Life Cycle Assessment and Computable General Equilibrium modeling
  •  Land-lake dynamics: making models of land-lake interactions more truly dynamic, with a view to better characterizing the dynamics of ecosystem services production
  •  Preparation of review article manuscripts: we determined that a comprehensive review article seemed infeasible (several such articles had been published recently, and the field had grown so large that comprehensive review articles were unable to achieve much depth). But there is scope for review manuscripts on two key sets of issues – we will draft manuscripts reviewing and critiquing the state of the art regarding
    • Uncertainty and validation in IAMs
    • Linking and scaling in IAMs

At our mid-October team meeting we will review progress on these 4 mini-projects.

This brings us to the beginning of SRE’s second year. While the IAM team was doing the things summarized above, much of SRE’s attention was focused on a very successful effort to recruit talented new faculty and post-docs. An important objective for the IAM team in AY 2017 is to integrate newly appointed talent, especially those focused on modeling, into the team’s program. This must be done in the context of several SRE efforts to encourage team-building and networking,

including the topically-oriented networking forums to be introduced in Autumn 2016 and a one-day cross-cutting workshop currently in planning. We expect new interdisciplinary teams and projects to emerge from these activities, changing the landscape in which the IAM team works. In the coming year, we will be focused on finding the IAM team’s place among an expanding group of SRE collaborative activities. Perhaps the IAM Team will evolve and thrive as SRE’s intellectual resources grow rapidly. Perhaps it eventually will be subsumed within other collaborative structures yet to emerge. But either way it will leave its mark on SRE and the larger scholarly enterprise.

Autumn 2016 Seed Grant Recipients

SRE is proud to announce the selection of the Autumn 2016 Seed Grant recipients! Their project proposals emphasize what it means to be transdisciplinary and innovative in sustainability and resilience research, and we are excited to see the results of their efforts. The Principal Investigators of the recipient proposals include Guzin Bayraksan, Keely Croxton, Karen Dannemiller, Kelsey Hunter, Marcia Nishioka, Linda Weavers, Rangjuin Qin, and Klaus Lorenz. Congratulations!

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Bart Elmore named 2017 New America Fellow

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Bart Elmore

Congratulations to History Professor Bart Elmore who has been named a 2017 New America fellow! He “will work on his book ‘Seed Money: How the Monsanto Company’s Quest for Power Remade Our World,’ which will offer the first global environmental history of the St. Louis firm, tracing Monsanto’s astounding evolution from making DDT to manipulating DNA, and use the firm to assess the future environmental sustainability of corporate capitalism.”

Read more about New America here.

Originally Published Sep. 16, 2016. Taken from the OSU Department of History’s website on Oct. 10, 2016.

 

H.S.H Prince Albert II of Monaco Visit

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HSH Prince Albert II speaking about the future of sustainability at the Mershon Auditorium on Aug. 31, 2016.

H.S.H. was shown around campus in order to introduce him to some of the many sustainability initiatives Ohio State has supported and instituted. He was shown the Venturi Buckeye Bullet, Ohio State’s electric race car, and he was also introduced to some of the University’s research and academic initiatives surrounding sustainability, as well as the Zero Waste program in Ohio Stadium. SRE Leaders at the Research Luncheon for H.S.H. included Mike Boehm, Elena Irwin, Katrina Cornish, and Melissa Amos. H.S.H. later gave a speech and participated in a fireside chat about the importance of access to clean water, biodiversity, climate change, his Foundation, and the future of sustainability.

Read more about the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation here, and look here for an official bio of H.S.H. For a full video of his speech and the Fireside Chat, see this video produced by Ohio State.

 

 

Meet Our New Faculty

SRE is thrilled to introduce our twelve new faculty to the OSU community. Read on to learn more about the ten faculty joining us this fall!

Yongyang Cai

Yongyang Cai earned his PhD from Stanford University, and his research interests include computational economics, integrated assessment models and climate change, environmental and resource economics, and decision making under uncertainty.

Yongyang is a computational and environmental economist. His current research focuses on dynamic and stochastic integration of climate and economics. He has written or co-written 14 peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals, including Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Computers & Operations Research, Journal of the European Economic Association, and Quantitative Economics. Prior to joining the OSU, Cai was a Senior Research Scientist at the Becker Friedman Institute and the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the University of Chicago, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

 

Zhenhua Chen

Zhenhua Chen earned his PhD in Public Policy from George Mason University and his MA in Regional Economics from the College of Economics at Shenzhen University in China. His research interests include CGE modeling, risk and resilience, and transportation and planning policy.

Zhenhua is an assistant professor in City and Regional Planning in the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University (OSU). His research interest focuses on computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling, risk and resilience, transportation planning and policy. He has a strong background in impact assessments of natural hazards and infrastructure investment policy, and transportation resilience using various CGE models. He is one of the lead developers of the Economic Consequence Analysis Tool, an Excel-VBA software that is intended for policymakers and analysts who need quick estimates of the economic impact of numerous threats, including terrorism, natural disasters, and technological accidents. Before joining the OSU, He was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Center of Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California.

 

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Karen Dannemiller

Karen Dannemiller earned her PhD, MPhil, and MS in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from Yale University. She earned her ScB in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering with Honors from Brown University. Her research interests include the indoor microbiome, fungal allergens, human exposure, mold in housing, environmental microbiology, childhood asthma, and DNA sequencing.

Karen’s interdisciplinary research integrates engineering with microbiology and addresses emerging health challenges and environmental concerns using -omics approaches. Within the indoor environment, people are simultaneously exposed to thousands of chemicals and microorganisms which compose their indoor exposome, and these exposures are different from those of their ancestors. Broadly, the goal of Karen’s work is to understand these exposures, their sources, and their impact on human health. Her unique background combines training in both engineering and public health to tackle difficult questions, particularly with regards to exposures in the built environment where people spend 90% of their time.
Karen graduated with honors in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from Brown University and earned her PhD at Yale University in Chemical and Environmental Engineering. During this time, she completed an internship at the California Department of Public Health in the Indoor Air Quality Program. Karen’s work improved our understanding of human exposures linked to childhood asthma development and severity. Her research also elucidated resident microbial populations and fundamental transport processes occurring in homes. Her current research is on microbial activity in house dust and biotransformation of phthalates in homes, and she is excited to tackle new challenges as an assistant professor at Ohio State University.

 

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Jennifer Eaglin

Jennifer Eaglin earned her PhD in Latin American History from Michigan State University, ME in Latin American Studies and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University, and her BA in History and Spanish from Spelman College. Her research interests include energy development in the Americas, alternative energy policy, fuel policy, air pollution, and government policy reform.

Dr. Jennifer Eaglin is an assistant professor of environmental history/sustainability at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the development of the Brazilian ethanol industry in the 1970s and 1980s. She completed her doctorate at Michigan State University in Latin American History. She began studying Brazilian energy and development as a Master’s student at Johns Hopkins University-School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where she focused on Latin American Studies and International Economics with a specialization in Emerging Markets. Jennifer is a graduate of Spelman College, where she earned her BA in Spanish and History.

 

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Bart Elmore

Bart Elmore earned his PhD and BA from the University of Virginia, and his BA from Dartmouth college. His research interests include the relationship between big, multinational firms and ecological change. He has closely examined both Monsanto and the Coca-Cola Company.

Bart Elmore is assistant professor of history at OSU and a Carnegie Fellow at New America. Engaging with scholarship on the history of capitalism, Bart recently published a global environmental history of the Coca-Cola Company entitled Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) and is currently working on a project that examines the ecological footprint of the Monsanto Company. In addition, he has been a contributor to The Huffington Post, Salon, and other popular media outlets.

 

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Jonathan Fresnedo Ramirez

Jonathan Fresnedo Ramirez earned his PhD from the University of California Davis, and his BS from the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo in Mexico. His research interests include the use of genetics, genomics and engineering for the domestication and optimal genetic improvement of new and neglected crops, mainly focused for the sustainable and resilient production of biomaterials.

Jonathan is Mexican (born and raised) and considers himself an “agrogenetecist” given his interest in applying genetics for the development of agriculture. He has been involved in the study of plant genetic resources since his early days in college. Although his studies started with subtropical species, since 2009, he started a new journey with the breeding of temperate fruits for northern regions, such as peach and grapevine. He is also interested in ethnobotany and economic botany of crops.

 

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John M Horack

John M. Horack earned his MS and PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and a BS in Physics and Astronomy from Northwestern University. His research interests include aerospace engineering, astrophysics (cosmology, gamma ray bursts), international collaboration in spaceflight, commercial space development, and space policy.

Dr. Horack’s professional experience in aerospace innovation and leadership dates back to 1987. He currently serves as the vice president of the International Astronautical Federation, was vice president for research at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, achieved the level of Senior Executive Service at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and most recently served as vice president of Teledyne Brown Engineering’s Space Systems group. At TBE he had responsibility for overseeing all government and commercial space programs, including science, International Space Station payload operations, test support, flight hardware, launch vehicle and component development, and Earth imaging. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Horack is also a widely published scientist in the field of gamma ray bursts, having authored or co-authored more than 100 papers and conference presentations.

 

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Eden Lin

Eden Lin earned his PhD from Princeton University, his BPhil from the University of Oxford, and his BA from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include ethics, mainly well-being.

Before starting at Ohio State, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, Newark from 2013 to 2016. You can find more about Eden at his webpage, www.edenlin.com

 

 

Daniela Miteva

Daniela Miteva earned her PhD in Environment with a specialization in Environmental Economics from Duke University and a BA in Economics and Biology from Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests include coupled human-natural systems, mechanisms of landscape change, impact evaluations of conservation and development interventions, and ecosystem services.

Daniela is an environmental economist working at conservation and sustainability issues in developing countries. Combining a microeconomic framework with theory and tools from ecology and biogeography, her research focuses on understanding the drivers of landscape change, quantifying the impacts on ecosystems and human welfare, and evaluating policies like protected areas and Forest Sustainability Council (FSC) certification. Her research provides insights of why and where human behavior modifies the natural landscapes and highlights the characteristics of the optimal policy that promotes economic development and conservation of species, habitats, and ecosystem services. Daniela holds a PhD from Duke University, NC and has spent the past 3 years a postdoctoral associate at The Nature Conservancy, working on qualifying the tradeoffs between agricultural profit, ecosystem services, and biodiversity in Brazil, analyzing the drivers of forest loss on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and examining the heterogeneity of the impacts of FSC in Indonesia.

 

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Mark H. Weir

Mark H. Weir earned his PhD in Environmental Engineering from Drexel University, and his BS in Environmental Engineering from Wilkes University. His research interests include risk analysis specifically quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA). “I specialize in microbial dose response modelling and quantitative microbiology for exposure assessment and modelling. I am interested in developing new integrative insights into how to develop QMRA models in a truly trans-disciplinary fashion thus allowing for fast implementation of the models. I focus primarily on drinking and wastewater, which include water reuse.”

After completing his BS in Environmental Engineering and working locally and internationally, Dr. Weir desired to expand his skills in water distribution hydraulics and treatment in a more public health orientation. Mark worked under the mentorship of Dr. Charles N. Haas at Drexel University on quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) and complex system modeling. Mark focused his dissertation on a first of its kind advanced dose response model for inhalational anthrax and between his dissertation and other research at Drexel started the second generation of microbial dose response models. Mark worked as a Visiting Research Associate and Associate Director of the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment (CAMRA) under the mentorship of Dr. Joan B. Rose at Michigan State University (MSU). While at MSU Mark developed his engineered and environmental systems modelling skills further and with his wife Dr. Joanna M. Pope opened their business CAMRA Consultants LLC., an engineering and risk sciences consulting firm. After spending a year as an Environmental Engineer with the Office of Water at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington DC, Mark accepted a faculty position at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. While at Temple Mark served as the Acting Division Director for the Environmental Health Sciences Division, College of Public Health. While at Temple Mark directed the Division and developed his research in quantitative microbiology within the water industry while also teach and reaching out the community to work with the Philadelphia Water Department and various community groups. Mark also strengthened his international collaborative network, engaging in research with poor communities and underserved locations in: Argentina, Australia and Brazil. Upon coming to The Ohio State University, College of Public Health, Mark is interested in continuing his involvement of the local community and utilities in his research and exploring the ways that fundamental and applied research can be used to improve human health and overall community sustainability in Columbus and worldwide.

ROB GREENBAUM: Natural Hazards Research & Applications Workshop

In July, I had the opportunity to attend the 41st Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Broomfield, CO. I participated in a session entitled “Advances in Measuring Economic Resilience to Disasters,” where I shared some of the preliminary findings from work that Glenn College colleague Noah Dormady and doctoral student Kim Young are working on to examine resilience decision-making within middle market firms. We implemented a structured online experimental survey to examine how decisions to invest in longer-term stability are affected by the gender of the decision maker and the gender composition of firm boards, the influence of repeated events, and the decisions to invest in information.

At the workshop (and in my session), I had an opportunity interact with USC Sol Price School of Public Policy Research Professor Adam Rose. Professor Rose will be one of the invited out-of-town guest experts at the SRE seed grant-funded Resilience Workshop on October 27th and 28th at Ohio State. In Broomfield, I also had an opportunity to meet with one of the top candidates for City and Regional Planning’s SRE position in Disaster Planning & Resilience. The morning of my session, I also had the pleasure of participating in the Disaster Dash 5k, which served as a fundraiser for the William Averette Anderson Fund, which seeks to increase representation of minorities in the field of disaster and hazard research and practice.