Claire Mock has been selected to receive the ARCS Foundation – Pittsburgh Chapter Scholar Award! The Pittsburgh Chapter of ARCS Foundation aims to sustain the best emerging scientists, by providing financial support to the most promising graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.  

Congratulations to Hailey Sinon who was awarded a GSA Graduate Student Research Grant to carry out her current research on paleo-permafrost thaw in Arctic Alaska to the next step. With this grant, she will apply various radiocarbon dating techniques to a lake in interior Alaska to study patterns of organic carbon erosion that occurred as the region underwent significant permafrost degradation thousands of years ago, with the hope that it can be used as a potential analog for the future of Arctic permafrost.

Each summer, the Sustainability Summer Research Program at the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation selects students to participate in advanced, hands-on research.

This program goes beyond the classroom curriculum, enabling students to develop their ideas and work independently. We are pleased to announce that out of the 27 students selected for the 2024 program, 7 are from GES.

We look forward to seeing their results at the Undergraduate Research Symposium!

Congratulations to:

• Leanni Barreiros, Geology & Environmental Science - Exploring Sustainable Design (John C. Mascaro Scholar)
• Rachael Betz, Geology & Environmental Science - ​Using Diatoms to Reconstruct Environmental Change in Central Chile During the Common Era (Charles and Linda Sorber Scholar
• Madison Conn, Environmental Science & Geology - Phytoremediation of Environmental Pollutants (Charles and Linda Sorber Scholar)
• Tyler Henry, Geology & Environmental Science  - ​Laccase-Mimicking Bionanozyme for Sustainable Removal of Water Contaminants (John C. Mascaro Scholar)
• Neeharika Kolli, Environmental Science & Geology - ​Alternative Energy Opportunities (John C. Mascaro Scholar)
• Pip Mostern, Geology & Anthropology - Urban Permaculture (John C. Mascaro Scholar)
• Olivia Rossi, Geology & Environmental Science - Storm Chasing to Understand Nutrient Cycling in the Urban Tree Canopy (John C. Mascaro Scholar)

Learn about past undergraduate research by exploring student-made video summaries on the Pitt Sustainability YouTube channel.

Pittsburgh is the land of landslides, yet research monitoring them is sparse. But projects out of Pittsburgh’s universities could fill in the gaps to sturdy the region’s hillsides. Dr. Daniel Bain was quoted in this WESA article.

Photo by Keith Srakocic / AP 

Landslides pose a threat to life and infrastructure and are influenced by anthropogenic modifications associated with land development. Learn more from Dr. Tyler Rohan and Dr. Eitan Shelef about their research on "Prolonged Influence of Urbanization on Landslide Susceptibility".

The Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory was awarded a $650,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator to develop a digital tool that will use satellite data and machine learning to provide agencies and community organizations with historical and current information about water quality across the Pittsburgh region’s rivers.

Charles Jones, a professor in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Geology and Environmental Science, is featured in an NPR segment on the Geology of PIttsburgh.