Announcing a new Lunch & Learn series

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Come grab some lunch and partake in an interesting conversation with others from various disciplines! The EarthLab Lunch & Learn series provides a space to learn more about the skills needed to collaborate across diverse fields and communities.

Every month, two or more individuals from different disciplines are invited to share lessons from their efforts to collaborate with each other. Such partnerships might include artists collaborating with scientists, researchers collaborating with community members, academics collaborating with practitioners, and researchers collaborating across wide disciplinary divides (e.g. sciences and humanities). The discussion will include reflection on challenges and opportunities they encounter, the specific awareness and skills they have developed in order to collaborate, and recommendations for others attempting similar feats. 

Each event will last two hours. The first hour will consist of a 20-30 minute panel followed by discussion with a general audience and socializing. The second hour will be an opportunity for students to meet with the panelists, and learn from those who are a few steps ahead about how to become collaborative boundary-crossers.

Learn more here

Thank you to our co-sponsors:

        

 

2020 – 2021 Innovation Grants: Now accepting proposals

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EarthLab is pleased to announce the second round of funding with the 2020 – 2021 Innovation Grants program! The Innovation Grants is an exciting opportunity to make an innovative idea or project come to fruition. Funding is intended to support new partnerships that address pressing environmental challenges and that are led by and with those most impacted by a particular environmental challenge. Those most impacted may refer to the people, communities, municipalities (e.g., a city planning for sea level rise), industries (e.g., agricultural industry facing increased flooding or drought), or other entities directly affected by an environmental challenge.

Any community partnerships with interdisciplinary academic teams are encouraged to apply!

Learn more

EarthLab Salon 2020: Propose a talk

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EarthLab’s mission is to work in partnership with others to accelerate and focus UW expertise to address large-scale environmental challenges, making a positive impact on people’s lives and livelihoods. Underpinning this mission is a commitment to put equity and justice at the core of our work. We recognize that addressing complex environmental challenges requires an understanding of how inequities and injustices are both causes and consequences of such issues. Furthermore, we must redress inequities and injustices in how we bring people and knowledge together in our work and workplaces to make decisions and co-create solutions.

We are only beginning to fully explore what our commitment to equity and justice means. It is not always obvious how equity and justice relate to environmental issues. Yet we know there is considerable experience on this subject across the University of Washington. By providing a venue to share your insight with a broad audience, we hope to start a much-needed cross-disciplinary conversation on the question of “What does it mean to center equity and justice in environmental work?”

Opportunity

The EarthLab Salon is a 3-part quarterly public lecture and workshop series designed to highlight expertise and leadership on this subject in the UW-wide community, especially among students, and build a foundation of shared understanding, values and language among participants. In doing so, we hope to foster opportunities for a new cross-cutting community to connect and collaborate on shared interests. We plan to take lessons learned into our work at EarthLab.

We invite proposals from pairs of presenters from two distinct fields, who will work collaboratively and present contrasting or complementary perspectives on a theme. Joint talks will take place that centers around the question: What does it mean to center equity and justice in environmental work?  We encourage presenters to seek new colleagues from across units, professions, and positions, and to integrate creative modes such as dance, spoken word, or music, into presentations that enable multiple perspectives to be expressed.

Presenters will be invited to deliver a 35-minute evening public lecture or performance followed by a Q&A and social hour at one of UW’s three campuses (Seattle, Tacoma, or Bothell). We will also invite presenters to share advanced readings, videos or other related resources and join a subsequent lunch and workshop with the EarthLab community to discuss their work in a more informal setting. All presentations will be live-streamed and curated in a UW Libraries digital publication. An honorarium of $200 will be available for community partners.

Any member of the UW community is eligible to submit a proposal, including students, staff, faculty, post-docs, visiting scholars, and more. One of the pair may be from outside UW, such as a community partner. Student-only pairs must designate a faculty or staff contact.

Selection Process

Proposals will be evaluated by a committee composed of a mix of students, faculty and staff from across the UW community representing different units and disciplines, according to the following criteria:

Content

-Addresses goals of the salon series with a clear, focused rationale
-Expresses perspectives not often heard in the environmental field

Presentation

-Design/format makes sense given the content that is presented
-Communicated in a clear way that reaches a diverse audience

Quality of collaboration

-Each member contributes in a clear and valuable way to the project
-Innovative pairing of disciplines, units, professions, or etc.

Inter/transdisciplinary perspective

-Integrates concepts, methods and resources from 2 or more relevant disciplines
-The inter- or transdisciplinary integration results in novel or unexpected insights

Timeline

Applications Due *Extended to January 13, 2020
Selection Process January 14, 2020 – January 17, 2020
Selections Announced January 20, 2020
First Lecture Early spring, 2020
Second Lecture Late spring, 2020
Third Lecture Fall, 2020


Presentation ideas are due January 13, 2020

To Apply

Write a proposal of up to 500 words that describes how you will answer the question, “What does it mean to center equity and justice in environmental work?” Include a description of your chosen topic (250 words), a description of your joint presentation format (100 words) and a brief biography of each presenter that illustrates why this topic is important to you (75 words each). For questions, contact sarajo@uw.edu.

Submit Your Talk

Co-sponsored by EarthLab; the College of the Environment Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity

Thanks to the UW Diversity Seed Grant Award for inspiring this series and making it possible

Change from within: Diversifying the environmental movement

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Join the opening night reception for Salish Sea Equity and Justice Symposium and the premiere of Change from Within, a dance film by CULTURE SHIFT. EarthLab’s first intern, Jasmmine Ramgotra, created a movement-based representation of interviews she conducted with leaders of Seattle’s environmental community over 5 months, including individuals in government, NGO’s, business, and academia. Using the interview audio as a sound score, and four dancers to communicate the message, the performance presents clear takeaways about how to create positive change on an individual level.

Details

Tickets are sold online – your ticket includes access to the aquarium

When: Thursday, November 14, 2019 | 6:30 p.m.
Where: Seattle Aquarium

New student program focuses on sustaining freshwater services

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From large lakes where fish populations thrive to running rivers that generate electricity, freshwater ecosystems supply our world with critical food, water, and power. With a changing climate and projected environmental changes, little is known about the potential impacts these changes may bring to communities. Enhancing the sustainability of these essential freshwater resources by developing a dynamic workforce is necessary in the face of change.

There is an urgent need for scientists from a range of disciplines to work together in innovative ways to solve problems. The Future Rivers Initiative, a new organization in EarthLab, aims to build a culturally-aware STEM workforce fluent in state-of-the-art quantitative approaches that will be necessary for sustaining food-energy-water (FEW) services in large river ecosystems. The Future Rivers training program will support up to 60 trainees as they prepare to effectively safeguard freshwater ecosystem services for a growing world population.

Graduate training that breaks down barriers

“How do we take the perspectives of all of these complementary but different disciplines here at the University of Washington?” asked Gordon Holtgrieve, associate professor for the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “We have engineering, forest science, fisheries, landscape architecture, geosciences, and more. How do we take those disciplines and use each of their strengths to solve problems around freshwater sustainability?”

To address this question, Holtgrieve recruited faculty from across the University to create Future Rivers. This National Science Foundation supported graduate training program at the University of Washington focuses on building collaborative bridges between disciplines to think outside-the-box when it comes to building a foundation of freshwater sustainability.

“The students here at the university really made this happen. Our students voiced that they want to gain skills around data science while connecting with people outside of their discipline,” says Holtgrieve. “These students want to learn more about communication and issues of inclusivity and culture in STEM. Future Rivers was designed and pursued in order to meet this request.”

Building a workforce of the future

Students accepted into the program will get to experience data science courses, science communication trainings, STEM inclusivity workshops, and social gatherings along with professional networking.

As an EarthLab initiative, students will learn to work in applied ways within career fields outside of academia. Future Rivers is creating a solid foundation that connects academic government and industry partners when addressing freshwater issues.

“Enduring solutions to complex environmental challenges usually come from multiple disciplines and sectors cooperating and using actionable science,” explains Ben Packard, EarthLab’s executive director. “EarthLab is thrilled to welcome Future Rivers and to help build the workforce of the future, competent in transdisciplinary work and prepared for careers in a variety of roles.”

As the program moves forward and prepares for its first cohort of students in Fall 2020, the team hopes this program will equip students with the skills and experiences needed to conduct science in an innovative way.

“The metric of success is coming up with new and interesting ways to do science with an interdisciplinary approach,” explains Holtgrieve. “This is the goal for each of our students to achieve and take with them throughout their careers.”

Application and program details

Graduate students interested in the Future Rivers program are encouraged to apply in January 2020. For more Future Rivers program details, please visit earthlab.uw.edu/program-details.

Learn more

Ocean acidification study offers warnings for marine life, habitats

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Acidification of the world’s oceans could drive a cascading loss of biodiversity in some marine habitats, according to research published Nov. 21 in Nature Climate Change.

The work by biodiversity researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of Washington and colleagues in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and China, combines dozens of existing studies to paint a more nuanced picture of the impact of ocean acidification.

While most research in the field focuses on the impact of ocean acidification on individual species, the new work predicts how acidification will affect the living habitats such as corals, seagrasses and kelp forests that form the homes of other ocean species.

“This work demonstrates the value of international collaborations to address a problem that’s global in scope and crosses boundaries between distinct habitats and ecosystems,” said co-author Terrie Klinger, professor and director of the UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs who also co-directs the Washington Ocean Acidification Center. “We can begin to test predictions with data from different locations to better understand likely ecosystem responses to ocean acidification.”

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