Institute Fellow Lucy Hutyra part of team awarded NSF Research Traineeship Grant

Hariri Research Fellow Lucy Hutyra is part of the team of researchers awarded a $3 million, five-year National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) grant to prepare a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists to tackle urgent urban environmental problems through what is hoped will be a model graduate program for other universities. Hutyra is is co–principal investigator and associate director of the BU program Boston UniverCity: Partnering Graduate Students and Cities to Tackle Urban Environmental Challenges. Hutyra and her colleagues believe that federal actions to ease environmental protections give programs like Boston UniverCity an even greater urgency, explaining,

“This program is building and institutionalizing a commitment of scientists as civic actors. We have an opportunity, and arguably a responsibility, to take our basic science to the streets to solve the real-world problems of our community—and all of our communities. This grant creates a mechanism to do that.”

Hutyra is also a current recipient of the Hariri Institute and Digital Health Initiative (DHI) award for her project Coupled Human-Natural Dynamics in Urban Heat Islands: From Big Data to Local Policies. Her research centers on improving our understanding of the urban carbon cycle, particularly the role of vegetation and land use change on the flows of carbon between the biosphere and the atmosphere.

Because modeling and data analytics will be an important part of the training, the core faculty includes Hariri Faculty Affiliates Eric Kolaczyk, CAS professor of mathematics and statistics, as well as Mark Friedl, CAS professor of earth and environment. Institute Faculty Fellow and Initiative on Cities (IOC) Founding Executive Director Katherine Lusk will take part in the new program with IOC helping to connect students to government agencies that have expressed an eagerness to work with the University’s researchers on issues from reducing traffic congestion to planting trees to mitigate air pollution. She explains, 

“The hope is that we can build a model here that can be applied in other cities and universities so that students can more directly engage in the really sophisticated research that needs to be happening at the intersection of the urban environment and health.”

The Hariri Institute is heavily involved in looking at how emerging technologies can continue to contribute to the development of tools and platforms that address issues at the intersection of climate change, sustainability, and public health.

[Read the full article on BU Today]