Tag: University of Vermont

Six years ago when Sanjay Sharma took over as dean of the Grossman School of Business, he set his sights on an ambitious goal: to become the top MBA program in the country for sustainable innovation.

That dream became reality on Oct. 31 when The Princeton Review ranked UVM’s Sustainable Innovation MBA program No. 1 on its 2018 list of “Best Green MBA” programs. UVM took over the top spot from the University of Oregon, which dropped to No. 4 behind second-place Yale and Portland State, followed by No. 5 Stanford.

The decision to replace a traditional 38-year-old MBA program with the nation’s first one-year AACSB-accredited MBA focused entirely on sustainable innovation seemed risky, but according to Sharma, was perfect timing. He’d been sensing a growing demand by companies seeking managers to convert global sustainability challenges into business opportunities for triple bottom line performance – a measure of a company’s financial, social and environmental impact – was undeniable.

“We were fortunate that the Vermont brand and UVM’s strengths and identity resonated with the sustainability ethos,” says Sharma. “While it was a major risk for the school, we decided to take a big leap and go ‘all in’ because we were convinced that the future of business education was to educate managers for tomorrow so that they could develop profitable business solutions to societal needs and demands for the next 50 years.” 

The “Best Green MBA” rankings are based on students’ assessments of how well their school is preparing them in environmental/sustainability and social responsibility issues, and for a career in a green job market. UVM’s Sustainable Innovation MBA was also included in The Princeton Review’s list of the 267 Outstanding On-Campus MBA programs. This list was based on data from surveys of 23,000 students attending the schools and of administrators at the graduate schools.

Worldwide practicums with top companies, access to exclusive job network set program apart 

A number of aspects of UVM’s Sustainable Innovation MBA set it apart from other programs. The course curriculum, based entirely on sustainability and innovation, is delivered by world class faculty in this arena under four modules: foundations of management; building a sustainable enterprise; growing a sustainable enterprise; and focusing on sustainability.

Following coursework, students engage in a three-month practicum – a capstone experiential project to address issues such as poverty, climate change, and the environment – with companies like PepsiCo, 1% For the Planet, Philips, Ingersoll Rand, Burton, Keurig, and Facebook. Students traveled to India, Mexico, Ghana, Brazil, Denmark, China, Kenya, and Guatemala to complete practicums, which have led to sustainability and innovation-related jobs at Ben & Jerry’s, King Arthur Flour, Pottery Barn, Seventh Generation and others.

Students also have access to a new career management system called “Launch” designed to propel them into careers in renewable energy, clean tech, affordable health care, inclusive business, entrepreneurship within larger companies, start-ups, and other innovative ventures. The program’s Changemaker Network, comprised of more than 125 companies and individuals focused on sustainable business, puts students in direct contact with mentors who help them land jobs within the program’s condensed 12-month format.

“We devote one hundred percent of our energy to creating a robust back end that injects people into an opportunity network that helps students realize their personal and professional dreams,” says professor and Sustainable Innovation MBA co-director Stuart Hart, the world’s leading authority on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy. “If you are a student interested in figuring out how to use the power of business and enterprise to make a positive impact on the world, that’s all we do.”

The Princeton Review ranking comes on the heels of a No. 8 ranking by Corporate Knights – a Toronto-based media and research company focused on clean capitalism – in its “Better World MBA Rankings.” The UVM program moved up two spots from last year and is now ranked third among U.S. schools, trailing only Duquesne University and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Corporate Knights ranks programs based on the number of core courses, institutes and centers, and faculty research produced in the last three years related to sustainability, including corporate responsibility, human rights, and ethics.

“We are excited to teach and help launch the next generation of innovative leaders who will create the kinds of transformative sustainable business models and strategies that the world demands,” says professor and co-director David Jones. “We are also honored to have our unique MBA program recognized by these organizations after just our third cohort of graduates.”

Source: UVM News

On an eighty-degree morning this July, Suma Lashof ‘18 stops her car in front of a ranch house in Milton, Vermont, and walks to the front door. She knocks and two smiling, gray-haired people, Barry and Maureen Genzlinger, open the door.  “Good to see you again,” Barry says. “So, what do we need?”

“Some more poop,” says Lashof, with a grin.

A few minutes later, Lashof steps inside a wooden cage in the Genzlinger’s basement—where Barry runs a home-grown bat rehabilitation center. Over Lashof’s head, two tiny bats sleep under a white cloth on the wall. Crouching beneath them, she carefully picks up tiny pellets of bat guano off the floor with tweezers and deposits them into a plastic vial.

This is undergraduate research in the real world. An environmental science major in the Honors College, Lashof is studying the DNA of two species of bats in Vermont, little brown bats and big brown bats. “Historically, these species have been all around the state,” she says, “but with the arrival of white-nose syndrome, many bats have died and their ranges are shifting.” Lashof gets the DNA from feces she’s collecting at the bottom of bat nursery colonies across the Champlain Valley—barns, attics, big trees, rock piles.

Her task: provide genetic verification for a method that Alyssa Bennett, the small mammals specialist for Vermont’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, uses to visually distinguish the two bat species. When Bennett examines unknown fecal pellets, she sorts big vs. little brown bats based on the pellets’ size, color, and insect remains. This helps state biologists to monitor the location and health of roosting bat colonies—without having to catch or handle these sensitive creatures. Working with Bennett, and UVM biology professor Bill Kilpatrick, Lashof aims to confirm that the visual technique is fully accurate. In other words, her senior thesis could go far beyond describing bat science—it could help conserve bats.

Research realities

That is, it could help if Lashof can get her experiments to work. It’s Monday, August 21, the afternoon of the much-anticipated solar eclipse. Some people are already gathering on the sidewalk outside Marsh Life Science building to look up with dark glasses. But inside, Lashof and professor Kilpatrick are hunched over a laptop in his office examining long sequences of letters representing mitochondrial DNA base pairs— CTAACGGCCTCTATTTTA. “Um, how are we doing?” she says, repeating the question of a reporter who dropped by. “Well, we’re…” then she pauses, sighs, and smiles diplomatically, “we’re doing some problem-solving.”

 

Lashof’s summer-long research effort—with financial support from the Office of Undergraduate Research, including a Green Mountain Scholar Fellowship—has yielded good-quality DNA from ten bat colonies (plus the Milton guano as a control group) and she’s learned a lot of lab techniques. But, so far, Lashof has not been able to “identify a primer that will work,” she says, to properly amplify the DNA so that “we can clean it and send it off to be sequenced. If we don’t have that, we can’t continue. But we don’t know why it isn’t working.”

This is not failure, Bill Kilpatrick notes, this is education. “There is an advantage of getting into research,” he says. “You do a lab in a genetics course, and, of course, it’s going to work. It’s designed that way.” But Lashof’s struggles to amplify the DNA of these bats requires a much deeper dive into what it actually means to experiment.

“I had this idealized picture in my mind that there this is clear methodology and it’s just simply going to work,” Lashof says. “That’s not the reality of research.”

Deadly disease

It’s a Thursday afternoon in September during the first week of classes and first-year students keep walking into the lab where Lashof is working, looking for their lecture hall.  For more than a month she’s been developing custom primers, searching for ones that can amplify the genes for two proteins—cytochrome B and cytochrome oxidase 1—she wants to use as a tool to distinguish the two bat species. Each time she runs the experiment—preparing a goopy gel that she tests with an electrical current and then stains—she looks for tell-tale bands in the gel, “around the 200 base-pair mark,” she says. And each time, no band. So she tries again.

As she waits for the electrical current to do its work on the gel, Lashof talks about her love of dancing and her role as the president of the student-run Orchesis Dance Company. She describes her mentoring work in the DREAM program with a seven-year-old refugee child from Nepal. She talks about growing up in the small town of Sudbury, Vermont, and about how her parents, two moms, have supported her to come to UVM. And she talks about bats. She thinks they get a bad rap.

“They’re not scary,” she says, “they’re beautiful.” For more than sixty-five million years, these creatures have been masters of the nighttime air, flexing their elongated finger bones to change the camber of the live skin with which they fly—and echolocating with pinpoint precision to catch beetles and mosquitoes on the wing.  “I didn’t know much about them before I came to college. Now they are my passion,” she says. “It all started with a paper in a class on invasive species.” There she learned that nine species of North American bats are being devastated by white-nose syndrome, a deadly disease caused by an invasive fungus.  Since white-nose arrived in North America in 2006, it has killed more than six million bats in 31 states—including many bats in Vermont, especially little brown bats that were once common but have now been reduced by more than ninety percent and are listed by the state as endangered.

“OK, let’s get upstairs to look at this under the UV light,” she says. In a few minutes, she and professor Kilpatrick are bathed in an eerie glow, staring intently at her block of gel shining purple on a light table under a plastic shield. “OK, let’s see,” Lashof says with caution. They lean in closer.

“Whoa. Yes, we have something. That looks like a band,” Lashof says.

“Sure does,” says Kilpatrick.

“That’s around the 200 mark,” says Lashof, with a laugh and huge smile. “Yay! Finally, after a month of trying.”

“Success,” says Kilpatrick.

And again

It’s a Friday afternoon later in the fall—after “a busy, busy week,” of classes and lab time, Suma Lashof says—and she’s practicing a dance routine by herself in an old racquetball court at the Patrick Gymnasium. Tomorrow is the open audition for Orchesis and she’s going to be demoing this routine that she performed last year. “It’s a fast one. I need to practice it to make sure I have it right,” she says. Lashof cues up the theme to Westworld and soon is spinning and soaring across the wooden floor. She’s happy her bat research has overcome a major hurdle, but there is a lot more work to do before her study is done. Sometimes science is a bit like dancing. “I love doing this,” Suma Lashof says, starting the music again. “I’m going to stretch a little bit more. And then I’m going to do it all over again.”

Source: UVM News

Given that they’ve just launched an entire new consumer product line, this group of UVM employees is surprisingly calm, even content. Alfina gazes at a stranger and flicks an ear. Gillian nibbles a student’s sleeve.

Both are members of UVM’s teaching herd, 48 cows under the care of students in the university’s Cooperative for Real Education in Agricultural Management, or CREAM, program.

Until recently, the nearly 100,000 gallons of milk the cows produce each month at a high-tech teaching barn and milking parlor at UVM’s Spear Street farm mostly went to Agri-Mark Cooperative to make Cabot cheese. But beginning in the late summer, ice cream in seven flavors (and counting) was added to the herd’s, and the students’, portfolio.  

CREAM member Leslie Rivers, a senior Animal Science major from McLean, Virginia, thinks the product expansion presents an educational opportunity.    

“Anything that helps UVM students realize what we do in CREAM” – that is feed, milk, and attend to the health of the herd 24/7 and run a complex business – “is awesome,” she says.

The opportunity is also culinary.

Those ice cream flavors, from Proctor Maple Cream, made with maple syrup from UVM’s Proctor Maple Research Center, to Sweet CREAM to Catamount Tracks, are earning rave reviews from students, faculty, staff and community members at a revamped version of a university legend – the UVM Dairy Bar – that opened in the Davis Center Marketplace on the first day of classes this semester.   

Ice cream heritage

The new dairy bar has big shoes to fill.

Its predecessor opened in 1950 in Carrigan Hall – razed in 2006 to make way for the Davis Center – as the retail outlet for the ice cream Dairy Science faculty and students made using milk from the UVM herd. It was a favorite for generations of UVM students and Burlington residents. But the operation became too costly as time went on. The university was forced to shutter it in the early 1990s, leaving legions of fans bereft.

“The question I got more than any other when I met alumni or people in the community was, ‘When are you bringing the Dairy Bar back?’” says Tom Vogelmann, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. 

The answer was always a vague one until Kate Finley Woodruff arrived in the deans’ office in 2015 as associate dean for student services. Finley Woodruff had spent 18 years at Cabot Creamery learning how a commodity like milk can be transformed into a range of branded products with wide appeal. “As soon as I got the job, I began thinking about the value-added aspect and how what we represent here at the college” could form the basis of a compelling brand, she says.

Vogelmann, who had been thinking about the same issue with other members of his team for years, was intrigued. When Finley Woodruff broached the idea of re-launching UVM ice cream, he gave her the green light to investigate further.

Milk from the CREAM herd at the beginning of the supply chain was a given. Next step, the St. Albans Coop signed on to produce the mix of milk, cream and sugar that provides the raw material for ice cream. Final production would come from Wilcox Ice Cream in Arlington, Vermont, where the “Ice Cream Master” is Howard Wilcox, a 1966 UVM grad who first honed his skills at the original UVM Dairy Bar. 

Wilcox’s ice cream bears more than a passing resemblance to the old Dairy Bar product.  “I would say that the formulas that we are making for UVM today are very similar or maybe exactly what was used at the Dairy Bar,” Wilcox says.

First scoops

Retail was the last critical step, and UVM Dining quickly partnered on the effort. 

“It was a good fit for our Vermont First program,” which sources locally grown food for the university’s dining program, says UVM Dining director Melissa Zelazny. When, late in the spring 2017 semester Ben & Jerry’s announced it was vacating the space it rented in the Davis Center, a plan to reboot the Dairy Bar in DC went into overdrive. 

The production team came through; Wilcox delivered its first shipment of ice cream to UVM Dining in mid-August. UVM Dining did its part, installing ice cream storage and serving equipment in the old Ben & Jerry’s space by early August.  And Finley Woodruff’s old friends at Cabot donated design services; the Dairy Bar had a logo, color scheme, signage and large wall mural, all in a fitting retro style, by late August.  

The effort paid off. Since the opening, the Dairy Bar has sold over 300 gallons of ice cream, serving more than 250 people on its best day. For Family and Homecoming Weekend, the Dairy Bar held a throwback 75 Cent Cone Day and doled out more than 650 scoops. And Brennan’s and the residence halls have served another 2,000 gallons. The space has also given UVM Dining a venue for smoothies, which are popular with students.

“We’re happy,” says Zelazny.  “Every day it seems sales go up, and people definitely like the ice cream.”

There’s an added bonus for Vogelman, over and above bringing back a dearly loved campus tradition.

“UVM ice cream highlights the food system we are creating here on campus, and the economic ripples created throughout Vermont,” he says. “The students in CREAM are getting hands-on understanding — not only of dairy management, but of how their work fits into the overall food system.” 

To one alum, it only makes sense that the Dairy Bar is back.

“I think it’s great to have something that reconnects to the past and connects to such an important part of UVM’s history,” says Fred (Chico) Lager, Class of ’75, who with his wife, Yvette Pigeon ’80 G’87 ’99, has supported other efforts to preserve the Dairy Bar’s memory. 

Lager should know. He’s the former CEO of Ben & Jerry’s. 

Source: UVM News

Have you ever snacked on a bag of salty, crunchy chips and gotten the feeling that you just couldn’t stop? You’re not alone. That irresistible sensation is completely by design. It’s just one of the ways the processed food industry tempts us to eat more of “the food we hate to love,” as author and journalist Michael Moss illuminated at the 2017 Aiken Lecture on Nov. 1.

Drawing on his best-selling book, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” Moss took the audience, sitting in a packed Ira Allen Chapel, on an exposé of this “unholy trinity,” the ingredients the trillion-dollar industry “relies on to make their products easy, irresistible, and cheap.”

Moss used potato chips as an example. The satisfying “mouthfeel” you get, said Moss, is exactly what the industry is after; chips can be as much as 50 percent fat. Another key part of the chip equation is their crunch: The industry has figured out that the more noise a chip makes, the more of them you’ll want to eat.

And consumers seem to be paying the price. According to the NIH, more than one in three adults, and one in six children and adolescents, are considered to have obesity in the United States. Those numbers have big implications – some estimate associated healthcare costs at more than $150 billion nationwide.

“Crawling around the food system is like reading a detective story,” said Moss, whose work as an investigative reporter with the New York Times on the dangers of contaminated meat won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2010.

What Moss has unearthed in his food systems detective work is lots of deliberate product development, and marketing, to make us consume more. Some tactics, says Moss, echo those used by big tobacco. (In fact, Philip Morris owned Kraft Foods until 2007.)  

Moss points to Lunchables as a case study. In addition to the salty, fatty chow inside every package, it’s marketing that makes the product so successful with children, said Moss. “Lunchables give kids the feeling of empowerment.”  Their slogan: “Lunchtime is All Yours.”

Where do we go from here? Moss said the work starts when we’re young, when our strongest food memories and associations are formed. “In talking with kids, we need to help them see information about food as empowerment.”

Since information is power, when you’re reading an ingredient list, Moss suggested paying attention to what order things are listed (the biggest item comes first, and the smallest comes last). “You have to be careful in the grocery store,” said Moss, as he walked through the ingredient list of a frozen broccoli, potato and cheddar dinner, in which broccoli was the very last ingredient. 

As for the larger food industry, Moss hopes produce growers and the makers of other whole foods will have fun marketing their goods, as processed foods titans have, rather than preaching. Moss worked with an ad agency to test this fun-first approach, and developed a marketing campaign for the much-loathed vegetable, broccoli. Taking a page out of the processed food industry’s handbook, the campaign was built on a fictitious brand battle, pitting broccoli against kale, the trendy vegetable of the moment. One ad from the campaign read: “Broccoli: Now 43 percent less pretentious than kale.”

During his visit to campus, Moss also spoke with a group of 25 food systems students (below). He seemed to speak to them as he ended his talk with a call for exposing the truth behind the things we eat. “We have to take an investigative reporting approach to food systems.”

Source: UVM News

A new study shows that people who perceive their employer as committed to environmental and community-based causes will, in turn, engage in green behavior and local volunteerism, with one caveat: their boss must display similarly ethical behavior.

The forthcoming study in the Journal of Business Ethics by Kenneth De Roeck, assistant professor at the University of Vermont, and Omer Farooq of UAE University, shows that people who work for socially and environmentally responsible companies tend to identify more strongly with their employer, and as a result, increase their engagement in green and socially responsible behaviors like community volunteerism.

“When you identify with a group, you tend to adopt its values and goals as your own,” says De Roeck. “For example, if you are a fan who identifies with the New England Patriots, their objective to win the Super Bowl becomes your objective too. If they win it, you will say ‘we,’ rather than ‘they,’ won the Super Bowl, because being a fan of the New England Patriots became part of your own identity.”

That loyalty goes out the window, however, if employees don’t perceive their immediate supervisor as ethical, defined as conduct that shows concern for how their decisions affect others’ well-being. Results show that the propensity for the company’s environmental initiatives to foster employees’ green behaviors disappears if they think their boss has poor ethics. Employees’ engagement in volunteer efforts in support of their company’s community-based initiatives also declines if they believe their boss is not ethical, though not as dramatically.

“When morally loaded cues stemming from the organization and its leaders are inconsistent, employees become skeptical about the organization’s ethical stance, integrity, and overall character,” says De Roeck. “Consequently, employees refrain from identifying with their employers, and as a result, significantly diminish their engagement in creating social and environmental good.”

Companies as engines for positive social change 

Findings of the study, based on surveys of 359 employees at 35 companies in the manufacturing industry (consumer goods, automobile, and textile), could provide insight for companies failing to reap the substantial societal benefits of CSR.

“This isn’t another story about how I can get my employees to work better to increase the bottom line, it’s more about how I can get employees to create social good,” says De Roeck, whose research focuses on the psychological mechanisms explaining employees’ reactions to, and engagement in, CSR. “Moreover, our measure of employees’ volunteer efforts consists of actions that extend well beyond the work environment, showing that organizations can be a strong engine for positive social change by fostering, through the mechanism of identification, a new and more sustainable way of life to their employees.” 

De Roeck says organizations wanting to boost their social performance by encouraging employee engagement in socially responsible behaviors need to ensure that employees perceive their ethical stance and societal engagement as authentic. To do so, and avoid any perception of greenwashing – the promotion of green-based initiatives despite not practicing them fully – organizations should strive to ensure consistency between CSR engagement and leaders’ ethical stance by training supervisors about social and ethical responsibility. Organizations should also be cautious in hiring and promoting individuals to leadership positions who fit with the company CSR strategy and ethical culture.

“Organizations should not treat CSR as an add-on activity to their traditional business models, but rather as something that should be carefully planned and integrated into the company strategy, culture, and DNA,” says De Roeck. “Only then will employees positively perceive CSR as a strong identity cue that will trigger their identification with the organization and, as a result, foster their engagement in such activities through socially responsible behaviors.”

Source: UVM News

It’s a humid summer morning at Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., but seemingly a long way from its bustle. Heavy mist hangs in the low ground as rays of sun break through the clouds, illuminating rows of white headstones that stretch endlessly into the distance. Flags wave lazily in the breeze, as birds flit between flowering trees. For now, the cemetery is, as you might expect, quiet. But by day’s end, thousands of visitors, ninety groundskeepers, and somewhere between twenty and thirty funeral services will transform Arlington with activity.

Seeing these 624 stunning acres in the peaceful early morning hours, says Greg Huse, is one of the best parts of his job as Arlington’s urban forester. Huse, who graduated from UVM in 1994 with a degree in forestry, is the self-described “tree guy” here, the country’s premiere military cemetery. “We consider the trees living memorials,” says Huse. “In a way, just by being on the grounds and growing, they’re honoring those that are buried here.”

“Tree guy” is no small job: Arlington is home to more than 8,700 trees, with 369 different species and varieties at last count. “We cover a lot of ground,” Huse says with a smile, nodding in the direction of his colleague, Arlington’s agronomist Aaron Pettit, who looks after about 440 football fields worth of turf.         

Among the trees in Huse’s care are magnificent old oaks in the cemetery’s original sections, which trace back to Robert E. Lee’s estate. “Several of them pre-date the first burials,” says Huse, “so they’re at least two hundred and fifty years old.” Arlington was designated a national cemetery in 1864 during the Civil War, and is now the resting place for service members from every American conflict. “I find it fascinating to think, what have these trees witnessed? Wars, the first Memorial Day.”

In addition to caring for ancient giants, Huse and team plant about 250 new trees every year. Diversity is better for the ecosystem, and increasing the variety of species helps Arlington continue to achieve higher levels of arboretum certification.

Huse is one of those rare people who knew what he wanted to do from an early age. He grew up in northern New Jersey, and spent vacations visiting his grandparents in New Hampshire (his grandfather was a 1923 UVM grad). “Their house was on the side of a mountain, so I was always out in the forest,” says Huse.

Once at UVM, Huse was completely immersed in the world of trees. He was active in the student chapter of the Society of American Foresters and spent lots of time with advisor Peter Hannah (now retired) and Professor Emeritus Carl Newton. Huse also remembers loving dendrology class with John Shane, now a lecturer emeritus. “Our class was in the woods doing field work, and John picked up a plant and said, ‘Does anybody know what this is?’ It was poison ivy, and everybody was freaking out,” laughs Huse. “He started rubbing it against his face, and taught us that some people just aren’t allergic. I will always remember that.”

Huse also studied abroad in Australia and did two internships. “I got a wonderful education that really set me up for having a great career in this field,” the alumnus says. He went on to work in forestry consulting, eventually moving into arboriculture, or managing individual trees versus whole populations, and took a break to hike the Appalachian Trail, which “reinforced my love of nature.”

Most recently, Huse was the Smithsonian’s arborist, where he cared for 1,850 trees in their gardens and museum grounds. “It was just madness,” says Huse. “I was right on the National Mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. Millions of people, sirens, helicopters, motorcades. Here, it’s very busy and active, but it’s a more manageable pace.”

One year into his job at Arlington, he’s still discovering new things on those early morning strolls through the cemetery. “I’ll see a monument I haven’t noticed, or a tree in a certain light,” Huse says. “It’s very rewarding and humbling to have that juxtaposition of life and death and to have the responsibility to care for these living memorials.”

Source: UVM News

Students arrived at a UVM dining hall on a recent Tuesday evening, and, like any other night, they perused the offerings and returned to their tables with small plates. They sat with their friends, chatted about classes, and laughed, but this was no ordinary meal. Every dish shared a common element: they each featured an invasive species as a primary ingredient.

The plates, colorful and artfully arranged, evoked a tapas menu at a gourmet restaurant: pan seared marinated perch served in a house made taco bowl and finished with a Tequila pineapple salsa. Green crabs, dipped in a seasoned flour and fried whole. A salad featuring dandelion greens, arugula, watercress, carrots, beets, and fiddleheads with Tomme cheese and a prickly pear vinaigrette. Sweet wild boar, slow roasted, pulled, and glazed in a maple apple reduction, served with pickled mustard greens and paired with a whole-grain maple agave mustard. And finally, the periwinkle pappardelle: periwinkles (marine snails) poached in white wine served over VT Fresh house cut pasta in clarified garlic butter.

Every dish was a hit.

“We pretty much sold out,” said Eric Caravan, executive chef of Harris Millis Dining. “We had five times more traffic than we do on a regular night.”

“I’m impressed by how much people are willing to try,” said Joe Roman, a conservation ecologist and research associate professor at UVM, whose work provided the inspiration for the event.

Roman is the cofounder of eattheinvaders.org, a website devoted to educating people about edible invasive species and sharing recipes for preparing them into tasty meals. Invasive species thrive when they do not have a natural predator, so the idea behind eating them is that human consumption can help keep non-native populations in check, thereby supporting the health of native ecosystems.

Researchers note that this approach may be more successful for some species than others, and that creating profitable markets can run the risk of encouraging the propagation (rather than eradication) of problem species. While a gastronomic solution may not be a silver bullet, it can help raise awareness and direct attention to alternative management strategies.

New Ingredients, Familiar Flavors

Stanhope Nwosu chewed thoughtfully as he tasted a periwinkle. “Chewy,” he said. “It reminds me of clams.”

His friend Kate Vesely recalled that she had seen the marine snails at the ocean, but that she didn’t know they were edible. She, meanwhile, was enthusiastic about the wild boar. “It’s really good. It’s like pulled pork.”

“We got to play with ingredients we had never used before,” said Chef Caravan. “We were able to get down to the individual taste of each item and play around with it. It was a lot of fun!”

Although the dinner was a one-time event, UVM Dining sustainability manager Emily Portman says it was a trial run of sorts. “We were curious to see how students reacted,” she said.

Going forward, Chef Caravan and his team will be integrating some of the ingredients into their rotating menu, and sharing their experience with other chefs across campus.

UVM at the forefront

Red’s Best, a fishermen’s cooperative out of the Boston area, supplied the green crabs and periwinkles for the event. Mary Parks, who manages environmental compliance and outreach for the co-op, was on hand with some live green crabs to prompt conversations with students. Some stopped by the table to pick them up and talk with Parks, who highlighted that UVM is on the cutting edge by incorporating them into the student dining experience.

“Green crabs are an emerging market we are trying to support,” said Parks. “We only started offering them within the last year—this is the first order we’ve filled from a university.”

And it’s not just the green crabs. “As far as I know, this is the first time a university dining hall has offered a meal focused on invasive species,” said Roman.

Roman hopes the experience will stick with people. “Exposing people to edible invasive species can do three important things,” he said. “First, hopefully it expands the foods people are willing to eat because they have had a great meal. Second, it does the right thing for native ecosystems and it has a lower ecological footprint. Third, it can get people outside and learning more about nature.”

Source: UVM News

There was no golden dome on the top of the Davis Center, but the fourth floor of the UVM’s student center bore more than a passing resemblance to the Vermont State House on Monday morning. 

Nearly 50 state legislators took up residence there from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., on hand for UVM’s fifth annual Legislative Summit.

After addressing education, climate change, the Vermont economy and healthcare policy in past years, the summit’s topic this year was “Water: How Will We Ensure That It Is Clean and Plentiful.” The summit was divided into three sub-areas: groundwater contamination, causes and consequences of algal bloom and Lake Champlain as sentinel.

UVM faculty in disciplines ranging from natural resources, geology and public administration to agriculture and civil and environmental engineering shared with legislators the key takeaways from their research programs, with the idea that the information would help them do their jobs.

“The goal of this year’s Legislative Summit is to maximize the exchange of information between scientists at the University of Vermont who study various aspects of water and legislators from Montpelier, who have to make policy about these very issues,” said Richard Galbraith, UVM’s vice president for research, who was on hand for the event. 

The nature of Vermont’s citizen legislature makes this kind of exchange important, said Chris Bray (’85), chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy and a former member of the UVM Board of Trustees.   

“One of the glories of Vermont is the citizen legislature,” he said. “I love the legislature, but I also realize that we don’t have the expertise for a lot of very complicated things that come our way. I’m always up for opportunities to help us educate ourselves, and I think that’s where an event like the summit can really help,” he said.

Faculty participants were glad to be of service.  

Mindy Morales-Williams, an assistant professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, whose work focuses on the relationship between blue-green algae blooms and carbon cycles, said the event capsulizes why she does research.

“It’s so important for us to communicate our science and getting our science out there,” she said. “Often we are in a bubble, and we just go about our business doing our science. But without communicating it and influencing legislation and policy, there’s no point in doing it.”

Bray hopes that the summit can lead to even more collaboration in the future.

“I’d like to turn this into an ongoing dialogue, where UVM faculty can participate in a less academic way than they’re accustomed to but still contribute to the work of the state,” he said. “They could be providing testimony or consulting with individual legislators.”

This year’s event was organized as a “slam.” Faculty presenters in each of the topic areas had four minutes to give an overview of their research, then repaired to one of several round tables. Legislators could then have a more extended Q&A with the faculty member of their choice.  

“Instead of having long presentations and a relatively small amount of discussion, we changed it to short presentations with a large amount of discussion to increase the interaction between the two groups,” Galbraith said.

Judging from the animated discussions that were taking place at the tables throughout the course of the morning, the change was a constructive one.

Faculty participating in the Legislative Summit included George Pinder, Eric
 Roy and Raju Badireddy (groundwater contamination); Breck Bowden, Chuck Ross and Chris Koliba (causes and consequences of algal bloom);  and Ellen Marsden, Mindy Morales-Williams, and Andrew Schroth (Lake Champlain as sentinel).  

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont’s Spatial Analysis Lab reached a milestone late last month. The lab – which provides Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, services to customers around the country – crossed the $1 million threshold in wages paid over the last five years to the UVM students who worked there.

“It’s a significant accomplishment,” said Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, director of the lab, known as the SAL. “The lab is both giving students an important learning experience that will help them with their careers and helping them defray college expenses.” 

The financial resources to pay students in the SAL rarely come from traditional sources, like the university or the federal government, O’Neil-Dunne said. They are generated by the lab’s paying customers – and therefore represent an additional source of student financial support that many other schools do not offer.

Most of the SAL’s work focuses on helping cities and towns accurately assess the tree canopy in their community, a research program the university developed in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service. Increasingly, cities are seeking to manage their tree cover, because urban trees are now known to provide a variety of benefits, from improving air quality to reducing flooding and water pollution to reducing temperature during the hot summer months.

More than 80 cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, have hired the SAL to assess their urban tree canopy using imagery acquired from planes and satellites. The cities are using this information for a variety of purposes from helping set tree canopy goals to targeting areas for new tree plantings.

The student work takes a variety of forms, said O’Neil-Dunne. Entry level students primarily do quality control, combing through GIS data to make sure the mapping of objects, like trees or building, is accurate, based on the imagery. Experienced students can become team leaders, training new students and coordinating student teams. Students with the most experience do analysis and write reports.

“It’s serious work,” O’Neil-Dunne said. “They have a budget to manage and a timeline to meet.”  

Students working in the SAL earn $10 an hour at the outset and $12 an hour and above if they take on management and analysis roles.

Nancy Mathews, dean of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, said the career preparation the SAL provides students is unusual.

“The opportunity for students to grow and learn about geospatial practices through the SAL is unparalleled on our campus and many others,” she said. “Students gain direct experience tackling diverse applications for a wide range of agencies. There can be no better skill building to help prepare them for their careers in the environment and natural resources.”

Their experience working in the SAL has helped recent UVM graduates land jobs at firms like Apple, Google, Esri, Mapbox and AECOM.

Thanks in part to the work she did at the SAL, 2016 graduate Alison Peek was hired as a GIS technician at Apple Computer to enhance and validate mapping data, the Anthropology major and Geospatial Systems minor said.  

“The experience that I had at the SAL was similar to the actual work I was going to do at Apple,” she says, and was a key factor in the company’s decision to hire her. 

“My current career path was heavily influenced by a professor who hired me on when I was an undergraduate,” said O’Neill-Dunne. “It gives me great pleasure to know that we are helping communities chart a greener future while at the same time developing the next generation of GIS professionals.”

Source: UVM News

Growing up in southern India, Srinivas Venugopal witnessed people living in extreme poverty on a daily basis. He often marveled at their entrepreneurial abilities to meet basic consumption needs by selling tea or umbrellas or patching punctured bicycle tires on the streets of Chennai. 

Those experiences inspired Venugopal, assistant professor in the Grossman School of Business, to start a technology-based social venture at age 23. His goal: improving education for low-income students in rural India through technology. He currently runs a non-profit that has increased the economic and educational opportunities of young women in the slums of Chennai, which also informs his research on subsistence marketplaces.

“Growing up middle class with poverty all around makes you want to understand it,” says Venugopal, who teaches courses on sustainable marketing. “I was fascinated by people who were trying to be productive and make a difference in their own lives. They would say, ‘Yeah, I live in poverty, but I get up at 5 a.m. every morning to sell tea on the street.’ That’s an interesting thing to study — people trying to overcome terrific constraints they face on a day-to-day basis.” 

Living at the Base of the Pyramid

Since arriving at UVM in 2016, Venugopal has published widely on the intertwined nature of consumption and entrepreneurship in subsistence marketplaces. His bottom-up approach to research involves immersing himself in communities to better understand the lives of local entrepreneurs who live at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP), often living on a few dollars a day. It’s an approach that was popularized by Stuart Hart, UVM’s Steven Grossman Endowed Chair in Sustainable Business. 

“The marketing world has done a fantastic job of meeting needs in affluent contexts, but to me the ultimate marketing challenge is how to meet the basic needs in sectors like education, healthcare, finance and nutrition in these contexts of poverty,” says Venugopal. “The cornerstone of the Grossman School is seeing how businesses can be used as an important force for making the world better, and my own philosophy and research fits squarely within that broader paradigm.” 

Venugopal’s research has taken him and his students to India, Tanzania, Argentina and a refugee camp in Uganda where they use qualitative research techniques such as interviews, videography, photography, role playing, map drawing and village walks. “Different contexts have different rhythms and you need to start with an immersive exercise rather than with pre-conceived notions inherited from research done in the context of affluence,” he says.

“Srini’s not hovering above in a helicopter collecting big data,” says Hart, a world authority on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy. “He’s embedded in those contexts on the ground, which is similar to our approach to business at the Base of the Pyramid. We share a common perspective that to be successful, business has to be developed from the inside out by co-creating a value proposition business model from within with local entrepreneurs. Trying to figure out how to market and sell to the poor is not what we’re about.”

In a forthcoming journal article, Venugopal underscores the importance of understanding the nuanced lives of 25 women entrepreneurs who face multiple limitations in India’s patriarchal society. One woman, who makes $10 a month running a small bottle pickling business, can’t expand because her husband won’t let her work outside the home. Over time, however, he becomes impressed with her entrepreneurial skills — and the accompanying economic benefits — and agrees to let her sell within the broader community.

“If you view her circumstances with an economic lens and that she only makes $10 a month you would miss all of the micro-level transformations, starting with how she sees herself and the barriers she is breaking,” says Venugopal. “She no longer has to depend on her husband for money and told me that she was proud to be able to buy a chocolate for her son with her own money.”

Changing lives though research  

Once Venugopal understands the local context in which entrepreneurs operate, he theorizes ways to improve their circumstances, often testing it with an experiment. He recently employed an entrepreneurial education program for 750 women in India to see if it improved a set of empowerment indicators. Many of the women have benefitted from the program and are now able to contribute to the family budget, having a voice in household purchases for the first time.

Venugopal conducts much of his research through his non-profit, which offers classes by a local Ph.D student to girls studying for critical matriculation exams. He’s currently applying for a Catalyst Award grant through the Gund Institute for Environment to purchase 20 GPS systems as part of an experiment to help low-income fishermen struggling to locate fish after a tsunami changed local ecological patterns. The fishermen, who learned where to fish from their fathers, are losing business to wealthier fishermen with larger boats equipped with GPS systems. 

Many of Venugopal’s experiences are chronicled in a new book he co-wrote titled “Voices from the Subsistence Marketplaces.” The goal of the book, he says, was to write stories about individuals in their own voices to show readers that they are more than just statistics.

“A lot of people talk about poverty without even having probably ever met or interacted with anyone who has experienced poverty,” he says. “It’s easy to reduce someone among the poor to a number, but you don’t really get to see them as full individuals who lead rich lives and have other facets just like us.”

Source: UVM News