“Few institutions,” writes the Chronicle of Higher Education, “have taken as comprehensive an approach as UVM, which has built a program that spans departments and comprises all aspects of student well-being — mental, physical, and social.” Read the Chronicle’s two part, special report, on UVM’s Wellness Environment.
Read “Incentives for Healthy Habits” and “Can a Wellness Program Curb Risky Behavior?”
Source: UVM News
Outside magazine profiles the Wellness Environment, a program, it writes, that has put UVM on the vanguard of student wellness programs. Read this story.
Source: UVM News
Sophomore animal science major Ellie Karasch cups a baby house sparrow in her hands, holding it steady while vet tech Jen Wolfe wraps its legs with clear tape, leaving a half-inch gap so the bird can balance and hop.
Wolfe is treating a condition called splay leg – the spread-eagled, immobilizing posture baby birds can acquire, often as a result of disease or faulty nest design, which makes them an easy target for predators if they’ve been blown to the ground. After the tape is removed in a few weeks, the legs should be back to normal and the bird can be released when it matures.
Nursing injured or abandoned juvenile birds, ducks, turtles, racoons, skunks, possums and other wildlife back to health, releasing them to the wild, and, in the process, educating the public about wildlife and conservation is the mission of the New England Wildlife Center in South Weymouth, Mass., where Karasch is interning this summer.
The 12-week internship is notable, says Karasch, who wants to be a veterinarian, because “it’s the most hand-on experience I’ve been able to do,” a major selling point on her eventual vet school applications.
The internship is notable in another respect. Even though the wildlife center is in the non-profit sector, where internships are typically unpaid, Karsach’s expenses – food, gas and housing – are being covered by a newly expanded and consolidated internship scholarship program at the University of Vermont.
The stipend she received from UVM as part of the program made the internship possible. “I don’t know what my summer would have been like without it,” Karasch says.
Internship leveling
Study after study shows that internships are an invaluable career-building experience for college students, helping them earn starting salaries between 10 and 26 percent higher than students who haven’t interned. Interns are also significantly more likely to receive full-time job offers than non-interns and, once employed, are more satisfied with their jobs and are promoted more quickly than their non-intern counterparts.
But internships carry a built-in inequity.
“Internships are likely to be paid in business and STEM fields,” says Amanda Chase, UVM’s internship coordinator, who manages the internship scholarship program.
“Nonprofits, government and media internships tend to be unpaid,” she says, forcing some students interested in those fields – especially those from less affluent families – to take on a summer job rather than an internship, which will help pay the bills but not advance their careers. Chase has led an effort rallying and coordinating support across the university to aid students in unpaid internships.
“Our goal is to remove, for as many students as possible, any financial burden that unpaid internships can represent,” says UVM provost David Rosowsky, who has advocated for the program and is working with the UVM Foundation to secure additional funding to build on the pool of more than $300,000 currently available.
As UVM is expanding its commitment to scholarships that support unpaid internships, it is also enhancing its efforts to place students in paid internships. About 65 percent of UVM internships are paid, according to Chase, which corresponds to national figures, and the university has recently helped students secure internships with Google, Fidelity Investments, Amazon, Microsoft, Pfizer, Under Armour, and Morgan Stanley, among other employers – which more often than not turn into job offers after graduation.
From internship to law school
It’s hard to imagine a bigger fan of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources’ Perennial Internship program than Nicole Pidala, a Natural Resources major and member of UVM’s Honors College who graduated in 2017.
The scholarship program – whose costs are split between the Rubenstein School and employers – supported a summer internship Pidala secured as a public communications assistant at Green Mountain Power’s 21-turbine wind farm along a ridge line in Lowell, Vt. The internship, in turn, helped her land a job as an operations assistant at SunCommon, Vermont’s largest installer of residential solar panels.
Pidala then marshalled both her internship and job experiences into a standout law school application to University of Virginia, where she will start in the fall, specializing in renewable energy law.
As crucial as the Green Mountain Power internship turned out to be for her trajectory, it wouldn’t have happened without UVM’s support. “I would not have been able to apply for it if it wasn’t paid,” she says.
Greater good
Sophomore political science major Daniel Felde benefited himself from a scholarship that supported his unpaid internship – working in Washington, D.C. for Nevada congresswoman Dina Titus of Nevada – and in the process learned why internship scholarship programs like UVM’s are needed.
“Most people working on Capitol Hill as staff assistants had an internship with a senator or representative at one point,” he says. Internship programs like UVM’s help ensure that interns – and eventually congressional staffers – come from economically diverse backgrounds. “Ultimately we need those types of people in government to provide that perspective,” he says.
Chase agrees. “When you think about it, if a whole set of industries tend to have internships that are unpaid,” she says, “and you have students who have to choose between a paid part-time job and an unpaid internship, that’s not a choice they should have to make. This program helps make these internships a more viable option for students of all income levels, which benefits both students and employers.”
Source: UVM News
A first-of-its-kind global study shows that children in 27 developing countries have better nutrition–when they live near forests.
The results turn on its head the common assumption that improving nutrition in poorer countries requires clearing forests for more farmland–and, instead, suggest that forest conservation could be an important tool for aid agencies seeking to improve the nutrition of children.
“The data show that forests aren’t just correlated with improvements in people’s diets,” says Ranaivo Rasolofoson, a scientist at the University of Vermont who led the new study. “We show that forests cause these improvements.”
The results were published on August 15 in the journal Science Advances.
Global Realities
More than two billion people in the developing world suffer from a lack of micronutrients–like vitamin A, sodium, iron and calcium. The result for children can be brain damage, stunted growth, and even death.
In response, food and farming programs have begun to consider how to do more than just increase production of staple crops, like rice and corn, to fight malnutrition. There is a growing global awareness that the fight against hunger requires getting people a larger range of nutrients needed to thrive.
The new study, led by a team at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Environment, examined data on children’s diets from 43,000 households across four continents. They found that being close to forests caused children to have at least 25% greater diversity in their diets compared to kids who lived farther away from forests.
“This is a powerful, actionable result,” says Taylor Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute and senior author on the paper. “It’s comparable to the impacts of some nutrition-focused agricultural programs.”
For example, the results of the new forest study are very similar to the results of an effort to introduce a fortified sweet potato in drought-prone areas of Mozambique and of a homestead food production program in Cambodia. In other words, protecting forests could be a central piece in integrated efforts to promote better nutrition.
Other recent studies have also suggested that forests help reduce micronutrient deficiency by increasing dietary diversity. “But their evidence has been mostly based on local case studies or simple correlations,” says Rasolofoson. “These are of limited use in forming a global view and in forming global policies.”
In contrast, the new study examined data for a huge diversity of households–in the Caribbean, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia and the Philippines–that were both close to and far away from forests. By painstakingly accounting for variables that could hide or mimic the impact of forests, the team of scientists was able to show that in otherwise similar households, the ones within or nearer to forests had better nutrition, on average, than those farther away.
Overall, the study reveals a global signal showing that forests can improve nutrition through numerous pathways. These include: providing a range of foods gathered in forests, benefits from wild pollinators that live in forests, income from forests products to buy food, and more productive use of mothers’ time–all of which can promote greater dietary diversity.
The team also took a closer look at a group of African countries, which added detail to their portrait of how forests help.
“We discovered that the positive effect of forests is greater for poor communities,” says Rasolofoson, a post-doctoral researcher at UVM who grew up in Madagascar. “But communities need at least some access to roads, markets, and education in order to get the most benefit from their forests.”
Additionally, the study presents evidence that forests can reduce vitamin A and iron deficiencies.
The team built their study and models from data–about children under the age of five– gathered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) between 2000 and 2013. The massive database enables researchers to study global links between health and the environment. The database features 30 years of USAID demographic and health surveys, with 150 variables for 500,000 households, to which the research team added spatial data on the environment.
False Choices
Forest conservation and children’s health have not often been seen as closely aligned issues.
“Our study shows that conservation and health can go hand in hand,” says Brendan Fisher, a professor in UVM’s Environmental Program in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a co-author on the new research.
The proven benefits of forest conservation include supporting the livelihoods of local communities, helping to slow climate change, and protecting wildlife. Now the new study adds strong evidence that forests promote the health of children through improved nutrition.
“Economic development and forest conservation are typically thought of as trade-offs–that leaders have to prioritize one or the other. This study helps to show that’s just not always, or even usually, true. More often than we think, it’s a false choice,” says Taylor Ricketts.
“This study is a wake-up call that people who work on forest conservation and those that work on improving children’s health should be working together and coordinating what they do,” says Brendan Fisher, a Fellow at UVM’s Gund Institute. “We are now seeing a lot more examples of how an integrated approach to some of the world’s most pressing problems pays double dividends.”
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Support for this research came from the Biodiversity Results and Integrated Development Gains Enhanced program of the USAID, the Luc Hoffmann Institute at WWF International under funding provided by the Mava Foundation, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding from the National Science Foundation DBI-1052875, and the Gordon and Betty Moore and Rockefeller Foundations as part of the Health & Ecosystems: Analysis of Linkages program.
Source: UVM News
A bus tour of Vermont might conjure images of adventurous retirees traipsing around the Ben & Jerry’s factory.
But the Vermont Catamounts bus that pulled out of the Davis Center circle on August 16 at 7:45 a.m. carried 16 people in the prime of their working lives – brand new UVM faculty, most of whom would start teaching or diving into their research within 10 days.
The occasion was the tour of Vermont’s working landscape that UVM Extension has organized for new faculty for the past six years.
The idea is “to help new faculty at the University of Vermont get a sense of how the state operates, what our communities are like and how the university is connected to them,” said UVM Extension director Chuck Ross, who served as tour guide.
“We’ve seen an array of incredible Vermonters today, innovators, leaders and pioneers, all hard-working people who’ve invested in their communities.”
Faculty came from a range of disciplines, including Math and Statistics, Biomedical Engineering, Nursing, Forestry, Education and Computer Science.
In all the tour made six stops showcasing the variety of enterprises that define Vermont’s agricultural sector. Destinations included the Green Mountain Dairy in Sheldon, the Choiniere Family Farm in Highgate Center, St. Albans City School Teaching Gardens and the Down to Earth Community Garden in St. Albans, the Boyden Valley Winery in Cambridge, UVM’s Proctor Maple Research Center in Underhill and the Jericho Settlers Farm in Jericho.
Faculty took a seat on the bus for a variety of reasons.
Valerie Wood, a new research faculty member in the Center for Disability and Community Inclusion, “thought it was really important to understand the relationship between UVM, Vermont and Vermonters” and how the abundance of knowledge at the university is shared with communities. “This was the perfect opportunity through Extension to learn more about that.”
Deb Hinchey, a new faculty member in Biomedical and Health Sciences, had two reasons for taking the tour. “One of my main responsibilities is developing an undergraduate capstone where students will be partnering with communities around issues related to health and health outcomes,” she said. “So I thought learning about local agriculture and meeting farmers and getting to know the landscape outside of Burlington was a good idea from a professional perspective. On a personal level, I’m really interested in food and food systems and where food comes from.”
Computer Science lecturer Jason Hibbeler, who came to UVM from IBM in Essex Junction, said he “learned a ton today because of the way this tour has been structured to take us out from Chittenden County, so we can see what’s going on outside of the Burlington area. It’s a fantastic way to start making connections with Vermont.”
Early Education faculty member Kait Northey echoed a point other faculty made. It’s important to understand “the history of what’s happening in the area” – especially the ups and downs of the agricultural economy –”and how that’s going to affect the students that we’re teaching and their families, and what they’re coming to learn.”
For Emily Morgan, a faculty member in Nutrition and Food Sciences who will start in January, lessons learned were directly related to her field.
“My research interests are really in the local food system and food system sustainability,” she said, “and I thought this would be an awesome way to get a little sampling of what is happening in Vermont, see little bit of landscape and meet people.”
She had special appreciation for tour guide Ross. “I think it’s really special that we’ve had the director of extension to show us around.”
The experience was also a valuable one for the food producers who were the objects of faculty interest.
“I appreciate the opportunity to be able to reach out to a wide spectrum of faculty because, having been in school where you’re in your little isolated bubble, I know it’s very hard to understand what’s going on the community around you,” said Christa Alexander, co-owner of Jericho Settlers Farm, a 200-acre farm producing 25 acres of certified organic vegetables, flowers and herbs.
“If in any way it informs their teaching or their perspective that they share with their students, that’s even better,” she added. “I don’t farm just because I like growing food. I farm because I truly believe there are better ways to grow food than some of the ways that are being practiced, and I want other people to know about that.”
Source: UVM News
Classics professor Mark Usher was nearing the end of a visiting scholar stint at the American Academy in Rome when he decided to take a break from working on his latest book to hike the nearby Sabine Hills with his wife, staying at a series of “agriturismi” – small farms that host guests, B&B style – along the way.
He was particularly keen on one a UVM colleague had recommended, Le Mole sul Farfa, which boasted personable owners and an archeological dig of an ancient villa.
When he arrived at the dig site near the agriturismo, “My jaw dropped,” Usher says, not only because of the Roman mosaic poking through the grass, which signaled its obvious significance.
“What really got my attention,” he says, “was the grove of ancient olive trees” next to the ruins, huge, gnarled and still producing olives, which he learned later were more than 1,500 years old.
“That was the taste of ancient Rome on those trees,” he says.
By the end of his three-day visit, he knew not only that Le Mole would anchor the chapter on Roman agronomy in his new book, but that he could build a one-of-a-kind multi-disciplinary course around the site, incorporating classical history, food systems and sustainable agriculture, one that – as a farmer who’d practiced small scale agriculture for 20 years, as well as a classicist – he was uniquely qualified to teach.
Just two years later Usher’s book, on sustainable systems in antiquity, is nearing publication, and three lucky students have just returned from a beta-test version of the course, launched this summer.
Environmental Studies majors Amanda Brown and Ariella Mandel, both seniors, and senior Geology major Melinda Quock spent two weeks at Le Mole helping professional archeologists excavate the dig site, a Roman “villa rustica” – a kind of working farm that formed the backbone of productive agriculture in ancient Rome, where elites would relax when they weren’t at their beachside estates on the Bay of Naples.
Students, who had read Usher’s book chapter and discussed it informally during their stay, also helped archeologists produce 3-D images of the site using laser scan technology, created a GPS map of the olive trees, and retrieved and carbon-dated olive pits.
Back to the land, Roman-style
What makes the site so resonant for Usher, for both his book and the evolving class, is what he describes as its continuity and contiguity.
By continuity, he means the relationship between what the ancient Romans were doing 2,000 years ago and the Italian government’s policies today.
“Romans were the original ‘back-to-the-landers’ and were always trying to keep small farmers on their land as part of the ancient Roman ideal,” Usher says.
That’s a “distant echo” of the current Italian government’s program of tax incentives for agriturismi, which also promote farming by allowing owners to put up guests, like Usher and his wife, if at least half the property’s income comes from agriculture.
By contiguity, Usher means the cheek-by-jowl location of the ancient villa rustica and the modern agriturismo, so close that a key point of Usher’s new book and the course – that the sustainability movement, far from springing full blown from contemporary society, has roots that go back millennia – is inescapable.
As if the dig site and olive trees weren’t enough to recommend it, Le Mole and its environs have another ace up their sleeve. In Roman times, the villa may well have belonged to the Pompey the Great, one of Rome’s most famous military leaders and statesmen.
The evidence, which Usher finds persuasive, lies in the etymology of the town where Le Mole is located, Mompeo, likely a combination of “mons,” the Latin term for hillside, and the adjective “Pompeianus” – relating to Pompey – and by countless references in a centuries-old registry of local properties to a “fundus,” Latin for farm, “Pompeianus” at the location of the dig.
In addition to giving legs to the fundraising effort to finance the ongoing excavation, the connection to Pompey makes the site even more resonant from an educational perspective by underscoring Usher’s theme that the concept of sustainability has ancient roots.
By refusing to buy up and agglomerate small parcels of land, instead contenting himself with carefully farming a smaller lot, Pompey was part of a movement, which might be taking place in the United States today, to slow the growth of “latifundia,” Rome’s equivalent of large factory farms.
High marks
If the summer course was a beta test, the grades couldn’t be better.
“Overall my experience in Mompeo was incredible, filled with a diverse array of opportunities to learn from knowledgeable and engaging teachers,” Brown wrote in her evaluation of the course.
As Environmental Studies majors, Brown and Mandel found the Romans’ commitment to small-holder farming compelling from a food systems perspective and were fascinated by the biodiversity implications of the ancient olives, which are distinct from genetically similar modern varieties. Geology major Quock, was moved by the way of life at the agriturismo and got to exercise her disciplinary chops with the carbon dating project. All were highly engaged in the dig and loved the family atmosphere created by the agriturismo’s energetic owners, husband and wife Stefano Fassone and Elisabeth De Coster.
But what about the eventual course that will combine archeology, food systems and sustainable agriculture with in-depth study of the site’s evocative ancient history, taught by Usher?
“I think you’d have to be pretty lucky to be one of those students who gets to come,” says Brown.
The archeological excavation and development of the course are being funded by the Office for the Vice President for Research, the UVM Humanities Center, the Environmental Program’s Ian Worley Award, the College of Arts and Sciences and by an Engaged Practices Innovation Grant from the Office of the Provost. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classics.
Source: UVM News
Are you a fan of the HBO series “Game of Thrones”? What about the Avengers film franchise? Maybe you love “House of Cards” on Netflix or the “Hunger Games” movies?
As it turns out, you’re not just enjoying these shows – or any entertainment that absorbs your attention and allows you to temporarily escape the real world. You’re also shaping your political viewpoint, often unwittingly, as you watch them.
So says Anthony Gierzynski, professor and chair of the political science department at The University of Vermont, in his latest book, “The Political Effects of Entertainment Media: How Fictional Worlds Affect Real World Political Perspectives.” In the book, released Aug. 15, Gierzynski argues that the content people consume for fun plays a serious role in their attitudes about social justice, crime and terrorism, tolerance and diversity, the benefits or dangers of technology, and the characteristics of leadership.
“The unique state of mind that occurs when we are transported by stories and identify with characters makes fictional stories (perhaps especially those most disconnected from our current reality, such as fantasy and science fiction) a more potent agent of political learning than overt attempts to teach politically relevant values,” he writes.
The book is one of few in academic research to explore the connection between popular entertainment and political beliefs. It expands on Gierzynski’s 2013 book, “Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation,” which found that the books and films about the boy wizard influenced the political perspectives of those who grew up with them.
Research for the new book took place before the 2016 presidential election, but the subject is all the more relevant in today’s polarized political environment.
With greater awareness of the influence of entertainment, Gierzynski says, people might recognize that they aren’t as rational as they thought they were in developing their staunch opinions and might become more open to opposing ideas.
“If you become aware of the fact that your views are not based on reason and evidence alone, then you might be able to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with you,” he says.
The proliferation of entertainment options, fueled by streaming and on-demand services, far outpaces that of news content today. And fiction captivates viewers on a more visceral level than news, allowing for greater influence, Gierzynski says. “In entertainment, you’re less on your guard.”
For the book, Gierzynski conducted 13 separate studies and experiments with the help of students from his courses. Using standard methods for social science research and survey tools, his team looked for correlations between participants’ immersion in a specific TV show and their political philosophies.
Many movies and TV shows contain political subject matter: “House of Cards” is about an unscrupulous congressman; much of science fiction features a president making decisions about an alien invasion. Overt political content, though, doesn’t usually change viewers’ minds, Gierzynski explains. It’s the thematic undertones of the story that alter our answers to political questions.
One of those themes is “belief in a just world,” the focus of Gierzynski’s study using “Game of Thrones.” In the TV series, good rarely triumphs over evil. Instead, the villainous characters seem disproportionately to overtake and, often, kill the honorable characters.
As Gierzynski writes, “The findings indicate that there appears to be a causal linkage between exposure to these shows and the belief in a just world – exposure to the repeated lessons of ‘Game of Thrones’ that the world is cruel and unjust seems to have dampened the tendency to believe the opposite, that the world is just.”
A person who sees the world as unjust might favor socially corrective measures to protect human rights and level the playing field for those less fortunate, he notes.
Gierzynski and his students conducted a similar study for “House of Cards,” determining its influence on cynicism about political leadership, which in turn could discourage the viewer from seeing the value of political engagement or even the need to vote in elections.
Gierzynski himself is a science fiction fan. He loves “Battlestar Galactica” and will talk at length about the potential for the character of the strong female president to influence viewers’ perspectives on gender and leadership.
Gierzynski has spent more than 25 years studying political parties, elections and campaign finance. The power of fictional entertainment fascinated him partly because many social science colleagues dismissed this content as either inconsequential in swaying political opinion or, because we choose what we watch, simply a reinforcement of the beliefs we already have, he says.
Gierzynski found that’s not true, that fictional storylines can change thinking – and they have done so throughout history.
“No one questions the fact that ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ had a huge impact on people’s views about slavery and racism,” he says.
Source: UVM News
For the fourth year in a row, UVM’s incoming class has achieved the highest academic credentials in the university’s history. The Class of 2022, an estimated 2,500 students, have earned an average SAT score of 1264 and an average ACT of 28.1, record highs for any incoming class.
It’s a record that’s been set year after year since this year’s senior class arrived on campus in the fall of 2015, making the current undergraduate body the most academically talented in school history.
Beyond test scores, the Class of 2022 boasts a number of standout students with fascinating backgrounds — from a professional cinematographer, to an internationally competitive snowboarder, a classically trained advanced ballet dancer to a competitor in the long distance paddling world championships. They’re Eagle Scouts, entrepreneurs, National Hispanic Scholars, leaders in the LGBTQA community, and Olympic hopefuls.
The incoming class hails from 43 states and 25 countries. Approximately 22 percent are Vermonters, and an estimated 12 percent are students of color. Thirty-five of Vermont’s Green and Gold Scholars, the top rising seniors in 68 high schools across the state, have chosen UVM.
First-year students arrive on campus Friday, Aug. 24 for Opening Weekend, an annual program that helps acquaint new students with college life. The weekend culminates in a convocation ceremony, Sunday, Aug. 26 at 6:30 p.m. in Patrick Gymnasium, to celebrate the opening of the new academic year. Following convocation, the UVM community will process down Main Street to the University Green, where the Class of 2022 will participate in a twilight induction ceremony.
Classes begin for all undergraduates Monday, Aug. 27.
New this year
A number of new academic programs come online this year, including a major and minor in Health and Society, an interdisciplinary, cross-college program that applies social science approaches to questions of health and healing in human populations.
Also launched this year are doctorates in Physics and Complex Systems and Data Management, master’s in Biomedical Engineering, Engineering Management, Leadership for Sustainability, Athletic Training, and Physical Activity and Wellness Science. New minors include Emergency Medical Services and American Sign Language.
Progress on construction projects continues, with a number of new facilities to greet students. The Grossman School of Business has opened Ifshin Hall (below), which connects to its home base in Kalkin Hall. The new facility features dedicated space for group work, enhanced capacity to host events like case competitions, new classrooms, and a coffee shop, Campus Perk, in the lobby.
The Michelle and Martin Cohen Hall for the Integrative Creative Arts, located on South Williams Street, also opens this fall. The building, formerly Taft School, is designed to promote collaboration across the arts. Featuring classroom and studio space, students and faculty in music and dance, film and television, and studio art will work alongside each other and draw on resources that include an audio recording studio, a digital lab, and lighting studio, as well as display space.
Re-opening this fall is the historic Billings Library, now home to the Jack and Shirley Silver Special Collections Library, as well as the Humanities Center, the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies and the Center for Research on Vermont. A renovated North Lounge provides additional space for student study.
To help navigate a changing campus, UVM has launched a new, online interactive map, available at uvm.edu/map.
Fall events
Signature events this fall include:
Source: UVM News
Two recent national reports have recognized the University of Vermont’s leadership among institutions of higher education in the category of sustainable energy use and sources. One comes from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), the organization that coordinates the STARS (Sustainability Tracking Assessment & Rating System) rankings. The other comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Green Power Partnership.
On August 22, AASHE released the 2018 Sustainability Campus Index (SCI), recognizing the University of Vermont (UVM) among the top ten performers in the Energy category for achievements in energy reduction and development and use of clean, renewable energy sources. The 2018 SCI report draws from data submitted through STARS by hundreds of colleges and universities from across North America and the world.
The Energy section of UVM’s 2017 STARS submission reports that between 2007 and 2015 the UVM campus building space increased by 7% while total energy use for electricity, heating and cooling dropped 12%. Electricity and thermal energy sources also became cleaner between 2007 and 2015, as UVM ceased using #6 fuel oil for heating, converting to #2 oil as a backup fuel and using natural gas for most of its heating fuel. Cooling became more efficient in a shift away from individual chilling units toward centralized chilling.
On July 23, the Green Power Partnership program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed the University of Vermont 24th on itsTop 30 College & University list based on the total quantity of certified renewable electricity it used. The Green Power Partnership (GPP) is a voluntary program that encourages organizations to use “green power” as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with electricity use. The EPA website describes “green power” as “zero-emissions electricity that is certified as being generated from environmentally preferable renewable resources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, eligible biogas, biomass, and low-impact hydro.”
UVM is one of ten institutions on the GPP list buying 99% or more of their power using certified “green power” sources. According to Gioia Thompson, Director of UVM’s Office of Sustainability, “the University of Vermont has generated its own power (1%) or purchased certified “green power”(99%) for all of its buildings since 2015, in conformance with its 2010 Climate Action Plan and commitment to reducing greenhouse gases.”
There are three ways UVM buildings are powered.
“These recent reports from AASHE and the EPA are recognizing both UVM’s strong commitments to energy and climate action, and the hard work of the many people at UVM—students, faculty, staff, and leaders—who embody that commitment and make UVM’s achievements possible,” said Thompson. “It takes sustained leadership and dedication over time to achieve the overall energy and carbon reductions that UVM has seen.”
The 2018 Sustainable Campus Index report recognized top-performing colleges and universities in a total of 17 sustainability impact areas relating to academics, engagement, operations and administration. Vermont institutions recognized in the report for achievements in categories such as curriculum, air and climate, energy, food and dining include Sterling College, Middlebury College, Green Mountain College and UVM. The SCI report draws from STARS reports that are available online at stars.aashe.org. The University’s 2017 STARS submission resulted in a Gold rating, as did UVM’s first submission in 2014
The Green Power Partnerhip’s Top 30 list represents the largest green power users among participating higher education institutions participating. The Partnership has more than 1,400 member organizations voluntarily using more than 40 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually. Partners include a variety of leading organizations including Fortune 500®companies; small- and medium-sized businesses; local, state, and federal governments; and colleges and universities. The combined green power use of these organizations amounts to more than 3 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually, equivalent to the total annual electricity use of more than 280,000 average American homes.
Source: UVM News
Talk about the challenges of scientific study: Kate Rubins had to conduct her biomedical and gene-sequencing experiments without many of the basic laboratory necessities – including gravity.
She’s a NASA astronaut who flew on Expedition 48/49 to the International Space Station in 2016, spending 115 days there with five other crew members. Rubins became the first person to sequence DNA in space and helped conduct hundreds of other biological studies, collecting reams of data.
Last week, she came to a somewhat less remote location at the Grand Isle Lake House on Lake Champlain in Grand Isle, Vt., for the annual retreat of University of Vermont doctoral students in the Neuroscience Graduate Program and the Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Sciences program. A group of students from both programs invited Rubins to talk about her scientific experiences in space and the transfer of her skills in microbiology and virology to an unusual field of work.
With her science pedigree and atypical job, Rubins shows the Ph.D. candidates “the breadth of areas you could go with your science,” said Cynthia Forehand, dean of the UVM Graduate College, after Rubins’ talk.
“We’re encouraged to explore alternative options beyond academia,” said Emily Whitaker, a third-year CMB student who helped arrange Rubins’ visit. “Hearing people like Kate come speak to us, it just opens a whole field of opportunities for where we can go.”
An academic career remains the goal for many graduate students, but the number of funded faculty positions is shrinking, along with federal research budgets, said Neuroscience Graduate Program director Anthony Morielli, a professor of pharmacology at UVM. Meanwhile, he said, more jobs are available for scientists in the biochemical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as government agencies like the Food & Drug Administration.
In the Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Sciences program, the Career Mobility Builder was designed to introduce graduate and post-doctoral students to alternative career paths through a series of speakers and workshops, including sessions on starting a business or interviewing for a private-sector job. “There’s so many opportunities outside of having your own bench, doing your own research, working in your own lab,” said Trevor Wolf, a second-year CMB student who helps coordinate the Builder.
Rubins’ job is “something different, out-of-the-box, that you might not have thought of,” he said.
Rubins, who got her Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2005, said she always wanted to be an astronaut but started out with more earthbound work in public health, specifically the study of HIV infection. One day on a whim, she filled out the NASA application online and was accepted in 2009. The agency sought her ability to pick up new skills in training, she said, even more than her scientific background.
“They don’t really hire you for your expertise,” Rubins said.
Training for spaceflight started two and a half years before launch. First, Rubins learned to fly Navy airplanes, she said. Many astronauts come from the U.S. military, particularly as pilots; the rest are scientists and engineers. On the space station, all had to share the work and learn from one another’s skills.
“I’ve taught pilots how to remove brains from mice, and they get pretty good at it,” Rubins said.
They also took on practical tasks like assembling a life support system, fixing toilets and even doing dental work like pulling out a molar.
Rubins took her first spacewalk to help install a docking system outside the International Space Station. That morning, the team spent six hours in their spacesuits to depressurize.
“There’s no way to really train or prepare for this,” she said. “I will tell you, it’s completely terrifying.”
As for working in outer space, she said, “If you want to replicate this at home, you can put on some oven mitts and roller skates and then try to cook dinner.”
On the space station, Rubins lacked several pieces of equipment, including a centrifuge. In her slideshow presentation, she held a makeshift version she constructed using a hand drill. For her rudimentary research bench, she stacked up packing materials and used Velcro to keep them in place.
Astronauts send themselves care packages in cargo spacecraft that arrives later at the space station, usually treats like cookies or photos of their children. Rubins shipped an array of pipettes to herself. Then, she had to figure out how to keep fluids inside the test tubes without gravity.
“You can do any experiment on the ceiling,” she said, adding with tongue in cheek, “It makes it so much better.”
In many ways, Rubins said, the restrictions of space were similar to the limited resources she had in Congo, where she oversaw lab teams studying viral diseases. They grappled with poor or nonexistent filtration and sanitation systems and installed solar arrays to supply missing power.
Back in space, the possibilities are vast, Rubins said. She hopes to explore more biological effects of zero gravity on future trips, including eventual missions to Mars.
Despite the many gee-whiz aspects of her work, the UVM grad students focused on the science with their questions after Rubins’ talk. They asked about the ability of microbes to live on a spacesuit, gravity’s effect on organs at the cellular level and the body’s immune response in space to certain viruses.
One student wondered how the astronauts handle fecal waste – a query Rubins also gets from 5-year-olds, she laughed. The answer: It’s a closed-loop, complicated purification system in which almost all waste gets recycled.
Space travel isn’t for everyone, Rubins acknowledged after her talk, but scientists can take their Ph.D.’s into nearly any field.
“It’s good for students to be exposed to a range of options,” she said, “and then decide what’s a good fit, where are they going to be happy.”
Source: UVM News
