FACULTY
Dr. Ajay Nair is an Associate Professor working in the area of Sustainable Vegetable Production in the Department of Horticulture at Iowa State University. The focus of his research, extension, and education program is on cover cropping, conservation tillage, nutrient management, soil amendments and health, and season extension strategies in vegetable production. He works closely with commercial vegetable growers, extension staff, industry representatives and stakeholders to meet the rising demand of locally grown produce and enhance the profitability and sustainability of vegetable production systems.
More information about Ajay Nair: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/vegetablelab/
Baskar Ganapathysubramanian is the Anderlik professor in Engineering, with appointments in Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He directs a curiosity-driven, computational sustainability research group that leverages advances in data science, applied mathematics and high-performance computing to model, design, and controls real-world physical phenomena. From the application point-of-view, his group is particularly interested in energy, food, water and environment-related phenomena including large scale modeling of thermal flow physics in the built and near built environment, machine learning-enabled plant phenotyping, and data-driven coupling of complex simulators for decision support.
More infomation about Baskar Ganapathysubramanian: https://www.me.iastate.edu/bglab/
Caroline Krejci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington. Her research focuses on the development of modeling methodologies for the analysis and sustainable management of complex sociotechnical systems, including regional food logistics and urban food recovery networks. Within the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, she is a member of the human systems modeling team developing an agent-based model that will represent the dynamic interactions, adaptations, and decision making processes of Iowa producers and consumers in a virtual environment. The model will be validated against human behavior data and will be used to simulate producer and consumer behavior in response to different policies aimed at increasing local food production and consumption. These experiments will yield predicted changes in land use and farming practices over time, which will be used to inform biophysical crop production models.
More information about Caroline Krejci: https://www.uta.edu/engineering/research/faculty/krejci.php
Jan Thompson is Morrill Professor of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University. She conducts research on the integration of social and biophysical dynamics of land use in urban landscapes, ecology and restoration of remnant forest landscapes in the Midwest, and the role of trees to increase resiliency in urban environments. She directs the Urban Natural Resources, Ecosystems and Landscapes Lab at Iowa State. She participated in the “Big Data for Sustainable Cities Decision-Making” project funded through Iowa State’s Presidential Interdisciplinary Research Initiative (PIRI, 2016-2019). She also conducts research on teaching and learning, focusing on formal collaborative learning and leadership development for students. She has authored over 75 peer-reviewed articles on a variety of aspects of natural resource ecology and management, primarily focused on urban landscapes.
More information about Jan Thompson: https://www.nrem.iastate.edu/people/janette-thompson
Dr. Kurt Rosentrater is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering and Food Science and Human Nutrition at Iowa State University. He teaches courses focused on sustainability and life cycle assessment. For almost two decades he has actively pursued research to improve manufacturing efficiencies and byproduct utilization, and has developed a variety of new applications, including enhanced feeds, foods, biofuels, bioplastics, biocomposites, industrial intermediates, and ingredients. Prior to his work at Iowa State, he was a Lead Scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service. Before this, he worked for a design-build engineering company in Iowa, and was responsible for process and equipment design, as well as plant and site layout for industrial manufacturing facilities.
More information about Dr. Kurt Rosentrater: https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/karosent/
Matt Liebman is a professor of agronomy and the H.A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. His research, teaching, and outreach activities focus on ways to use ecological principles and processes to improve environmental quality and food security. Within the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, he is part of the modeling team evaluating how shifts in land use and farming practices would affect crop productivity, water movement, soil erosion, and nutrient discharge to surface and ground water. As a long-time member of the board of directors of Wheatsfield Cooperative Grocery in Ames, IA, he has developed a strong appreciation of how local and regional producers can supply Iowans with high quality food.
More information about Matt Liebman: http://www.wallacechair.iastate.edu/
Michael Dorneich is an Associate Professor in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University. His research interests focus on human-centered design, decision support systems, human-autonomy teaming, human-computer interaction, and increasing participation in STEM. Within the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, he is part of the human systems modeling team gathering human behavior data to inform agent-based modeling of producers and consumers. Data gathered through multiple methods will enable assessment of current practices, values, objectives, motivations, and barriers that influence choices, and how drivers could influence behavior for local food production and consumption. More broadly, the goal is to build data-intensive, replicable decision-making support systems that engage researchers, community stakeholders, and city officials in data collection and decision-making to create sustainable futures.
More information about Michael Dorneich: https://www.imse.iastate.edu/dorneich/
Dr. Schwab is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. His research interests concern the development of social norms, attitude and behavior change, and the use of social psychological theory to promote sustainable behaviors. Dr. Schwab has studied attitude and behavior change related to recycling, energy usage, and climate change. Within the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, he is part of the human systems modeling team. The human systems modeling team is working to better understand barriers and incentives influencing decisions to produce and purchase locally grown foods. Utilizing qualitative and quantitative data from current producers and consumers to better characterize and understand local food systems for the development of an agent-based model of decision-making dynamics surrounding local food production and consumption.
More information about Nick Schwab: https://csbs.uni.edu/psych/faculty-staff-directory/nicholas-schwab
Phil Gassman is an environmental scientist whose research experience has focused on supporting the integration of environmental, economic and other models which have been used to assess policy scenario impacts for watersheds and other regions, and testing of field- and watershed-scale models. He will be working on the application and integration of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) ecohydrological model (https://swat.tamu.edu/) and the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) urban water quality model (https://www.epa.gov/water-
More information about Phil Gassman: https://www.card.iastate.edu/people/profile/?n=philip-w-gassman
Ulrike Passe teaches sustainable design and environmental technologies and serves as director for the Center for Building Energy Research at Iowa State. Her research focuses on the interaction of architectural spatial composition, climate, and energy consumption. In 2009 she led the ISU team in the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition. Passe also led the building science plank in the five-year Iowa NSF-supported EPSCoR project “Harnessing Energy in the Biosphere to Build Sustainable Energy Systems,” which transformed the Solar Decathlon Interlock House into a community research lab. Her exploratory NSF EAGER grant “Multi-scale material and dynamic thermo-fluid computational models for sustainable buildings" (2013-2016) studied the relationship between thermal dynamics and material properties in the historic Harran Houses in Turkey using novel computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling techniques. In collaboration with Dr. Francine Battaglia she published “Designing Spaces for Natural Ventilation: An Architect’s Guide, (Routledge) in 2015. Two new research directions derived from the book: improving knowledge of the urban micro-climate around buildings and interactions of occupants with the buildings they occupy. She initiated the interdisciplinary “Big data for sustainable cities decision making” funded by ISUs Presidential Interdisciplinary Research Initiative (PIRI) to integrate human-building-microclimate interactions into urban energy models for urban resilience, which provided the basis for the collaboration among researchers working together in the Iowa UrbanFEWS project.
More information about Ulrike Passe: https://www.cber.iastate.edu/people/director
Dr. Zhou’s research interests lie in the applications of geospatial technologies including remote sensing, GIS, geovisualization, spatial analytic tools, and integrated assessment modeling to understanding the problems of global environmental change (e.g., urbanization, urban heat island, ecosystem phenology, energy use and GHG emissions) and their potential solutions. His research focus has always been in quantifying spatiotemporal patterns of environmental change and developing modeling mechanisms to bridge the driving forces (both natural and socioeconomic factors) and consequences of environmental change so that the impacts of human activities on environment can be effectively measured, modeled, and evaluated.
More information about Yuyu Zhou: https://ge-at.iastate.edu/directory/yuyu-zhou/