Carlisle Shealy, BioBuild Fellow, defended her PhD in February 2021. During her time completing her dissertation research, she received a Graduate Certificate from the Center for Gerontology.
Congratulations on your many achievements, Dr. Shealy!
To read more about her work, click here.
From Dr. Brian Kleiner's MLSoC Milestones:
"Mountain View Humane Spay Neuter Clinic in Christiansburg is working with students and faculty at Virginia Tech to construct an outdoor storage facility for its clinic at the Christiansburg Industrial Park. This project, begun during the early days of the pandemic, has been a hands-on learning opportunity for multiple groups of students at Virginia Tech, including Engineers without Borders, the Building Goodness Foundation, the Sustainable Facilities & Infrastructure Lab, and the BioBuild Program.
Creator of Mosaic for Earth joins BioBuild
Join us in welcoming a new faculty affiliate, Dr. Dwight Bigler, Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. We are glad to have you in our IGEP community. Dr. Bigler’s work focuses on choral compositions to inspire and motivate performers and audiences toward environmentally respectful and restorative behavior.
Dr. Bigler’s work, Mosaic for Earth, will premiere in spring 2022 at the Moss Arts Center.
Congraulations, Dr. Hu!
Dr. Hu's dissertation entitled, "Preference Construction and Decision-Making for Green Infrastructure: How Do Behavioral Interventions Influence Choice and Neurocognition?" was successfully defended on 26 October 2021.
The abstract:
This blog is about household digesters, my experience in designing and building them, and lessons I’ve learned after discovering that nature had already made perfect digesters long before I gained an interest in designing them. I apologize in advance if verbiage within this writing seems intended for an audience of anaerobic digestion enthusiasts. In an effort to bridge this gap, I will provide a brief list of just a couple of terms that might be useful:
Feedstock: The content that is fed to an anaerobic digester (food waste or manure)
Figure 1: Example of Bioinspiration http://www.innovationessence.com/biomimetics-learning-nature/ “Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.” –Albert Einstein Biology—the study of life—encompasses a huge set of subjects. In recent years, it has led to a mixture of subjects that do not exclusively focus on living systems, but rather inform design decisions within the built environment.
On the airplane now on my way from Hong Kong to Shanghai after an incredible experience at the Passive and Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) 2018 conference. Topics spanned from automated simulation validation with artificial neural networks to surveys on Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) adoption in industry to new techniques to retrofit wooden windows in historic structures from the northern Italian Alps.
This week the BioBuild Lab ventured to Stroubles Creek to observe the impairment of various sections of the creek, and to raise awareness among the class of local ecological issues.
Harvey was definitely not the first hurricane to cause devastation on American soil. Indeed, Harvey follows several such major storms that caused billions of dollars in damages including Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Ike (2008), Wilma (2005) and Andrew (1992). Hurricanes are certainly not a new phenomenon. In fact, Christopher Columbus encountered one in 1495 near Hispaniola (SunSentinel, 2017). We have had 522 years to prepare more effectively for huge storms and, yet, we are often not ready or, at least, not as prepared as we ought to be. The question is why that is so.
Professor Brown's presentation two weeks ago is interesting. I like his research in community ecology in aquatic system. I was amazed to find out that even for a creature as small as a crayfish can have such a complex community around them. The interaction is multi-faceted and complicated and can range from a mutualistic cleaning symbiosis to a parasitism depending on a variety of factors. It is interesting both the host and the worm species can exert some control over the interaction, and the combined interactions between them creates a truly fascinating picture of community assembly.
