Faculty Research Projects
To foster interdisciplinary education, students will gain experience with both STEM and social science research perspectives. Climate-sensitive systems face complex impacts from climate change, significantly affecting the environment, economy and society. Our research focus integrates interdisciplinary perspectives to address resilience challenges in Texas, which experiences extraordinary natural hazards and population growth. Our approach transforms students from passive classroom learners to active, independent researchers by involving them in laboratory and field research addressing climate resilience and water management challenges. Concurrently, students will gain insights from experts across multiple disciplines, including Environmental Justice (EJ) experts, community members, policy specialists, city planners and social scientists. Each participant research project will focus on a specific theme, while program elements such as roundtables, seminars, field trips, co-mentoring and EJ perspective integration will ensure participants appreciate all themes.
Research Theme A: Lessons from the Past: Using Records of Environmental Processes and Projecting Climate Impacts. Studies of past societies, ecosystems and climate and hydrologic systems offer unique perspectives on present and future change that can inform planning for more resilient systems. As the past is key to the future, our research will 1) advance new proxies for environmental change, 2) mine publicly available time series for climate, water, and ecological data, 3) collect oral histories to better understand environmental changes and past extreme weather events and 4) project future climate impacts.
Research Theme B: Environmental and Ecological Responses to Climate and Urban Stressors. By understanding how communities and ecosystems across the rural to urban gradient react to climate change and urbanization, we can address critical resilience challenges. Land use changes often lead to the loss of vital ecosystem services and exacerbate issues like the Urban Heat Island effect, water pollution and reduced air quality. By studying the responses to stressors, we can develop effective strategies to mitigate negative impacts, improve communication between rural and urban areas and increase resilience across the entire gradient.
Research Theme C: Securing Sustainable Water Resources Under Climate Change. Understanding the varying water demands of agriculture, industry and domestic use allows us to develop adaptive strategies to ensure a reliable water supply amid climate change. Our projects will focus on downscaling climate projections for local communities, raising awareness and fostering collaboration between communities and decision-makers. This approach aims to secure sustainable water resources across diverse geographic settings. New technological solutions, such as managed aquifer recharge, aquifer storage and recovery, nature-based water quality improvements and gray water recycling, must be assessed in a rural to urban gradient in the context of projected climate change and population growth.
Crosscutting Environmental Justice Perspective. We will integrate an EJ perspective into our primary
research themes, recognizing the crucial role of understanding the relationships between environmental
stressors and community responses in developing climate resilience strategies. This perspective
incorporates insights from various fields to ensure fair decision-making and strengthen effective climate
resilience measures in all communities.
Each student will be part of a research project led by one of the faculty mentors listed below. Please select your top three choices for your research experience.
Faculty
Jay Banner’s (Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences) research applies principles of geochemistry to understanding: 1) past climate change based on studies of cave mineral deposits (speleothems) and tree rings, and 2) impacts of urbanization on water resources over decadal to century time scales. Example research projects: How do reconstructions of the processes that control the evolution of water quality in Austin-area watersheds over the past century inform planning of new urban development? How did the climate of central Texas change in response to abrupt global warming during the transition out of the last ice age? Participants will use novel applications of isotope tracers to reconstruct climate and water quality histories using geochemical proxies in speleothems, tree rings, and travertine mineral deposits, as exemplified by AGU abstracts authored by summer 2024 REU participants.
Danielle Touma’s (Institute for Geophysics) research assesses recent and future changes in extreme climate events and informs how societies and natural systems are influenced by anthropogenic climate change. Her research has revealed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on increased wildfires in the western and southwestern U.S., increased and long lasting droughts globally and increasing extreme and spatially expansive tropical cyclone rainfall. Example research projects: How has drought and wildfire risk changed in Texas in recent years? How well do climate models simulate droughts and wildfires in Texas? Can we use them to understand future risks of these events? Participants will use climate model output, weather observations and statistical and machine learning methods to investigate these questions.
Nate Miller’s (Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences) research uses geochemical tools to understand Earth systems and their evolution from proxies preserved in natural time-series (sedimentary sequences, biominerals, tree cores and speleothems). A recent focus on central Texas stalagmite records demonstrates that growth can be effectively imaged chemically and contribute to an understanding of karst processes, their ultimate transfer into physical/chemical speleothem records, and offer an important new tool for assessing how rainfall changed over periods of rapid climate change – a question of key relevance for water resource sustainability in the Austin area. REU participants typically use data sets from proxies and cave monitoring (drip water, farmed calcite) analyzed by ICP-MS or LA-ICP-MS, for their projects.
Caroline Farrior’s (Dept. Integrative Biology) research studies how plants interact with one another and their environment. Her research group combines theory with data to understand plant strategies and their coexistence. They have developed foundational forest dynamics models and shown how gap dynamics can be a strategy diversity-generating mechanism in forests. The prevalence of strategies that allow plants to handle drought is an important ingredient in many plant communities’ resilience to climate change. Participants will utilize models of physiology and stochastic drought to ask how the historical drought regime promotes a single or diverse set of plant strategies to enhance our understanding of plant community sensitivity to changing drought frequencies. We will use mathematical models, simulations in R, literature reviews and trait databases to answer these questions.
Sergio Castellanos’ (Dept. Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering) studies sustainability solutions at the intersection of energy, equity, data science and community engagement. His work in projects, such as Community Resilience integrated into an Earth System Science Learning Ecosystem (CRESSLE), involves air quality projects with under-resourced communities in Austin. As a member of UT’s EJ Faculty Learning Community, he fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and integrates EJ into sustainability education. His research addresses global energy and transportation issues, collaborating with governments, corporations and researchers to solve pressing sustainability challenges. Participants will explore areas like evaluating the equity of net-zero emissions policies and clean energy transitions, focusing on how urban stressors connect to macro infrastructure systems and their impacts on disadvantaged communities, particularly through the lens of air quality or energy.
Dorina Murgulet’s (Dept. Physical and Environmental Sciences) research focuses on the impacts of climate and groundwater recharge in coastal critical zones and subterranean estuary processes. Her research employs integrated physical-chemical modeling by integrating high-resolution characterization of the vital zone and small-scale flow and transport processes. Example research projects: How do natural disasters such as flooding affect groundwater quality in unconnected poor, touristic and industrially developed rural communities? How does the feedback between human and environmental factors influence the well-being of different socioeconomically challenged communities?
Daniella Rempe’s (Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences) research focuses on the impacts of climate and land-use on hydrologic processes. Prof. Rempe manages hydrologic monitoring infrastructure at multi-disciplinary field sites across the western U.S. and within central Texas. Datasets from these sites along with field and/or laboratory measurements can be analyzed by participants to address interdisciplinary research questions such as: How does streamflow quality, quantity and habitat change during extended drought periods? How do plants and land-use impact the pace of streamflow recovery following drought?
Chu-Lin Cheng’s (Dept. Civil Engineering) research studies water availability under different scales of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus and directs two IUSE-GEOPATHS projects, SHIP-GEO and FUTURE. His team applies citizen science to engage communities around water quality/quantity issues in RGV. Example research projects: 1) Potentials of flood mitigation, increasing water supply and aquifer recharge in the Arroyo Colorado watershed of South Texas, 2) Modeling selected water quality parameters in the Arroyo Colorado basin under climate extremes for possible managed aquifer recharge (MAR), 3) Investigation of hydraulic parameters and their roles in soil greenhouse gas and water exchange under climate extremes and 4) Evaluation of arsenic sorption performance using dendritic anatase and polycrystalline rutile nano-TiO2 for environmental applications.
Shujuan Mao’s (Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences) research applies geophysical remote-sensing techniques to study the spatiotemporal variations of aquifer systems in response to climate change and human activities, with the goal of guiding sustainable water management. Example research projects: 1) How has groundwater storage varied over the past decades in relation to water management strategies and projects, such as MAR, in Greater Los Angeles? and 2) How do hydrogeological structures, land use and engineered recharge facilities impact the efficiency of natural recharge from storms? Participants will combine groundwater records with novel geophysical data, including gravity, surface deformation and elastic properties, to understand the magnitude, rate and spatial variability of groundwater storage.
R. Patrick Bixler’s (LBJ School of Public Affairs) research focuses on climate and environmental governance, urban sustainability and resilience, hazard preparedness and response and network science. Through his research and involvement in CRESSLE, he emphasizes the importance and impact of community-engaged research and assessing local climate impacts and improving community resilience. CRESSLE partners UT researchers with under-resourced communities from Austin to design and implement community-driven research projects addressing community resilience and sustainability challenges through an EJ perspective.