Projects

The residential buildings account for 22% of the U.S. primary energy consumption and 17% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission in 2011. Individual housing units are becoming more energy efficient in per...

The Kohala Center, an independent, community-based institute for research, education, and conservation based on Hawaii Island, has just completed a plan for the County of Hawaii Energy Sustainabili...

Increasing population, modernized diet, and climate change will impose various pressures on global food systems - from agricultural production to nutrition consumption - for the next decades. On th...

One of the largest challenges in integrating large quantities of wind power into the grid is the variability in its power output. The fast ramping up or down of its power output can have negative c...

Natural fibers such as coconut, hemp, and kenaf, are being researched as a replacement for glass fibers and mineral fillers in polymer composites due to potential environmental, cost, and weight-sa...

The World Wildlife Fund's Market Transformation Initiative aims to reduce the environmental impact of global commodity production through partnership with major companies and their supply networks....

Intellectual Merit      Electricity accounts for ~40% the energy consumed in the U.S. and most is derived from non-renewable resources including fossil and nuclear fuels.&nb...

There are two major goals for this project. The first is to advance offshore wind siting methods by utilizing multi-criteria assessment that includes concepts and methods from life cycle assessment...

Particulate Matter (PM) is related to cardiopulmonary mortality, leading to a high annual burden of disease of around one million premature deaths, 65% in Asia. Identifying causes and remedies need...

Learning how to make liquid fuels from algae oil under water This project aims to develop a better understanding of the chemistry of hydrothermal catalytic deoxygenation of fatty acids over early t...

Recent advances in directional drilling have made extraction of natural gas and oil from shale formations economically viable via high-volume hydraulic fracturing, a process by which a mixture of w...

This project seeks to understand the broad, complex and potentially unanticipated impacts on humans and the environment that could emerge from the deployment of emerging innovative technologies cur...

Renewable energy development involves not only the energy system but also the economy, the environment, policy, and the society. Clean vehicle development in China, for example, has tremendous impa...

This multi-institutional, 3-year NASA-funded project seeks to understand how human-driven disturbances related to use of forest resources, combined with natural disturbances, have created the landscap...

This was a Master's Project to understand community perceptions regarding offshore wind energy development in Lake Michigan in Evanston, Illinois and Mason/Oceana Counties, Michigan. Objectives...

Summary of Project Idea: With 45 million inpatient and 1.9 million outpatient visits in 2011, the University of Michigan Health System manages a vast network of patients in constant flux.  T...

Summary of Project Idea: This project applied social science knowledge of landscape cues to care and perceived safety to design green infrastructure best management practices (BMPs) for urban sto...

Camp Michigania, owned and operated by the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan since 1962, is a 420 acre facility on 1.5 miles of shore on Walloon Lake.  Our mission, "To provide ...

This was a collaborative master’s project between our team of graduate students at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) and DTE Energy, the gas and electr...

The term infrastructure ecology was coined by the PI as a metaphor to describe the complex interdependence between infrastructure, environmental, economic and social components in urban areas. At t...

The City of Detroit has approximately 40 square miles of vacant residential, commercial, and industrial property and has ambitious plans to demolish some of these properties and shrink the city by con...

Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a useful tool to quantify the environmental impacts of a product or process in an effort to improve its environmental profile.  LCA is easiest to implement on esta...