Climate Change

Vanderbilt University has been selected to present in two venues at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as COP27, Nov. 15 at Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Leah Dundon Vanderbilt research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and Vanderbilt Climate Change Initiative Director Leah… Read More

Two engineering graduate students and 14 undergraduate students represented Vanderbilt University 3,923 miles away in Glasgow, Scotland, as official delegates to the United Nations international climate change negotiations—dubbed COP26. Leah Dundon The extraordinary opportunity was facilitated by Leah Dundon, director of the Vanderbilt Climate Change Initiative and research assistant professor… Read More

Shipboard program open to all undergraduate majors As a Vanderbilt undergraduate, Miguel Moravec took part in a research cruise that used multibeam sonar to map areas of the Queen Charlotte Fault off the Southeast Alaskan coast. He and other students also visited Exit Glacier Park and saw first-hand how fast… Read More

The historic rain and flash flooding that swept central Tennessee on Saturday, Aug. 21, 2021, devastated the small city of Waverly, about 60 miles west of Nashville. A flash flood watch issued Friday quickly became a “flash flood emergency” Saturday. On Wednesday, Sept. 25, Humphreys County officials said 20 people died and… Read More

By Marissa Shapiro THE IDEA Jonathan Gilligan (John Russell) Jonathan Gilligan, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences and civil and environmental engineering, and a group of international researchers have illustrated potential international conflicts over climate change. One of a larger group of studies, this work engaged in a… Read More

The School of Engineering’s work in polar and climate science, plus computational mechanics, will get international exposure with a two-year travel grant from the Royal Society, the independent academic society of the U.K., for a collaboration between a Vanderbilt professor and a professor in England. The project will establish new… Read More

Two civil engineering faculty members have been named to key positions on committees of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Mark Abkowitz, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, has been appointed chair of the… Read More

This opinion piece by Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Mark Abkowitz originally appeared in The Hill, an American news website based in Washington, D.C. focused on politics, policy, business and international relations. Professor Abkowitz chairs a National Academy of Sciences… Read More

Photo courtesy of NASA Improved models of iceberg calving will reduce uncertainty in sea level rise projections An assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering has been awarded a $555,000 NSF CAREER grant to analyze Antarctic ice sheet fracture, improve models for ice mass loss and reduce uncertainty in long-term… Read More

American climate scientist and National Medal of Science recipient Warren M. Washington is a guest speaker in the 2013-2014 John R. and Donna S. Hall Engineering Lecture Series at Vanderbilt University. The lecture – The Development of Computer Earth System Models: Climate Change in the 20th and 21st Century –… Read More