Concordia takes on global sustainability in the electronic age
With Concordia a short while ago putting 62nd all over the world in the newly unveiled 2021 Times Larger Education (THE) Impression Rankings for its institutional determination to the United Nations’ Sustainable Progress Goals, the work of Damon Matthews’s team on the Management in Environmental and Electronic Innovation for Sustainability (Leads) system couldn’t be more timely.
Matthews is the Tier 1 Concordia University Study Chair in Local weather Science and Sustainability and professor of geography, organizing and surroundings in the School of Arts and Science.
The Leads software just concluded the first calendar year of its 6-yr, $1.65-million Collaborative Study and Education Working experience (Produce) system grant from the Pure Sciences and Engineering Investigation Council of Canada (NSERC). The grant emphasizes collaboration and aims to combine qualified growth with investigate. SynBioApps is a different NSERC-CREATE–funded initiative at this time underway at Concordia.
“We’re seeking to deliver college students with the capability to interact with the digital planet in a way that will further their very own sustainability research targets and also connect that exploration additional tangibly to societal problems,” Matthews says.
“One of the significant results of the pandemic is that we’ve been pressured to create a facility with digital instruments in a way that we hadn’t before.”
Partnerships with world research networks
The Potential customers method is partnering with world wide sustainability networks Potential Earth and Sustainability in the Digital Age, as nicely as other college associates.
Graduate students have been attaining expertise, know-how and practical experience in sustainability science and electronic innovation, as they operate to come across dynamic options to real-earth challenges like curbing biodiversity loss, local weather mitigation and new strategies of calculating environmental footprints.
They’ve also worked with a community of Local climate Improve AI researchers, coaching that will assist pupils “be bilingual throughout unique fields of study,” Matthews claims, specially sustainability science and artificial intelligence technological know-how. And learners have been introduced to the thought of collective management, doing the job with varied groups in get to implement a facilitated, collective expertise towards difficult problems.
The program’s ultimate goal is to mobilize the transformative electricity of digital innovation toward meeting the world’s local weather and other sustainability objectives, and this mix of information, science and sustainability is a single of the factors PhD pupil Mitchell Dickau claims attracted him to Qualified prospects.
“Having an possibility to collaborate and have access to scientists in a extensive variety of environmental disciplines, as nicely as in the computer system science and machine finding out worlds, is quite interesting,” he claims. “I’m optimistic about the alternatives that will appear from this plan.”
The initial 12 months observed the staff operate solely on the internet thanks to the pandemic, acquiring to navigate how to present students with a “training group,” irrespective of only currently being capable to interact with their peers by way of their laptop or computer screens, Matthews notes.
“Working digitally has been a problem, but it is been very compatible with the theme of our system as very well,” he claims. “The digital entire world has only risen in prominence more than the previous calendar year, and what we’re striving to do with this method is to mobilize the resources and innovations of that entire world towards furthering progress on worldwide sustainability objectives.”
Master a lot more about Concordia’s SynBioApps and Potential customers applications.
Find out much more about the Collaborative Research and Training Working experience application grant from the Organic Sciences and Engineering Exploration Council of Canada.
