From January 19-21st, Mallory Squier and Carli Flynn attended the first International Low Impact Development Conference hosted by ASCE. This conference provides an opportunity for leaders in industry, policy and research realms to discuss continuing developments related to LID and green infrastructure.

Mallory presented recent results on water flows for various storm data collected from the OnCenter green roof. Several other research projects focused on green roof monitoring data, so it was a great opportunity to connect with other research groups in the LID/GI community.

Carli presented some of the theoretical background on how diffusion theories relate to GI adoption, as well as some recent survey work from the Cleveland GI Summit.

This was an excellent conference that we will look forward to attending again in future years!

From November 6-8th, several members of our research group attended the first International Conference on Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI) hosted by ASCE.

Onondaga County Executive Joanne Mahoney delivered one of the opening plenary talks on the development and success of the Save the Rain program. Though I may be biased, it was one of the most engaging talks of the morning as she described the complicated history of stormwater management planning in Syracuse, and how she played a major role in the development of a more sustainable direction. The audience of primarily engineers was very interested to hear about her extensive stakeholder engagement efforts, something that was generally absent from many public works projects of the past.

Mallory Squier presented her poster entitled “Preliminary heat transfer analysis for a large extensive green roof” which focused on recent data collected from the OnCenter green roof.

Caitlin Eger presented her paper entitled “Water Budget Triangle: A New Conceptual Framework for Comparison of Green and Gray Infrastructure.” Her talk was very interactive and involved personal drawings and calculations done by all audience members. It was very refreshing mid-way through the conference!

Overall, this was an excellent conference that I will look forward to attending again in future years. I expect it to grow as more engineers and community leaders seek to learn about the best practices related to the development of sustainable infrastructure systems.

Research group meeting in the OnCenter green roof 9/18/14

This past June I traveled to Indianapolis, IN to attend the Making Academic Change Happen (MACH) workshop and the 2014 ASEE conference.

Hosted by the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the MACH workshop provides attendees with the skills and confidence to make a difference in academic settings. The changes proposed by other participants were quite exciting to hear about, ranging from integrating global learning into the freshman engineering experience to complete curriculum upheavals. My ideas centered around the creation of a STEM education center at SU that would help to bring together faculty  research efforts related to undergraduate STEM education. I left the workshop with a lot of new ideas on how to start the process of making significant changes like this a reality.

The 2014 ASEE conference provided me the opportunity to connect with leaders in the field of engineering education and discover what new and innovative research is being conducted. Over the course of 2.5 days, I attended several workshops, presentations and informal meetings that provided a wealth of knowledge on the educational research community. I also received very helpful feedback on our educational research and what our next steps may be. Looking forward to staying in tough with fellow ASEE colleagues!