Summer Undergrad Research Topics Archive

Research Focus The undergraduate fellow will participate in a NASA funded project to better understand the impact of tundra and boreal wildfires on permafrost across different environmental gradients in the Alaskan Arctic and Subarctic. This project will primarily revolve around the processing, analysis, and interpretation of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), which can resolve centimetric-scale […]

Research Focus Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the predominant greenhouse gas driving climate change. The prospect of capturing and storing CO2 emerges as a pivotal strategy in mitigating climate change. Current efforts involve capturing CO2 from point sources (e.g., industrial facilities) and directly from the air. In August 2023, the Biden-Harris administration announced $1.2 billion for […]

Research Focus The Influence of Carbon Neutral Biofuels and Carbon Free Hydrogen and Ammonia on Aerodynamic Design of Commercial Aircraft Configurations    In efforts to combat climate change worldwide, the aviation industry faces particularly complex design challenges in designing new, CO2 emissions free vehicles. One potential solution to this problem is the use of sustainable biofuels […]

Research Focus Asthma, the most common chronic condition affecting youth, disproportionately impacts Black youth (twice the national prevalence), and children living in poverty (1.5 times their peers). Programs that successfully target asthma management through environmental interventions exist, but are under-implemented among vulnerable populations due to social and economic contextual barriers (i.e., poverty, resources, environmental conditions). […]

Research Focus Recognizing the growing impact of climate change on community health and resilience, this project seeks to assess and understand the public health and environmental implications of local climate adaptation efforts. A key part of the initiative is a three-day interdisciplinary workshop that will bring together residents, community leaders, government officials, nonprofit organizations, researchers, […]

Research Focus Diffusion models have become a popular machine learning approach for many types of problems, such as linear inverse problems. Paleoclimate reconstruction based on climate proxies such as tree rings and pollen is an inverse problem. Many statistical methods have been used to reconstruct past climates, and we plan to investigate how diffusion models […]

Research Focus Are you passionate about sustainable energy and curious about how we can design better materials to power the future? Join the Wexler Group in developing computational and theoretical methods to study material imperfections—like surfaces and defects—that can be essential in clean energy technologies. Our projects include (1) discovering how changes on material surfaces […]

Research Focus The Initiative for Social Work and Forced Migration seeks to lead and coordinate research, education, and training in the multifaceted field of forced migration. This includes topics related to forced migration due to human-made disasters (e.g., war and conflict), natural disasters, or climate change, with or without recognized legal documents by the receiving […]

Research Focus The Aquatic Chemistry Laboratory is focused on chemical reactions that affect the fate and transport of heavy metals, radionuclides, and other inorganic constituents in natural and engineering aquatic systems.  Major research themes in the group are (1) drinking water treatment and supply, (2) environmental geochemistry of soil and groundwater, and (3) the environmental […]

Research Focus Develop computer vision techniques to address pressing problems in ecology in collaboration with domain experts. We have identified three exciting potential projects: (1) Species Distribution Mapping: This project aims to use computer vision techniques to map species distributions using citizen science and remote sensing data; (2) Camera-Trap Imagery Analysis: This project focuses on […]