As Earth Day approaches April 22, Rice University experts are available to provide insight into their research on a range of environmental topics, including the Texas coastline, climate patterns, severe storms and more.
Jim Blackburn is a professor of environmental law whose research focuses on sustainable design, energy and water sustainability and coastal resilience. He co-directs theSSPEED Center, which studies severe storm prevention, flood protection and disaster planning for the Texas coast, and is the founder and CEO ofBCarbon, a nonprofit carbon credit registry. Through his firm, Sustainable Planning and Design, he integrates research with planning practice to address environmental challenges along the Gulf Coast. He is currently working with Rice students to design and build a living coastline to protect coastal ecosystems along Galveston Bay.
Dominic Boyer is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and co-director of Rice’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience. He is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on climate mitigation and adaptation. Following Hurricane Harvey, he led a National Science Foundation-funded project to investigate the social and emotional burdens of recurring catastrophic flooding and why some Houstonians chose to remain and rebuild while others decided to move on from their homes, neighborhoods and even the city itself. He is currently working in the Kashmere/Trinity/Houston Gardens neighborhoods of northeast Houston, researching how green stormwater infrastructure could help climate resilience in the city’s historically underserved regions.
Boyer can also discuss global glacier health. With his research partner Cymene Howe, he coordinated the world’s first glacier funeral for Iceland’s first glacier lost to climate change and launched the Global Glacier Casualty List, the first platform for tracking disappeared and critically endangered glaciers around the world.
Sylvia Dee is a climate scientist whose research explores how natural climate patterns like El Niño and La Niña interact with climate change to influence weather extremes and flood risk. Her lab uses climate models to assess future hazards to human and natural systems with a particular focus on the Gulf of Mexico. She is currently collaborating with a team of scientists at Baylor College of Medicine on a groundbreaking initiative called theTexas Virosphere Project, which seeks to predict and prevent climate-driven infectious disease outbreaks in Texas and the Gulf Coast.
Jim Elliott, professor and department chair of sociology and co-director of Rice’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience, is an expert in social inequality and the environment and studies the intersection of natural and industrial hazards. He can discuss climate relocation, disaster inequities and brownfields/contamination.
Avantika Gori is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering whose research focuses on quantifying coastal flood risk in a changing climate. She combines physics-based models and statistical methods to study tropical cyclone behavior, compound flood hazards and the interaction between coastal hazards, climate change and the built environment. Her work aims to improve high-resolution flood risk assessment and resilience planning for vulnerable coastal regions. She is currently working on a project withthe University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University to help rural Texas communities overhaul their flood management systems.
Howe, a professor of cultural anthropology who researches the relationship between social and environmental systems, specializes in human-caused climate change, the loss of glaciers and rising seas around the world’s coastal cities. With her research partner Boyer, she coordinated the world’s first glacier funeral and launched the GGCL, the first platform for tracking disappeared and critically endangered glaciers around the world. Howe has field research expertise in Greenland, Iceland, South Africa, Mexico and the U.S.
Matt McCary is an ecosystem ecologist whose research explores how soil biodiversity shapes food web dynamics, ecosystem health and responses to environmental change. His work focuses on the impacts of invasive species, urbanization and resource availability on soil communities and ecosystem processes. He uses observational and experimental studies, ecological modeling and molecular techniques to investigate these questions.
Carrie Masiello is the W. Maurice Ewing Professor of Biogeochemistry and director of the Rice Sustainability Institute. Her team develops new tools to understand the processes that control carbon, nitrogen and water fluxes through the Earth system, then collaborates with economists and businesses to apply these tools to measure and verify new nature-based solutions to carbon and water challenges. She works with national and international businesses and carbon registries in bringing new solutions to market.
Matteo Pasquali is a chemical engineer whose research focuses on sustainable carbon materials and industrial decarbonization. His lab has developed methods for turning carbon nanotubes into lightweight, high-performance fibers and has recently demonstrated a method for recycling these fibers with no loss in performance, supporting circular approaches to materials design. Pasquali is the director of the Carbon Hub at Rice and co-founder and chief science adviser of Dexmat.
Haotian Wang is a chemical engineer whose research focuses on developing novel materials and technologies for energy and environmental applications, including energy storage, catalysis, green synthesis and energy devices. His lab recently developed a solution to a critical challenge in carbon capture and utilization technology. Wang is also the co-founder of Solidec, a climate-tech company spun out of his research lab.
For more information or to schedule an interview with one of the scholars, contact Amy McCaig, senior national media relations specialist at Rice, at 713-348-6777 or amym@rice.edu.