For the world to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” by mid-century, scientists say removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere will be essential. Dozens of companies have been created and billions of dollars spent already for […]
Read MoreRicardo Rubio grew up in the borderlands region of southwestern Texas where he came to recognize the challenges and vulnerabilities that communities like his increasingly face because of the compounded effects of water scarcity, political disempowerment, infrastructure scarcity, and climate change. Rubio is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of […]
Read MoreNicholas Witham, a fifth-year biomedical engineering Ph.D. student at the U, won first place in the Wilkes Student Innovation Prize competition in May 2023 for his proposal titled, “Renewable Energy And Carbon Capture With Thermomotive Biopolymer Textiles.” His idea proposes a novel renewable energy system that generates power through the daily heating and nightly cooling […]
Read MoreIn continuing our conversations with the winners of the 2023 Wilkes Student Innovation Prize, we spoke with Samantha Eddy and Xiang Huo, whose proposal: “Decarbonize the Diné: A Prefabricated Solar-Driven Communal Solution with Passive Survivability,” won second prize. It aims to turn Dennehotso, a Navajo chapter in Arizona, into a pilot project for building a […]
Read MoreIn a continuation of the 2023 Wilkes Student Innovation Prize winner interviews, Audri Dara joins us to speak about her idea to improve ridership of the public transit system at the University of Utah. Audri’s idea won third place last May and she presented her idea at the Wilkes Climate Summit. The proposal covers multiple […]
Read MoreBen Santer is a Fowler Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering. We at the Wilkes Center have been fortunate to have him working here at the University of Utah these past few weeks where he has given […]
Read MoreLast year The Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy hosted the first Student Innovation Prize competition where students could submit their most creative solutions to climate change. Steven Tran and Rabiul Hasan are Ph.D. students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering here at the U, and they took home the third place […]
Read MoreAnyone who has experienced the brown and gray haze of wildfire smoke in the last few years knows that it can be brutal. Wildfires can not only have devastatingly destructive impacts on communities where people live and work, they can also worsen air quality to unhealthy levels in areas downwind of these massive fires. People […]
Read MoreDr. Kevin Perry has been studying air quality for over 20 years. Perry has monitored plumes from the World Trade Center collapse, smoke from pyrotechnic – firework – displays, and more recently he has been studying dust blowing off the Great Salt Lake. He has deployed equipment to monitor ambient air from the ground, from […]
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