Research Day 2025

The Rockefeller Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative to support global cities in addressing environmental and socio-economic challenges to realize sustainable cities. This presentation shares findings on how cities approached creating Resilience Strategies by identifying key actions areas related to equity, and provides recommendations on optimal ways to integrate equity into urban resilience planning, with a focused case study on the City of Toronto.

Studying aquifers and underground water in the desert offers a unique perspective on the territory, investigating it from a vertical dimension. This project examines boreholes in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt as a portal to understanding desert politics and the environmental imaginaries that exist between extractive powers and indigenous communities.

This paper focuses on the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorjee, a prominent Tibetan Buddhist figure of fourteenth-century Tibet. It seeks to explore questions such as how Buddhist cosmology and worldview shape the representation of nature in medieval texts. By examining his writings, the study will investigate how fundamental Buddhist principles are reflected in medieval Tibetan Buddhist literature, particularly with regard to nature and the environment.

The ancient Moche site of Huaca Colorada (650–850 CE) on the north coast of Peru has been the focus of intensive archaeological study, yet the unique wooden posts within architectural platforms remains under-analyzed, despite the fact that they were made from the venerated algarrobo tree. This presentation will examine the endurance of these posts within (and between) Moche ritual spaces and elucidate their possible purpose in the materialization of social memory, ancestry, and cosmic continuity

We examined the bidirectional relationship between PA and sleep among agropastoralists residing in rural South Africa. We analyzed activity and sleep data collected from 113 individuals using MotionWatch actigraphy wristwatches across three field seasons (7,111 individual days). We found that low- to moderate-intensity PA durations consistently predicted higher sleep quality. Our findings showed that sleep quality was more strongly affected by PA than sleep duration.

This talk examines the “Divestment Generation,” a cohort of youth who grew up as public awareness of the climate crisis expanded and were politicized through involvement in fossil fuel divestment campaigns on university campuses across North America in the 2010s. It traces their shift from “climate activist” to “climate justice activist,” examining the tensions, silences, encounters, and desires shaping this change—along with the contradictions of a politics in search of "justice".

Methane is urban environment are important contributor of climate change while targeting methane mitigation offers faster climate benefits. This research focuses on identifying urban methane sources and applies biochar to mitigate methane from biogenic sources with specific objectives of map and identify urban methane point-sources from a tropical mega-city, determine flux from organic mulching in urban soil and potential mitigating role of biochar, biochar role to methane flux in green roof.

Measuring facility level greenhouse gas emissions is an important step to track progress towards net zero and decarbonization efforts. Landfills are a significant source of anthropogenic methane emissions, are an important target for emissions mitigation efforts, and are difficult to measure. This work evaluates several emissions quantification strategies and platforms, from vehicle based surveys to imaging satellites.

Methane (CH4) is the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas with 86 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide in a 20-year period. Satellite and ground-based remote sensing instruments can be used to measure CH4 concentrations and infer emissions. But CH4 has a diverse set of sources including fugitive emissions which make emissions allocation difficult. Measurements of other trace gas species are used in this work to partition sources and aid in CH4 emission quantification.

Organophosphate esters (OPEs) are a class of flame retardants and plasticizers detected at high concentrations in both people and the environment with negative health impacts. I investigated the biological interactions initiating this toxicity and found direct OPE interactions with many proteins across multiple species. By looking further into these interactions, I have discovered specific protein targets and found that the chemical structure of OPEs has a major impact on their protein binding.