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Each INT Science Nugget is linked to a descriptive paragraph about the supported activity.
Nano-based Chemical Sensors for Homeland Security - Penner (Western Europe Program)
Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute on Green Chemistry - Kirchhoff (Americas Program)
Using GIS to Understand Urban Change in Six African Cities - Park (Africa, Near East & South Asia Program)
Innovations in Internationalization: Building Multi-Sector Partnerships (East Asia & Pacific Program)
0125122This Partnerships for Innovation Program project, co-funded by INT with the Education and Human Resources Directorate, fosters partnerships among the University of Washington (Lead Institution), Washington State Office of Economic Development, Washington State China Relations Council, Northwest Environmental Business Council, Earth Tech, Inc., and Hart Crowser, Inc., and in China, Sichuan University. The goals are to (1) create new team-based approaches for faculty, students, government and industry partners to collaborate on international research and education, (2) translate the work of these teams into products, systems, and services, (3) produce a scientific and engineering workforce to work in an international marketplace. Teams of faculty and undergraduate students from the University of Washington and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, have been working collaboratively on water resource management, waste water treatment, forest ecology, environmentally-friendly materials processing, biodiversity, and the impact of humans on the ecology.
Geologic Field Mapping (Central & Eastern Europe Program)
0209874
Ray Weldon
University of Oregon Eugene
The first summer of this international field camp brought together students from the U.S., European Union, and Central Asia to learn geologic mapping skills in the Tien Shan Mountain range in Kyrgyzstan. The Tien Shan offers superb exposure and complex geology where the students are able to address some of the most fundamental questions on mountain building and interactions of older and younger deformational events. The co-organizers of this program were Dr. Ray J. Weldon from the University of Oregon Eugene and Dr. Kanatbek Abdrahkmatov from the Kyrgyz Institute of Seismology. The students mapped the geology of the region surrounding Lake Issyk-Kul and took two long field trips. The first trip circled Lake Issyk-Kul and focused on the geologic history of the lake basin and the active faults that define it. The second trip was to the high mountain in the Central Tien Shan to look at the bedrock geology and study the glacial history of the region. The field camp was spectacularly successful and the participants are preparing three papers. One is on the technical issue of how the basement-cored faults of the Tien Shan work, led by graduate student Reed Burgette. The second is on the field camp for the Journal of Geoscience Education, led by Ray Weldon, and a combination paper by Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov for the Russian research community.
Nano-based Chemical Sensors for Homeland Security (Western Europe Program)
0233371
& 0111557
Reginald Penner
University of California-Irvine
A US-French team of researchers and students is investigating a new generation of chemical sensors that will have a wide range of applications, from detection of biological and chemical agents to biomedical uses to pollution control. In partnership with a French research team in Montpellier, the research group at the University of California Irvine, led by Reginald Penner, is exploring the synthesis of nanowires of various metals and evaluating their use as chemical sensors. Nanowires are ultra-small, molecular structures. They act as sensors by measuring electrical conductivity when exposed to a molecule of a particular element or agent. Their electrical conductivity depends on the number and kinds of molecules attached to the nanowire's surface area. The US-French team has already demonstrated that single palladium nanowires have potential to act as sensitive sensors for hydrogen. Their present investigations address synthesis of nanowires composed of two metals and new methods for attaching receptors for sensing molecules.
Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute on Green Chemistry (Americas Program)
0221274
Mary Kirchhoff
American Chemical Society (ACS)
The term “green chemistry” refers to the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances. Green chemistry uses basic and applied science and engineering to prevent pollution through reduced materials and energy use. In addition, the utilization of green-chemistry methods addresses major issues of global sustainability, such as climate change, energy and food production, resource depletion, and toxicity in the environment. A systematic and effective way for students to learn about the practice of green chemistry is essential to having the next generation of leaders in industry, education, and government understand methods by which society can achieve sustainable development. However, despite the emergence of green chemistry over the past decade, it is largely absent from both the graduate and undergraduate curriculum in the United States and abroad. Supported by an award from SBE/INT and the Department of Energy (DOE), Dr. Mary Kirchhoff of the Green Chemistry Institute of the American Chemical Society and Dr. Patrick Moyna of the National University of Uruguay in Montevideo, have organized a Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) to be held at the University from July 6-17, 2003. This Institute will engage graduate and post-doctoral students from Western-Hemisphere countries in ten intensive days of activities focusing on relevant topics not found in a typical chemistry curriculum. Among the events are presentations by leading experts in green chemistry, discussions on policy and economic factors driving green chemistry, group problem-solving sessions, and hands-on laboratory experiments.
Using GIS to Understand Urban Change in Six African Cities (Africa, Near East & South Asia Program)
9817743
Thomas Park
University of Arizona
INT co-funded with the Division of Earth Sciences Thomas Park’s award “Creation of a GIS for Six Cities in Arid Environments: In Morocco, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Tanzania and Botswana” (EAR-9817743) and recently funded a workshop supplement (EAR-0138217) for the project. The workshop, held in January 2003 at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, featured presentations by representatives of all six African countries as well as by graduate students and faculty from the University of Arizona. Five American and five African graduate students attended the workshop.
One of the original goals of the project was methodological - to determine whether remote sensing imagery could be used to detect fine-scale differences in urban landscapes. The urban classification developed from the GIS images proved to be very accurate in delineating distinct housing types and these distinctions were themselves highly correlated with a number of socio-economic variables. Furthermore, the sampling strategy proved extraordinarily accurate in picking up variation in a wide variety of socio-economic and demographic variables. All the GIS specialists at the workshop felt that even more could be done with the new higher resolution (1m meter) imagery now available for recent years and recommended adding such images to future projects since they would enable the development of significant refinements in the methodology.
A second goal of the project, which was funded by NSF’s Urban Research Initiative, was to use the new methodology to study patterns of urban change. The researchers were able to document and compare phenomena such as urban immigration patterns, urban land use and environmental change, and gender and class in urban geography. Several government urban planners attended the workshop and participated in discussions with researchers about how municipal planning efforts could use such databases to understand urban complexity.
The workshop made it clear that overall, the project successfully developed a methodology for accurately assessing many types of urban change in poor cities at low cost. The use of remote sensing imagery over a 20-year period as a way of mapping out urban change and as a basis for accurate sampling proved to be very viable. The GIS datasets collected in this project hold great promise for enabling a wide range of research projects on urban change in Africa and the rest of the world. Researchers and municipalities can do further surveys in the six cities at low cost and produce data that is comparable across Africa. The availability of these datasets should encourage comparative research on urban change, an outcome with real potential to contribute both to academic understanding as well as to development decisions.
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