REU Site: Interdisciplinary Research Experience for Undergraduates in Atmospheric and Geological Hazards

The complexity of natural hazards, how they are exasperated by our changing climate, and the ways society reacts to these hazards requires an interdisciplinary approach to research the branches across the geoscience disciplines, engineering and the social sciences. Undergraduate students at the beginning of their career have not yet mastered a single discipline of expertise and thus are often not prepared for research opportunities that are interdisciplinary.

This research experience for undergraduates site seeks to develop undergraduate experience in interdisciplinary research to give them the tools to identify societal problems and how to solve them using a variety of research methods. Students will have primary and secondary advisors who are domain experts in different fields to work on a research project based on climate and geohazards.

By having two faculty advisors from different fields, students are much more likely to progress in interdisciplinary research. All mentors are members of the University of Buffalo’s Center for Geological and Climate Hazards. The students will spend 10 weeks at the University of Buffalo working on a hands-on research project as part of a team and participating in weekly professional development workshops with a cohort of their peers.

The primary goal of this project is to equip undergraduate students with the skills needed for interdisciplinary research with a focus on climate and natural hazards. Student participants will be active researchers in current, highly socially relevant scientific research with experts in the field. Students will also learn science communication and presentation skills, how to identify potential mentors, how to apply to graduate school, and the basics of proposal writing.

The projects cover topics such as glacier lake outburst floods, lake effect snow causes and impacts, driving behavior in snowy weather, managing agriculture to mitigate the impact of climate change, long range transport of wildfire smoke and the impact on air pollution, shoreline erosion along Lake Erie, and threats of massive forest die-off due to rapid environmental change. The project will use formative, summative and longitudinal evaluation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.