School of forestry and environmental studies

School Notes: School of the Environment
March/April 2013

Ingrid C. “Indy” Burke | http://environment.yale.edu

Urbanization expert promoted to full professor

Dr. Karen Seto, who utilizes remote sensing data to reveal the patterns of urbanization, has been promoted to professor of the urban environment with tenure. She has developed an internationally recognized research program that uses satellite, remote sensing, socioeconomic and biophysical data, in-person field interviews, and quantitative modeling methods to reveal the drivers, patterns, and consequences of urbanization. Her work in China, Vietnam, and India seeks to determine what drives Asia’s land change, where urban expansion will occur in the future, and how urbanization is changing the Earth’s surface and environment. Seto noted, “The unfolding urban transformation has profound implications for virtually every aspect of life on Earth. By creating a scientific understanding of the links between urbanization and global change, my research informs policy and provides the foundations for more sustainable urbanization in the decades to come.”

Doctoral student creates app for international conferences

F&ES doctoral student Angel Hsu has introduced her own mobile application for smartphones. The app, called DecisionMakr, allows Twitter users to give real-time feedback to decision-makers on the quality of their proposals and statements made during large-scale negotiations. The app, conceived by Hsu and developed by a team at Parvieda Solutions, bested 25 other apps to win an AT&T-sponsored Mobile App Hackathon for Social Good in New York City, and debuted at the United Nations climate change conference in Doha, Qatar.

Professor leads industrial ecology group

For Marian Chertow ’81MPPM, ’00PhD, one company’s trash is another’s raw material. An associate professor of industrial environmental management at F&ES, Chertow has been named president of the International Society for Industrial Ecology and began serving a two-year term in January 2013. Industrial ecology may sound like an oxymoron, but it is an intuitive call for more creative approaches to resource management; viewing manufacturing systems much like scientists view natural ecosystems. “Once you start looking at the waste stream, you must look at the entire system that produced the waste in the first place,” said Chertow. “That’s the notion of life-cycle analysis, examining a system from production to waste. That’s what industrial ecology does.”

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