School Notes: School of the Environment
January/February 2014

Alumna to serve on UN advisory board

Maria Ivanova ’99MESc, ’06PhD, has been appointed to a high-level international panel that will advise top United Nations leaders, including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as they develop strategies to improve the international response to environmental challenges and make a more sustainable planet. Ivanova, who helped create the Global Environmental Governance Project while she was a student at F&ES, is now a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “Contemporary global problems require innovative solutions that combine insights from a number of fields,” she said. “The board will seek to bring such innovation from the academy into the global policy process.” 

The path to sustainable food systems

On the weekend of October 18–19, the inaugural Yale Food Systems Symposium attracted researchers, practitioners, theorists—and eaters—from across the nation to discuss the path to a more sustainable food system. The two-day conference highlighted innovative projects, new research, and non-traditional collaborations that are pushing humankind toward more sustainable and just food systems. “We started to think about what is the next step in building food and agriculture here . . . both in cultivating F&ES’s unique contribution to that world, and also demonstrating that there really is a lot of amazing scholarship out there,” said Adan Martinez ’14MESc, one of the event’s organizers. 

Designing safer chemicals

A team of Yale scientists, led by chemistry professor Paul Anastas, will spearhead a new four-year project aimed at promoting the design of new chemicals and materials that are less toxic to humans and the environment. Working with researchers from three other universities, the team will develop tools that help molecule designers predict toxic hazards when evaluating new and existing chemicals and modify their designs to reduce risks while maintaining efficacy. A primary goal will be the creation of computer software that helps chemical designers assess whether a molecule is likely to cause toxicity, the specific factors that create that risk, and the modifications that would reduce potential toxic outcomes. The $4.4 million project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s EPA/NSF Networks for Sustainable Molecular Design and Synthesis.