Spearheaded by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development with faculty leadership from Dr. Hood, Director of the Environment Program, an amazing team of students studying Environmental Studies, Biomedical Engineering, Classical Latin, Business Management, Economics, Humanities and Architecture (Tulane) beat out teams from Harvard, Tulane and Sapienza University of Rome. The winner is a team of 11 students from the Imperial College London, the third highest ranking school in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge.
The Loyola team, “People First” composed of six Loyola and one Tulane student won honorable mention in the global “Students Reinventing Cities” competition. Mayor LaToya Cantrell will honor Sydney Lowman, Evan Roden, Mya Butler, Rinny Barcenas, Leila Avery, Natalia Arredondo, and Ileanna Calcano in a ceremony on September 25 and has asked them to make a 30-minute presentation of their proposal to revitalize East New Orleans.
Loyola is now among Keep Louisiana Beautiful’s University Affiliates. This program engages students in environmental stewardship and sustainability practices and is the largest and most successful program of its kind in the United States. The Environment Program's Mark Tobler is the university's KLB program manager.
Dr. Craig Hood, director of the Environment program, and Bara Watts, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development, led a team of students participating in the global Reinventing Cities competition. The team earned honorable mention and will present their ideas to Mayor Cantrell later this year.
Dr. Bob Thomas shared his insights with The U.S. Sun to help inform a story of an alligator found “waiting” at a bus stop in Florida, noting that the more alligators have contact with humans, the more accustomed they become to being around us.
Robert Verchick, Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar and Chair in Environmental Law, shares his expertise with MSNBC viewers, addressing climate resiliency and the side effects of climate change.
Joel MacClellan's article "Is Biocentrism Dead? Two Live Problems for Life-Centered Ethics", was recently published in the Journal of Value Inquiry. Biocentrism is the idea that environmental ethics should take a more wholistic approach, focusing on all living organisms rather than simply humanity.
Adrienne Ingram ENVB'18, currently a science faculty member at Haas Hall Academy, was
chosen for the NSF-funded Arkansas Data Analytics Teacher Alliance (AR-DATA) program that
provides mathematics, computer science, and pre-engineering teachers with transformative
research experiences thematically centered on data analytics, especially engineering
applications towards smart and connected health, infrastructure, and community. This summer
she developed a curriculum that uses computer programming courses as a conduit for teaching
Marie Haddad, a spring 2023 Environmental Studies graduate, has secured a job using the skills she learned in the GIS course only months after graduating! Her final project in the class was focused on environmental justice and air quality. She took temporal air quality data and interpolated it across the entire state to show estimates of concentrated pollution. She linked the pollution data to census data to investigate whether the areas were marginalized.
Olivia Guerra received the Environment Program Outstanding Research Award in Spring of 2023. This is awarded to a student who has made outstanding contributions to research in either Environmental Science or Environmental Studies. A student's outstanding work in their Capstone project is perhaps the best demonstration of this.
Congratulations Olivia!