Faisal Hossain - US grants

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 13-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and the G8 countries Heads of Research Councils. The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. The G8 Heads of Research Councils developed a funding framework to support multilateral research projects that address global challenges in ways that are beyond the capacity of national or bilateral activities. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

Working together in an inaugural call of the International Opportunities Fund, the Belmont Forum and G8HORCs have provided support for research projects that seek to deliver knowledge needed for action to mitigate and adapt to detrimental environmental change and extreme hazardous events that relate to either Freshwater Security or Coastal Vulnerability. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry).

This award supports research activities that will develop natural and social science frameworks to promote the adaptation to sea-level rise and related coastal hazards in coastal Bangladesh. Sea-level rise, changes in land-surface topography, and changes in the frequency of storms contribute to increasing vulnerability to coastal regions. This is especially true in Bangladesh, a low-lying coastal nation with a high population density that is also prone to hazards including monsoonal flooding, saltwater intrusion, erosion, and drinking water hazards. This project will quantify the causes of sea-level rise and land movement as well as the human interactions that govern coastal vulnerability in Bangladesh. An earth system analysis and prediction system will be constructed to promote the adaptation to and mitigation of these detrimental hazards. Using a range of satellite and ground instrumentation as well as socio-economic tools, this project will integrate improved sea-level rise predictions with land subsidence. This project will contribute an analysis and prediction framework to improve the coastal resilience of Bangladesh. The integrated development of a natural and social science framework will provide a novel decision support tool for the adaptation of sea-level rise that is transportable to other coastal regions of the world.

Large freshwater ecosystems are lifelines for a majority of the world's population, providing ecosystem goods and services critical to economies and livelihoods. Despite the important societal and economic benefits of these freshwater systems, the ability to predict impacts from ecosystem change and to evaluate tradeoffs is limited. A better understanding of conceptual and quantitative frameworks for evaluating the physical, biological, and social dynamics that sustain freshwater ecosystem services would allow for better management of these critical resources. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Washington will develop an innovative, culturally-aware STEM workforce fluent in state-of-the-art approaches for sustaining food-energy-water services in large river ecosystems and who are prepared to effectively safeguard ecosystem services for a growing world population. The project is driven by an urgent need for interdisciplinary scientists who can address current and future environmental problems by employing the quantitative tools required to integrate, model, and visualize complex datasets and often conflicting outcomes. The Future Rivers NRT training will include coursework and group activities that emphasize quantitative and interdisciplinary literacy. Students will engage in research that integrates transboundary rivers across the world, spanning a range of human disturbance and regional economic development regimes. The project anticipates training sixty (60) MS and PhD students, including eighteen (18) funded trainees, from disciplines across natural resource science, engineering, social science, health science, and policy.

The overall goals of the Future Rivers NRT project are to develop a trained workforce in 21st century quantitative and data science approaches to sustain and safeguard food-energy-water services in large river ecosystems, while researching new ways to better predict impacts and safeguard these resources. The project will use numerical modeling and data science to catalyze new approaches for addressing the grand challenge of achieving sustainability in large Food, Energy, and Water Systems (FEWS). To integrate the research and learning, the Future Rivers project follows an active learning model that starts with the presentation of new information, followed by directed practice and exercises, and ends with the application of knowledge gained in a new context. Project training activities are centered around five primary educational objectives: 1) develop new technical and data science skills; 2) foster innovative interdisciplinary and international science integration; 3) improve trainee communication skills; 4) increase cultural awareness and inclusivity among faculty, trainees, and participants; and 5) create networks and opportunities for student career development. Specific project components focus on data science training and careers (courses, hackathon events, research summits, career fairs); communication and outreach skillsets (workshops, science communication film contests); equity and inclusivity training; and interdisciplinary river FEWS issues (courses, seminar series, and summer institutes that include some international locations).

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.

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.