DEPARTMENT NEWS Konar to study food-energywater nexus in U.S.
Gardoni to study food security, infrastructure issues
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EE at Illinois Assistant Professor Megan Konar is part of a multi-institution interdisciplinary research group that has been awarded a four-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (NSF INFEWS) program to study the connections between food production, energy production and water supply in the United States. Food, energy and water (FEW) systems are complex, interconnected networks in which the benefit of using one resource may result in costs to another. For example, tapping water sources to irrigate farm land may lead to increased food production, but that in turn may require increased energy production in order to harvest and transport the crops. Understanding these connections can help decision-makers identify trade-offs between policies and technologies related to FEW systems. The researchers will collect decades of food, energy and water data from locations across the U.S. and create a detailed mapping of the nation’s FEW system. To read the full story, visit the news page on cee.illinois.edu.
EE at Illinois professor Paolo Gardoni is part of a multiinstitutional research team that has been awarded a four-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) program. The interdisciplinary team will examine the problem of food security in the United States by focusing on interconnected infrastructure networks and how natural disasters affect them. “One of the main characteristics of the problem is the fact that food security, or rather food insecurity, is a result of cascading effects that involve multiple infrastructure,” said Gardoni. “We’re considering four of these critical infrastructure — transportation, energy, water and food distribution — as fundamental for understanding, modeling and addressing the problem of food insecurity.” The team will model the functionality and vulnerabilities of the four individual networks, and integrate the models to account for interdependencies between the systems. To read the full story, visit the news page on cee.illinois.edu.
Allen Matis (BS 82) Global Head of Development and Project Management for Great Eagle Holdings, based in Hong Kong, visited the department in April. Matis is pictured here with students from Civil China, whom he joined for lunch in the Yeh Center. 34
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