Stony Brook University

11/19/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 11/19/2024 14:50

Q&A with Collaborative for the Earth Podcast Host Heather Lynch

"C4E Presents", a podcast from Stony Brook's Collaborative for the Earth (C4E), is set to release its second season this spring.

Each episode of the pilot season gave Stony Brook researchers and scholars an opportunity to discuss their work to address changes in the environment locally and globally in conversation with host and C4E Director Heather Lynch.

Lynch, the endowed chair for ecology and evolution in the Institute for Advanced Computation Science (IACS), said it was important to reach all corners of the university to connect the dots between departments that are contributing to our campus' efforts on climate and environment.

The second season planned for the Spring 2025 semester will flip the script to recognize a growing interdisciplinary effort at Stony Brook to respond and implement solutions to address contributions and impacts for climate change, Lynch said.

What should we expect from the second season of C4E Presents?

Climate change is going to impact every aspect of our lives, and to understand these challenges we need to talk to a wide range of scholars wrestling with issues of environmental damage and climate change. So, this season we're tackling this from every angle - talking to Stony Brook researchers and scholars from unexpected spaces around campus who you might not expect to be working on climate every day. Solutions have to come from everywhere, and working interdisciplinarily is our focus.

We certainly cover a scholar's own specific research but I also like to ask a lot of 'dumb' questions about a scholar's field that might be useful for our very diverse listenership. If I get stumped by jargon, I'm sure our listeners do too, so I'll ask what a word or a phrase means and inevitably that leads to more questions. But mostly I want to ask my guests questions that have no right answers but where they no doubt have informed opinions, so it's more of a conversation (that happens to be recorded) than an inquisition.

Why is talking about climate change in different spaces, like a podcast, important?

People are busy. Busy, busy, busy. And this busyness is usually the thing that gets in the way of interdisciplinary research, because it takes real time and effort to learn about a subject from another perspective. But a podcast is super mobile - you can listen in the car, while going for a walk, while making dinner. I'm a huge fan of podcasts for this reason so it seemed like a natural fit for getting the word out about Stony Brook faculty and all their exciting work. And I think just sitting down to have a conversation makes it clear, especially for students, how much isn't known. These are not easy issues, and I think that comes across better in a conversation than in a paper or an academic presentation.

What role does the Collaborative for the Earth play?

No department or even college on campus has a monopoly on environmental research. Clearly, some departments come to mind - the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and my own department of ecology and evolution stand out - but environmental work also includes engineers and writers and artists and social scientists and medical researchers and the list goes on and on. So, the Collaborative for the Earth is really designed to cut right through all these labels to get to the conversations we need to be having, where it doesn't matter where you sit on campus but rather what you can bring to the table in terms of a new perspective or fresh ideas.

The Collaborative for the Earth is also in a great position to play matchmaker on campus, connecting faculty with similar interests, and planning events such as lectures and field trips that expand our understanding of the issues. The Collaborative for the Earth is playing a 'long game', because we know that transformative interdisciplinary research sits on a foundation of personal relationships and a shared understanding of the problem at hand. These take time to develop.

Can you give an example of interdisciplinary research that C4E is working to foster?

One of the topics we've been working on is PFAS and related environmental contaminants, and this is a really terrific example of a broadly cross-cutting research area where we have strengths that could be better connected. The Center for Clean Water Technology has been working in this area for some time, and we also have expertise in public health, and in sustainabilities and in chemistry, all of which we're looking to combine with an astoundingly large collection of fish managed by Yong Chen's lab in SoMAS, not to mention the enormous potential implicit in being associated with a major medical center like Stony Brook Medicine.

All of these components are needed to understand how PFAS has filtered through the environment, how it's moving into the water we drink and fish we eat, and how that might manifest to adverse health outcomes for New Yorkers. Figuring this out requires so many different areas of expertise and we have everything we need right here on campus to lead in this area. To be clear, the Collaborative for the Earth is not doing the research, and we're not funding the research, but we're trying to solve what transportation engineers would call the 'last mile problem'. Everything is already in place, we're just trying to build that last little piece of infrastructure to connect the pieces of campus together.

What does that look like?

Everyone that we have recorded for the podcast is enthusiastic. But at the end of the day, this new push for more and better interdisciplinary research has to be executed in some rigorous way. We can't just think about interdisciplinary work. We have to find ways of operationalizing these grand ideas, and that means thinking seriously about the way our research is organized, the way our faculty are organized, and the kinds of degree programs that we're ultimately providing to our students.

What's happening with the Collaborative for the Earth in the spring?

We have so much going on, and I hope everyone will head to our website to look over our calendar of events. One thing that I'm excited to see coming up in Spring 2025 is a one-credit pop-up course, 'Climate Change and You'. The course is presented with a different instructor in each module, and we have a special interview that offers students - and our entire audience - an opportunity to learn more about what each of these instructors are working on and how it relates to their week of material in the course.

Because the theme of this academic year is nuclear energy, a lot of our spring events will focus on that topic. We're thinking about nuclear in a very broad way, and this includes the role that nuclear should play in the future as we battle climate change.

We will also discuss accidents and the health and environmental concerns that have long shadowed the nuclear industry, new developments in smaller modular reactors, the role of nuclear fuels in geopolitics, and the interest in building more nuclear power plants to generate the huge amount of energy needed to power artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. It's a very timely topic that divides the environmental community in ways that don't cleanly map onto the traditional political alliances, and that's why I'm so excited to focus on the issue this year.

We are continuing to plan more events for the spring, but the big events for Spring 2025 right now are:

You can find episodes of C4E Presents at www.stonybrook.edu/c4eor wherever you stream audio.

- J.D. Allen