Zimmerman Receives $2-million NSF Grant
12/15/2007
Departments: Chemical and Environmental Engineering
Yale Environmental Engineering Professor, Julie Zimmerman, received a $2-million grant from the National Science Foundation to research water management issues in the U.S. Great Lakes region.
The proposed project, led by Zimmerman and Alex Mayer at Michigan Technological University, hopes to determine the impact of direct and indirect drivers on water quality, quantity, and availability in the Great Lakes region through integrated physical and economic models and under various scenarios of population growth, climate change, land use, and emissions. A particular emphasis will be on quantifying the stocks and flows of fresh water, analyzing the underlying factors affecting water use and allocation decisions, and developing cost frameworks for capturing the value of having a specific amount of water available at a given purity, time, and location.
The Great Lakes region was chosen due to its large volume of available freshwater (but low rate of replacement), high economic impact, complex governance issues, increasing competition for water quantity among economic sectors, and the current and future threats of water quality deterioration.
The research plans to advance the analysis of many water management issues including, but not limited to, the development of new approaches to simulate quantity and quality of the Great Lakes region, identification of the most significant current and future withdrawals and consumptive uses of water in the basin, and identifying areas where technological innovations are most needed to protect vulnerabilities in the Great Lakes system.
The $2-million grant is split evenly between Yale and MTU. Co-investigators on the grant are Sheila Olmstead, Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at Yale, and Jim Mihelic, David Watkins and Qiong “Jane” Zhang of MTU.
The Great Lakes region was chosen due to its large volume of available freshwater (but low rate of replacement), high economic impact, complex governance issues, increasing competition for water quantity among economic sectors, and the current and future threats of water quality deterioration.
The research plans to advance the analysis of many water management issues including, but not limited to, the development of new approaches to simulate quantity and quality of the Great Lakes region, identification of the most significant current and future withdrawals and consumptive uses of water in the basin, and identifying areas where technological innovations are most needed to protect vulnerabilities in the Great Lakes system.
The $2-million grant is split evenly between Yale and MTU. Co-investigators on the grant are Sheila Olmstead, Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at Yale, and Jim Mihelic, David Watkins and Qiong “Jane” Zhang of MTU.