Fellowships

    Ms.Yini Ma (EAS)

Yini Ma comes to Purdue from Nanjing University where she studied carbon cycling in soils using isotope tracers and molecular biology techniques. She is now working on the feedbacks between anthropogenic disturbances to ecosystems and the dynamics of soil organic matter in the context of global climate change, in particular analyzing soil carbon structure influenced by the invasive earthworm in North America. She is working with Professor Timothy Filley in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

    Mr. Han Wu (Statistics)

Han Wu has joined the Department of Statistics working with Professor Alexander Gluhovsky on a project which focuses on incorporating resampling techniques in analyses of trends and extreme events in nonlinear time series with applications to trends and extremes in precipitation and other climatological variables.

    Charlotte Kendra Castillo - 2007

This last year, Kendra (Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Prof. Kevin Gurney, advisor) was part of an interdisciplinary team that initiated a project to measure Boilermakers’ attitudes on sustainability. The project involved creating and implementing a survey, “The Boilermaker Lifestyle Survey,” which was pilot-tested during the Fall Semester, 2007. The team presented their findings at the Ecological Sciences and Engineering Student Research Symposium in November, 2007 and won a 2nd place award. The project was also entered in Purdue’s “Idea-to-Product Competition for Environmental and Social Entrepreneurship” in March 2008.

Kendra attended the 2008 Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (Sustainable development and climate change) as one of the international graduate student delegates. Upon her return, she presented her experiences at the spring semester Graduate Students Seminar Series. Most recently, Kendra has been developing a research project aimed at understanding the climate impacts of applying the "preservation pathway" to tropical forests. She is also a Fulbright Scholar and a PEO International Peace Scholar.

Collaborating with scientists at Purdue University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Joseph (Department of Agronomy, Prof. Dev Niyogi, advisor) was invited to NCAR during the summers of 2006, 2007, and 2008 through the Advanced Study Program and the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Visiting Scientist Program. He has been investigating the linkages between the heterogeneity of surface characteristics and the spatial variability of surface fluxes. Using a combination of surface, remotely sensed, and modeled data, in conjunction with flux footprint and spatial statistical analysis techniques, Joseph's work seeks to clarify the influence of surface properties, such as land use and vegetation density, on land-atmosphere exchange processes. In 2007, he was awarded a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. He was also recognized as the Outstanding Ph.D. Student in Research and the recipient of the Wayne P. Rothgreb Memorial Scholarship awarded through the Department of Agronomy, Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences. Joseph was the author or co-author of six papers published during 2007.

    Vimal Mishra -2006

Vimal Mishra joined the department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) as a graduate student in the fall of 2006. He has been funded with a Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC) fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year. Vimal has been working on modeling of hydro-climatic issues with his major professor Dr. Keith Cherkauer.

During the past two semesters he has finished his course requirements for a Ph.D through ABE with 4.0/4.0 CGPA, and as a solid foundation to continue his studies related to hydrologic aspects of climate and land use change. Vimal’s research seeks to answer questions like, How will wetland hydrology respond to change in climatic and land use conditions in future? Will wetland extent increase due to projected increases in precipitation and soil moisture or shrink due to decreases in snow? What will be their future role in offsetting flood extremes caused by change in climate and land use? Answers to these questions will increase understanding of the dominant processes in wetland hydrology and their role in flood generation and reduction.

Vimal’s present research is divided between two projects. The first of these focuses on future projections of land cover/land use change (LCLUC) impact on hydrological processes in the state of Michigan. Here he is working to quantify changes in various hydrologic variables due to changes in the extent of forestation, urbanization and wetlands between 2000 and 2030. His second research focus is on the prediction of regional soil moisture contents for the north central Midwestern United States using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) large scale hydrology model and IPCC 4th assessment climate projections. He has submitted abstract titled "Variation in surface soil moisture and its implications under changing climatic conditions" to the Graduate Climate Conference (GCC) to be held at the University of Washington in October, 2007. He has received a graduate school incentive grant for the proposal he submitted for a NASA fellowship.

    Jinyun Tang - 2006

Jinyun Tang joined the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the 2006-2007 academic year. Jinyun has been very productive in his learning and thesis research with Prof. Qianlai Zhuang under the auspices of the PCCRC Fellowship. In March 2007, he participated in a workshop entitled "Toward an adequate quantification of methane emissions from land ecosystems: Integrating field and in-situ observations, satellite data, and modeling" in Santa Barbara, CA and in April, he attended the TransCom workshop held this year at the Purdue campus. Early this year, he submitted a research manuscript, entitled "A Global Sensitivity and Bayesian Inference Framework to Improve the Parameter Estimation and Prediction of Process-Based Terrestrial Ecosystem Models" to Global Change Biology for consideration of publication.

We are pleased to announce that in May, 2007, Jinyun was selected to receive the prestigious NASA Earth System Science (ESS) Fellowship with his research proposal "Improving a Process-Based Biogeochemistry Model Using an Atmospheric Transport Chemistry Model and In-Situ and Remotely-Sensed Terrestrial and Atmospheric Data".

    Avantika Regmi - 2005

Avantika Regmi joined the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources to work with Professor Bryan Pijanowski. She began her work in the fall of 2005, coupling the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) and Land Transformation Model (LTM) models to simulate the interactions of land use and climate change over diverse areas of the world. To accomplish this, she has developed a demographic model that interfaces with the coupled RAMS-LTM model. She has finished coding an alpha version of the model that contains spatially explicit population growth and migration. This model's population projection module will be used to control the agriculture and urban land use change projections in one region of study (in this case Kenya). This demographic module will receive inputs from several crop production models (e.g., CERES-Maize) that are coupled to RAMS and LTM. Next steps include the code evaluation phase of the work which will be followed by (in the next 3-4 months) model runs using a variety of scenarios. Avantika?s work was also supported by a College of Agriculture?s Agricultural Research Program (ARP) research grant for 2006-2007 and its further development will be supported in 2007-2008 by a grant from the Computational Research Institute (CRI) at Purdue. The larger effort to simulate climate and land use change into the future in East Africa is being funded by an NSF Biocomplexity grant.

    Joseph Alfieri - 2005

Joseph Alfieri, PCCRC fellowship recipient from 2005, is a doctoral student with Dr. Dev Niyogi in the Department of Agronomy. Joseph’s research focuses on understanding the spatial context of micrometerological measurements and it impacts on land surface and atmospheric modeling. Joseph is using data from the 2002 International H2O Project, a multi-agency field campaign conducted in the Southern Great Plains of the United States, to investigate the effects of heterogeneous land surface characteristics on airborne observations of surface-atmosphere exchange processes. These results will be used to develop improved techniques for validating land surface models with observational data. Current validation procedures do not consider either the variability in spatial extent, location, orientation of the source area or how the characteristics of the source area impact the measurements used for model validation. Joseph’s research will enhance our ability to validate models. This work has lead to several publications and presentations thus far with additional manuscripts currently in preparation.

Joe’s honors and awards include a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (May 2007); he was selected as an invited participant in the Colloquium on Regional Biogeochemical Cycles, Advanced Study Program, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (2007) where he was also a visiting graduate student in 2006. Joe received an incentive grant from the graduate school in both 2006 and 2007.