2015-16 Graduate Research and travel grant recipients

The PSE Announces its the 2015-16 Cohort of Graduate Student Travel and Research Grant Recipients
Thanks to a generous grant from the Dean of the UMD Graduate School, the PSE began a Graduate Student Travel and Research Grant program in 2013. Recipients will present their work in the Workshop on Society and the Environment during the 2015-16 academic year.  Their work will also be featured on our blog. Grants are offered yearly (check back in Spring 2016 for the 2016-17 Call for Proposals).

The Anacostia River, Recreation, and Health:  Is there an Association
between Limited-Contact Recreation and Adverse Health Outcomes?

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Rianna Murray is a doctoral student in the Toxicology and Environmental Health program at the School of Public Health. Her research is focused on the Anacostia River, a highly polluted tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. Despite this contamination, many people use regularly engage in limited-contact recreation on the river, such as kayaking, canoeing, rowing and sport fishing. Rianna will use the PSE Seed Grant funds to continue her ongoing research on exposure to water while recreating on the river and specific adverse health outcomes through a prospective cohort study design, focusing on exposure to microbiological contaminants.


Haiti’s first high-resolution tree cover maps and socioeconomic and 
geographic factors of contemporary tree cover change

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Gabriela Vaz Rodrigues is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation aims to uncover socio-economic and geographic factors of tree cover change throughout Haiti in the 2000s, and will involve an unprecedented estimation of tree cover change in the country using a combination of satellite imagery and aerial photography. Her main research interests are currently in human and environmental drivers of land use change, as well as in the role played by land tenure and its administration in environmental services preservation and economic development. She will use the PSE grant to travel to Haiti and conduct interviews with local land cover and deforestation experts in order to deepen the interpretation of her research findings. 


The Politics of Psychology and Climate Change: An experiment testing the 
effect of perception of environmental stressors on human psychology






Joe Braun and Felipe Westhelle are doctoral students in the Department of Government and Politics at UMD. Their research focuses on international relations and political psychology. They will be using the PSE grant to investigate how the communication of environmental risks may lead to associated actions that help prevent them at the individual level. Drawing on existing research in behavioral economics and political psychology, they argue that the perception of high costs associated with an environmental stressor may be a key mechanism that drives pro-environmental belief and actions.  Using behavioral experiments, they plan to investigate how different combinations of the expected cost and probability of environmental stressors affects an individual's willingness to support pro-environmental activity. This research should shed light on an understudied area: the effective communication of environmental risks to the public. The project will analyze the fact that many individuals, faced with seemingly large losses due to climate change and other environmental risks, may still be willing to accept the "gamble" of doing nothing. 

Powerful Polluters: the Politics of Disproportionate Emissions 
in the Coal-Fired Power Industry

Anya M. Galli is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland—College Park and a Graduate Fellow with the Program for Society and the Environment.  Anya will use the PSE seed grant to support data collection for her research on environmental inequality and industrial pollution in the coal-fired power industry. Specifically, funds will go toward conducting interviews with federal policymakers and regulators, as well as representatives of national environmental organizations and business interest groups. This project identifies facilities that produce extreme levels of emissions compared to their counterparts and uses qualitative interviews to identify the political and social processes that uphold environmental inequality in the sector. Although studies of environmental inequality have provided extensive evidence that the production and impacts of pollution are unequally distributed, less attention has been given to the specific processes by which environmental inequality is produced and legitimated. This project fills this gap by working toward an understanding of the socio-political determinants of disproportionate pollution.