How can we better understand and mitigate the effects of climate change?
For Northwestern faculty, solutions run the gamut, from designing structures that can adapt their shapes to make cities more resilient to measuring how our changing weather affects insects and the plants they pollinate. They even include understanding how climate change affects our relationships with our fellow humans.
Three new Northwestern faculty are ready to explore these issues, motivated by the university’s unique cross-disciplinary culture, top-notch faculty, and inquisitive students who are eager to create a better future.
“I’m very excited about the research environment at Northwestern,” said Lucia Stein-Montalvo, who will join Northwestern as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in January. “There are very talented researchers here who are approaching problems related to mitigating and combating climate change from a lot of different angles. That lends itself to interdisciplinary and impactful research. That’s where I want to be.”
Stein-Montalvo, who received her PhD from Boston University and who is currently finishing up a postdoctoral research fellowship at Princeton University, studies the mechanics of shape-shifting: how structures can adopt different configurations on demand.
Some of her recent work is inspired by kirigami and origami, the ancient Japanese art forms of cutting and folding paper into three-dimensional objects. She studies the mechanics of these structures first at a small scale, with the goal of using that knowledge to design building-scale adaptive structures.
Right now, buildings in the U.S. account for about 40 percent of energy consumption. Traditional architectural methods have created rigid, stationary structures that cannot adapt to changing temperatures. But Stein-Montalvo wants to both adapt these older buildings and develop new, flexible structures that can interact with the environment to help keep cities cool and resilient.
That could mean structures that shape-shift on demand to provide better airflow into a building or that move to improve shade along a walkway when the sun is overhead.
“We are feeling the effects of climate change everywhere, but rising temperatures and trapped contaminants are often felt more severely in cities,” she said. “We need dynamic structures that can regulate airflow, light, temperature, water, and sound. My group will design these adaptive structures to create a more sustainable built environment.”
Ecologist Gordon Smith studies an effect of climate change taking place in both rural and urban environments: the shifting relationships between insects and the plants they pollinate. In his research, Smith has studied the pollinating behavior of the hawk moth, looking at how male and females travel different distances to pollinate flowers. This type of long-distance pollination is important to maintain genetic diversity among both insects and plants, but as prairies disappear, these travel patterns change.
“If we understand how these interactions vary at the species level, it can help us predict how these interactions will change in the future due to changes in land use and climate change,” he said. “Because even small changes in the behaviors of pollinators can affect outcomes at the largest scales, like the availability of resources across ecosystems.”
With a PhD from the University of Arizona and coming off a visiting professorship at Williams College, Smith joined Northwestern this fall as an assistant professor of instruction. Here, he is excited to develop undergraduate research projects and work with local institutions, like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Field Museum, where specimens can offer a wealth of information on local climate change effects.
“There are a lot of interesting opportunities for undergraduates to use the techniques I’ve developed to ask creative questions,” he said. “I’m excited to dig into the local plant system and get a sense of which species are good to work with.”
Sarah Dimick, assistant professor of English, is also excited to work with Northwestern undergraduate students in her classes on the intersection of climate change and literature. Coming from Harvard University, Dimick first interacted with Northwestern students when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities from 2017-19.
“The student body here is so inquisitive and collegial, and they have such an incredible passion,” she said.
Dimick’s own work focuses on how literature has explored the issues of climate change—what it means for the world we live in and how we can navigate it to create an equitable future.
“When we hear climate change, our gut reaction is to think about it as a change in the composition of the atmosphere,” she said. “But it changes our relationships with each other, where we live, and how we live. Authors and artists are responding to this by creating literature, and it gives us a space to think about climate change in a holistic way.”
Dimick’s new book, Unseasonable, explores how climate change is conveyed and amplified in literatures, both historically and today. Next, she will study how literature examines the intersection of climate change and the US crisis in unhousing. She hopes to connect both with local environmental justice organizations and with faculty across the humanities and social sciences. “Incredible faculty are already doing amazing work in environmental policy and culture, and I’m excited to contribute to that,” she said.
She is also excited to have access to a hub like the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy, where she can meet leading faculty and learn about the work of scientists, engineers, and a wide range of thinkers. “The most interesting ideas and breakthroughs happen when there are spaces like the Trienens Institute where you can exchange work and have those conversations that don’t happen elsewhere on campus,” she said.