Mason Living Labs Initiative

Podcast: The modern grid: the intersection of energy and the environment

Sarah Holland — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:00:33 +0000

Podcast: The modern grid: the intersection of energy and the environment Sarah Holland Mon, 10/20/2025 - 11:00

“Infrastructure” is one of those words that can mean a lot of different things to different people. At George Mason, we’re focused on infrastructure in terms of sustainability – how can we help innovate new systems for the world’s infrastructure that will be resilient and flexible enough to support a changing world.

On this episode of Access to Excellence, President Gregory Washington is joined by two guests working at the intersection of innovation and sustainability to develop George Mason’s capabilities as a living laboratory for students, faculty, and staff to find solutions to our grand challenges: Liling Huang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering and Computing and the Dominion Energy Faculty Fellow in Power and Energy Systems, and Leah Nichols, executive director of the Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE) in the Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Impact.

The living lab, what I see, it's beyond the lab. It is a living community, a living society. We can have students actually have...a model startup to run this community, to run the lab, to collect the data, and then to hire students to be the operator. So I think this is even beyond lab, and it also brings in multidisciplinary collaboration between engineering, science, business and policy. – Liling Huang

We are now experiencing more intense storms, greater and longer durations of heat, shifts in seasonal patterns. However, a lot of our infrastructure was built decades, if not centuries ago...And so there's vulnerabilities, and we need to start accounting for how the changing climate and the information that we're receiving now about how the ecosystems are working and the physical systems are working into managing the infrastructure and the systems that comprise communities...Identifying opportunities to make changes to ensure that our systems are sustainable and can withstand the consequences or the more extreme weather and the different weather and climate effects that we're experiencing now is really important. – Leah Nichols

Read the transcript

Intro (00:04):
Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story: all make up the fabric that is ��, where taking on the grand challenges that face our students graduates in higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

President Gregory Washington (00:26):
Infrastructure is one of those words that can mean a lot of different things to different people. At George Mason, we're focused on infrastructure in terms of sustainability: how we can help innovate new systems for the world's infrastructure that will be resilient and flexible enough to support a changing world. And we're not just talking theory here. My two guests today are at the intersection of innovation and sustainability to develop George Mason's capabilities to be a living laboratory for students, faculty, and staff to find solutions to our pressing grand challenges. Liling Huang is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering and Computing, and she's the Dominion Energy Faculty Fellow in Power and Energy Systems. And Leah Nichols is the executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Earth, or ISE. It is in the Office of Research Innovation and Economic Impact. Leah, Liling, welcome to the show.

Leah Nichols (01:37):
Thank you.

Liling Huang (01:37):
Thank you.

President Gregory Washington (01:40):
Liling, your work focuses on securing the nation's critical energy infrastructure. Can you tell us a little more about what this means and why it's important?

Liling Huang (01:53):
Energy is a backbone of our national security, our economy, sustainability, our community trust. So without the energy we cannot have data flow, we cannot run hospitals, we cannot run data centers. So it is very, very critical infrastructure for our modern life.

President Gregory Washington (02:17):
So what kind of threats do you see that our energy and infrastructure face?

Liling Huang (02:23):
Our infrastructure is facing many challenges, uh, including the aging infrastructure. Our energy infrastructure was built more than a hundred years ago. It is aging and needs to be modernized. We also facing challenges of cyber physical attacks, we also facing challenges of the workflow shortage, the supply chain shortage, the challenge of incorporating the renewable energy into the power systems.
President Gregory Washington (02:54):
I see. Have we taken some major steps as a country or as a region to secure our energy infrastructure?

Liling Huang (03:02):
Yes. I think the public private sector are working together along with the government to secure the energy infrastructure by upgrading our infrastructure, investing in workforce development, uh, as well as bringing a more diverse energy portfolio to the system.
President Gregory Washington (03:24):
Well, that's more easily said than done, right? When you start to talk about diverse energy portfolio, that could be many other diverse energy pieces bring their own set of problems, right?

Liling Huang (03:36):
Yes, exactly.

President Gregory Washington (03:38):
So one of iscs key programs is Mason as a Living Lab. And that whole entity aims to stimulate and support the development of research and scholarship that use the campuses and their physical and social ecological structures for implementation in education. And that framework seems to be working really well. Leah, can you tell us more about how this initiative came about?

Leah Nichols (04:03):
Sure. Happy to. I came to Mason about five years ago to to run the Institute for a Sustainable Earth. And a core mission of the institute is to help put research into practice. So the campus itself is effectively a small city. There's over 48,000 people on the campus, a population that that utilizes the campus, some of whom live here. It embodies all of the different types of infrastructure systems that are required to support and maintain that population. So it's an ideal microcosm with which to engage, to study the socio-environmental technological ecosystems that make up this small city. And then it's also a microcosm within which we can develop solutions, test solutions, use it as a test bed, create some demonstration projects that could then be scaled into solutions in communities elsewhere and around the globe. So it was my first target to create opportunities to put research into practice.

Leah Nichols (04:54):
I reached out to Dr. Greg Farley, who's the director of sustainability, and he and I really jived on this idea. We really liked this idea and wanted to lean into it. So we looked at what all was going on already on campus and how faculty and students were utilizing the campus for research. Um, and learned that there was a lot going on. Our faculty are innovative and they wanna see their research put into practice. Um, but all of those projects were being, being done on an ad hoc basis. The wheel was being reinvented over and over again. And so Greg and I put our heads together along with Frank Strike, vice president for, uh, facilities and operations, campus operations, and Andre Marshall, vice president for research, to really develop a program that standardized protocols that effectively built a bridge between the research community and the facilities and operations communities. So this type of research activity could go on much more smoothly, be amplified. We also created a data sandbox to capture the data that was being collected about the university so that it could be shared across units with others who are interested in, in similar sorts of research projects.

President Gregory Washington (05:57):
Well, let's talk about scale and, uh, be a little more pragmatic. Can you gimme an idea of what kinds of projects have gone through this process? You know, just talk high level in terms of what they are and what they, what they're supposed to do.

Leah Nichols (06:12):
They do range and scale, and we have provided seed funding to, to support some new projects. Uh, they and those typically are on the order of, you know, tens of thousands, um, or so to support students and faculty who are getting ideas off the ground. Some of them are very large projects, not ones that we supported, but ones that we definitely amplify as the, that are international recognized arboretum, which has a massive amount of data about the trees on campus. Um, and like I said, internationally recognized, but we also supported very smaller scale projects. One of our very first ones that came through the new program is the Cherry Blossom Monitoring. And the math department has stood up a, a global competition where they're working with students who, um, to do statistical analysis to predict when the cherry blossoms are gonna bloom here in DC at Mason, I think in Japan, there's a couple of other international sites.

Leah Nichols (07:04):
It's, it's, it's now taken on a life of its own, but we were able to put in place working with facilities, cameras to monitor the, the, the blooms there. We also have a small project that we just funded this year that I'm, I'm quite excited about. Dr. Changwoo Ahn is taking on analysis of a corner of the campus that used to be an intermittent wetland. It's now turning into, um, a permanent wetland. And that transformation process is something that's not well studied. Um, so it creates opportunities there, but it's also of interest to the, the campus operations. Understanding this change process will help them better manage the, the wetlands and the ecosystem that's, that's emerging in this space. So, very exciting.

President Gregory Washington (07:42):
So Liling?

Liling Huang (07:43):
Yes.

President Gregory Washington (07:44):
While your smart grid lab is independent from ISE, if I'm not mistaken, right? The project is working towards a similar goal. Right? So we got two living lab concepts. So talk to me about each one of you. What does it mean to be a living lab?

Liling Huang (08:03):
To me, a living lab, it is the platform to close many, many gaps between the industry and academia, within the academia, between the students, the faculty, the staff. It's, it is a platform can bring everybody together as a community, and especially at Mason to achieve education and research.
President Gregory Washington (08:31):
Talk a little bit about how the project support experiential learning of our students.

Liling Huang (08:37):
It's bring our student, uh, career ready and build their teamwork problem solving, and it builds their confidence because they operate, they experience that they bring the theory into practice. I think it's very, very important to our students, not only to recruit, but also to retain and to advance. And I think it also will put Mason as a leading position in all the aspect. It's a very, very important tool for, for Mason and for our students.

Leah Nichols (09:15):
I would agree. Uh, a lot of faculty do take their students out of the classroom and utilize the ecosystems, the campus grounds to gather data. And while their students are learning about the tools and the data collection methods and the analytical methods for studying these types of systems, and, you know, with our lab. But we're hopeful we, we have some faculty who are already feeding this data that their, their students are collecting in courses into the data sandbox that starts to create a longitudinal data set of, um, similar sorts of data collection, um, over time. But the more that we can get, um, and encourage our faculty to get our students out utilizing the campus to develop their research skills, to develop their understanding of, of socio-environmental system theory, et cetera, is, is really exciting.

Liling Huang (09:56):
And to me, I think the, the living lab, what I see, it's beyond the lab. It is a living community, uh, living society. We can have student actually have a startup, a model startup to run this community, to run the lab, to collect the data, uh, and then to, to hire student, to be the operator. So I think this is, uh, even beyond lab, you know, like, and it, it also bridge, uh, brings in multidisciplinary collaboration between engineering, science, business and policy.

President Gregory Washington (10:33):
Well, the problems that we have to deal with today, especially in the energy space, are all multidisciplinary, right?

Liling Huang (10:41):
Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yes.

President Gregory Washington (10:41):
They have the technical aspects. Which are very clear. You have the social economic aspects, which in my opinion are very, very clear. And you got the political aspects which are not as clear <laugh>, uh, at least on some things, but are still clearly there, right? So, Leah, your role at the ISE is specifically around developing connections across communities to put George Mason's research and scholarship into action in support of a sustainable world. So what does it look like to build those bridges across discipline?

Leah Nichols (11:17):
Yes.

President Gregory Washington (11:18):
And talk a little bit about the receptivity on campus to building those bridges amongst our faculty and, and our, and our researchers and the like.

Leah Nichols (11:27):
Sure. Um, I was gonna say, I'm gonna go one step further and say we're building bridges across academic disciplines, but we're also working to bring external partners, people who are interested in co-designing, co-developing solutions, um, that they're experiencing in their, in their lives with local governments, local, you know, local businesses.

President Gregory Washington (11:44):
Yeah. Sometimes they can be, for lack of a better way of putting it, easier to build relationships with than the entities right here on campus.

Leah Nichols (11:51):
That can be true.

President Gregory Washington (11:53):
A couple of nights ago I had dinner with one of the founders of Nvidia. And at that dinner, they were talking, of course, they were extolling the virtues of their AI chips and the super computers that you can build from these AI chips. And one of the things that he talked about really piqued my interest that just immediately came to mind listening to you all talk about bridging the divide. Their belief is that some solutions are hyperdimensional, right? Meaning there's so many layers of possible connection that we just may not be able to see. It may not be able to draw the connection to inner city social science issues and next generation solar. Right. But that computers, especially those equipped with, uh, uh, AI generated tools, can actually explore well beyond our realm of seeing an actual problem. And so I just wanna get your reaction to that relative to this transdisciplinary work and finding solutions that right now aren't obvious to us.

Leah Nichols (13:03):
So you really hit on something I'm also excited about. One, one of the things I was doing while I was at the National Science Foundation and was trying to fund science that would advance our understanding of these complex system interactions. And the advances in the technology have really unlocked that ability. You know, science hundreds of years ago through relatively recently, was focused on a reductionist, like, let's break it down to the smallest, smallest, smallest parts to really understand what's going on. Valuable, but at like, now, we can really look at systems and try to interrogate what's the causality? Can you explain causality within systems? So these types of tools really allow us to interrogate these complex systems in really new ways, which could very much reveal opportunities to adjust to, to where to take action, how action in some spaces will potentially propagate into action. Uh, you know, this is a new area of science. I'm not, I'm not saying that we're gonna be able to explain every complex system, but what an exciting avenue of science is, is to be interrogating the complexity instead of the smallest pieces.

Liling Huang (14:03):
Yeah. I, I think that we, a a unit, an institution, we have a very limited time to learn. Very limited view. And yes, AI does provide a potential to be able to look at everything holistically, maybe come up with a good solution. But personally, I always think that, you know, everything has, it's, it's always two folded. On one side, it has one and has a zero. So I think it, it brings opportunity, but also we want to know the challenge that AI bring in to the society. So we still need a human, human in the loop to help AI do a better job. You know, we are human being, we want to have a better life. So we don't want the whole world to become just machine, just AI. So the human in the loop is very important. Uh, and that also, like all the AI computation, again, I'm the power person. So I would like to say the challenge that the AI computation bring in is the humongous energy demand to support those AI computation, and that huge energy demand is part of the challenge to our infrastructure, the impact to the environment. So how do we solve those complex problem? It's very interesting.

President Gregory Washington (15:23):
Oh, I hear you. I hear you.

Leah Nichols (15:25):
I think AI is an exciting tool, but fully agree that you have to use it cautiously. Any type of science, any type of tool, how is it gonna get used and how is it gonna be put into practice and changing the world around us. So things to think about the,

President Gregory Washington (15:37):
The challenge is that cat might be out of the bag right now, you know? So look, you both have work experience outside the academy, right? So Leah, you spend time at National Science Foundation; Liling, you were a certified, uh, professional engineer at Taiwan Development and Trust Corporation before pursuing a PhD. And so talk about those experiences and how those experiences inspire your move into higher ed, but also how those experiences are helpful for you today.

Liling Huang (16:08):
So I think it's a very valuable experience. Uh, like I work in industry and I see the challenge in industry, which the student will be, uh, facing, you know, in their career. So I see the gap between the industry and academia. I remember when I first report to, uh, my manager, I have to learn everything, you know, start from the beginning because it's, I learn all the theory. So I kind of see the importance of hands-on, practical. Uh, and also I see that the, the importance and actually to run the infrastructure, human is also, I would say like the operator. The engineer is very important and very critical part of the infrastructure. So I see the gap and I see the importance of having a skillful engineer workforce. And that's why, uh, inspire me to build a career in academia because I think that, uh, it is a very prestigious position to train and educate a future engineer. And that experience helped me to better embed, improve my teaching, uh, education and research to be able to bring in the practical challenge and experience into the education and research.

President Gregory Washington (17:31):
Interesting.

Leah Nichols (17:31):
So while I was at the National Science Foundation, one of my primary roles was to help build and design these multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary types of funding programs to fund different types of science. Again, focusing predominantly on socioecological systems and the, the role of, of those systems and how those are changing. And then toward the latter part, while I was engaged with an advisory council, they gave us very strong advice. Like we're, we've been describing the challenges of the world for a while, quite a long time in the socio-environmental systems. What do we start doing about it? And that really helped drive me to think about like, what type of science needs to be done so that we can start taking action to address these grand challenges, these wicked challenges. And as a, a program officer, I was facilitating those sorts of dialogues across disciplines so that I bring back to the table here at Mason, getting lots of people with very different worldviews in the same room to come to a, a common understanding of need and opportunity and ways that we can support, uh, science to develop solutions in these space. I was also often one of the voices in the room saying, how do we bring the spaces of research use into the, the scientific questions or the science that we're funding? How do we get use-inspired science where community partners or industry partners are, are deeply engaged in development of the science itself or the co-design of the science.

President Gregory Washington (18:50):
So one of the solutions in our grand challenge initiative is George Mason at the center of building a climate resilience society. Now, you two sit in different components of that spectrum, right, of building a climate resilient society. And so as two researchers dedicated to innovation and sustainability, what does climate resiliency mean to you? Right. And what do you see as the grand challenge in your space?

Leah Nichols (19:18):
So a climate resilience society, I, I will say, you know, we are in the throes of climate change. We are now experiencing more intense storms, greater and in longer, and durations of heat, shifts in seasonal, um, patterns. However, a lot of our communities, as, as, uh, Liling was saying earlier, a lot of our infrastructure was built decades, if not centuries ago, uh, well before climate change was even underway or understood to be underway. And so there's vulnerabilities, and we need to start accounting for how the changing climate and the, the information that we're receiving, um, now about how the ecosystems are working and the physical systems are working into managing those, the infrastructure and the, the systems that comprise communities. That means understanding and like really looking at where are the risks? What types of changes in the flood patterns or the rainfall patterns or the heat indices, where are those gonna cause the most damage?

Leah Nichols (20:18):
And then how do we start, um, mitigating that type of damage? What interventions do we need to put in place so that when events happen, when significant rainfall happens and floods occur, infrastructure and people are outta the way not damaged? Or what can we do to make sure that those systems are, can sort of go down for a short while and then come right back up? They're not being destroyed. So identifying where there's risk, identifying opportunities to make changes to ensure that our, our systems are sustainable and can withstand the consequences or the, the more extreme weather and the, the different weather and climate effects that we're experiencing now is, is really important.

Liling Huang (20:58):
And to me, I think Leah meant, you know, the cause--it's very, very important, like to build a climate, uh, resilient society, we need to understand and the cause and to observe the pattern, and from the engineering perspective, from the energy infrastructure, we need to know if we are part of the cause, how do we improve that? How do we reduce that from the design operate perspective to support that? And also, when this type of extreme weather occurred, how can we continuously provide reliable energy? Because that's the backbone of everything, of our daily life. So to build a resilient climate, uh, you know, uh, society, I, I see that all our six grand challenges touch this topic. And this is actually the core to connect all the six challenges together. We need the 21st century workforce, uh, to build a climate resilience society. We need the digital, we need the AI, we need a healthcare system, we need everything. And then our grand challenges right on top of that.

President Gregory Washington (22:11):
Okay. Well, let's <laugh> let's dive into this a little bit. This whole concept of building a climate resilient society really is not about understanding climate change from the perspective of whether it's manmade or whether it's just a natural artifact of the changing cycles in the way our planet is progressing. It's really about saying whatever's causing it, we have some challenges, right? We have major challenges on both coast <laugh>. One can't get enough water and it's burning, and the other one is literally getting too much. And, you know, we've had multiple 500, uh, year biblical floods in a number of locations. This is about what happens as we deal with the aftermath of climate change, building a climate resilient society. Our climate is changing. Our society has to change in order to accommodate it. And so, yes, everything you guys highlighted, we need faculty, we need folk trained properly in order to manage this.

President Gregory Washington (23:25):
Right? But what I'm getting at here is: talk a little bit about deal with the political issues that may be dividing us on the causality aspect of this problem. How do we get away from that and focus on the fact that, look, I don't care what your belief is, you're flooding and we need a solution for that. We need a a new home type system for that, or we need a solution to help you mitigate that, or a warning system to keep you out of that. Or communications framework that helps you to understand when these things are coming so you can react. Talk about that a little bit.

Leah Nichols (24:04):
The, what you were just saying is essential. We need to address the problems of today, as you just said, coasts are being inundated, communities are being destroyed, literally, um, quite literally. Um, and in a repeated way, both from wildfires and extreme like downpours and flooding in, in places that you would not expect floods to happen. And it, it's happening outside of the floodplains that we understand from before. Severe wind and tornadoes are taking down, you know, there's a lot of damage to infrastructure and people and livelihoods all across the country. So we do need to be addressing the challenges that we're experiencing today. I think one of the things that we need to do differently is a lot of the, like I said, the, the prior infrastructure and the risk assessments are typically looking retrospectively. Like what has happened in the past that we need to plan for now.

Leah Nichols (24:52):
Like you, you mentioned 500 year floods. In the past, those types of floods did happen once every 500 years or so. Now, the science is able to, to, to provide some predictions about what the future trends are going to be in these areas. And so in order to plan and, and address infrastructure challenges of today, we should be looking at what the best available science is telling us about where things are going so that we can start accounting for that in, in the way that we build our infrastructure systems. I mean, you might say climate science, but you, you might also just say, this is best available science of how many floods are gonna happen.

President Gregory Washington (25:27):
Or, this is just community planning now, right? Look, if, if the flood plain is shifting and it's going to be here now, it's not build the homes there, let's shift them and build them a mile two miles away, where it might've been a problem previously, but maybe it's not that now you, you, you get what I'm saying?

Leah Nichols (25:47):
And it's, some of it's the floodplains that themselves are shifting, but a lot of what's happening now is this heavy, heavy, heavy downpours, you know?

President Gregory Washington (25:53):
No, I, I get it. I get it. I mean, places that were flooding previously, this is what happened with the young people in, uh, in, in Texas. Texas, right?

Leah Nichols (26:04):
Yes, that was terrible.

President Gregory Washington (26:04):
You know, look, the reality is is that the, the area always flooded. And that's why nobody really worried about it too much. But we live in a different time now. We need tools to predict that. We need tools to say, Hey, based on our predictive models, what's coming is not what you saw five years ago, 10 years ago. This is different. Get out. Right. And so that's the kind of thing that I want us to get to as we build a climate resilient society. Liling, I I know I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Liling Huang (26:36):
No, no, you're good.

President Gregory Washington (26:38):
Uh, I, I, you know, because youre, you're in the, you're, you are literally in the core space of this with energy production.

Liling Huang (26:44):
Yes. As long as they are human activities, we impact the environment, but there's no way we'll go back to live in the cage, uh, without electricity, going back to, you know, millions years back. So how do we better design and, and live in the environment to reduce the impact? And President Washington, you mentioned, like, to design a climate resilient society is not just the science, not the engineering, but it's the society. My experience, my view is a lot of community, they do not have the access to the data, to the fact people make decision based on the feeling, their perspective, a very limited perspective on maybe just economy or maybe just political or, you know, they, they all look at a smaller set of their view and, which cannot solve the problem. Uh, you, you see, like even the energy policy, you roll out the energy policy for the next five years, and all of a sudden you change, and then who knows, then next five years it change again.

Liling Huang (27:56):
I think what the, the challenge is, uh, to have a holistic view of the multidisciplinary: from the social, from the business, from the political, from engineering, from science. And again, the core is the community, is the human. So I think that's actually what I see, the, the challenge. And then I think that we have the responsibility to deliver the message, uh, to deliver the holistic fact and data to inform that, you know, this is going to happen if you don't take this action. And then I think everyone is responsible, you know, on the building the resilient society.

Leah Nichols (28:39):
I was also gonna add, 'cause I, I, I didn't talk much about mitigation of climate, the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but that is something we might wanna be very, very thoughtfully considering as we address climate resiliency. Things that keep me up at night are, um, you know, we have trajectories and the science is starting to tell us that some systems are going to start collapsing. And we're talking about like ocean systems and sea level rise, and well, what's gonna happen to our agriculture system? I mean, there's some of these existential challenges that might be on the horizon that we're still working on getting the science about when is that gonna happen? Is that gonna happen? Those sorts of things. But there is signals that we do really need to be addressing how much carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere so that we hopefully keep us below some of those tipping points. We'll see.

President Gregory Washington (29:24):
As we move forward here. And, and if you were to be having conversations with our young people today, as you do in the classroom and beyond, or even with our faculty as, as we end, what are some of the ways individuals can help create climate resilient communities and ensure sustainable future?

Leah Nichols (29:43):
One of the most effective ways of, of creating resiliency within a community is, is actually reaching out to your, your neighbors and your community. Understanding where people are vulnerable, helping them address those vulnerabilities if and when possible. Recognizing that you, you might wanna go up the street and check on somebody in, in the context of a disaster so that you can help them create some resiliency. The more that we connect and create community, the stronger those communities are, regardless of the infrastructure. Though, ideally you also are engaged in the processes that will upgrade and, and increase the resiliency of the critical infrastructures of those communities.

Liling Huang (30:18):
Yeah. Uh, for me, I always encourage my student and emphasize the importance of having a critical thinking skill. They are the future, uh, generation. They're the future engineer to build the system, to operate the system. So critical thinking, skill and teamwork, it's very important. Uh, one person cannot solve a problem. You need a team. You need people from different skillset, from different perspective. Also, to be able to work with a team to drive the innovation and critical thinking. Uh, you don't always believe what you hear. Right. You have to be able to critically evaluate before you accept it. I think that's very, very important. Not just, you know, uh, receive what we were told and then execute that. I think critical thinking, very important. So you don't be influenced or misled easily.

President Gregory Washington (31:16):
Understood. Understood. Well, look, this has been fantastic. Last point. Just quickly, lightning round. What's given you hope for the future?

Liling Huang (31:27):
I think the, the hope of the future, uh, is our next generation. It is here, Mason, our faculty, our student. I think that's the future. And then the infrastructure side, you know, the research, and again, our theme, like our living lab that give us hope of the future.

Leah Nichols (31:48):
What gives me hope is, is the amount of people who are working hard to solve these types of problems. You know, faculty as well as students in the next generation, despite significant headwinds in some contexts. There's, there's a lot of people in the world in the United States and, and far beyond that are really committed to, and digging into solving these sorts of challenges. And that's the only way things are gonna get done, is we just keep on working, keep on designing. I think there's, there's a lot of opportunities to innovate. I just look for the people who are doing things, good things, um, and there's a lot of them through the living labs and through the Institute for Sustainable Earth, always wanting to help and support those individuals here in the Mason community and beyond.

President Gregory Washington (32:31):
Outstanding. Outstanding. Well, we're gonna have to leave it there. Liling and Leah, thank you both for joining us today.

Liling Huang (32:39):
Thank you.

Leah Nichols (32:40):
Thank you so much for having us.

Leah Nichols (32:41):
Thank you so much. I am Mason President Gregory Washington. Thanks for listening. And tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are all together different.

Outro (32:56):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students, graduates, and higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.

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Mason as a Living Lab

Lynn Tierney — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 16:53:59 +0000

Mason as a Living Lab Lynn Tierney Mon, 10/23/2023 - 12:53

In many ways, �� is a small town with a population of about 48,000. That’s a little bit bigger than Charlottesville, Virginia, which clocks in at 45,000.

Of course, this population isn’t all in one place.

The cherry grove by Mason Pond on the Fairfax Campus is part of the Living Lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

In Virginia, Mason has campuses in Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Prince William County, and sites in Loudoun County and on Belmont Bay in Woodbridge. There’s a contingent of students and researchers in Front Royal. On the other side of the globe, Mason Korea is about to celebrate its 10th year in Songdo, South Korea.

Our award-winning faculty is dedicated to tackling the grand challenges of our time, which include issues surrounding sustainability. That dedication can be seen anywhere you set foot on a Mason campus, with our nearly 1,000 acres of land, waterways, forests, and buildings being used as a dynamic Living Lab for hands-on applied environmental research.

From the canopies of the trees in our accredited Level II Arboretum to the stormwater running into Mason Pond, from our Green Leaf courses to serving as home to the commonwealth’s Virginia Climate Center, our experts are conducting research locally that can and will have an impact globally.

In 2011, Mason began reporting its sustainability progress to the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS) from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education and earned a Silver rating. By 2014, we were the first university in Virginia to achieve a Gold STARS rating.

In 2012, Mason committed to supporting the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative. The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals also drive much of the work coming out of the university’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE).

And still, Mason aspires to do more.

Putting Research into Practice

Part of what’s driving the Living Lab research, according to Andre Marshall, Mason’s vice president of research, innovation, and economic impact, is the desire to integrate Mason’s research and academic strengths in sustainability with campus operations to mitigate Mason’s impact on the environment and be good stewards of the resources we have.

He sees the value of the campuses serving as a test bed and “demonstration avenue” to test the effectiveness of these solutions so that “they can become realized beyond just the ideation stage.” In fact, as Virginia’s largest public research university, such experimentation is a responsibility.

For Leah Nichols, executive director of ISE, the Campus as a Living Lab concept “puts Mason research into practice here at home and helps launch solutions that can have global impact.”

As a Living Lab, Mason aims to stimulate and support the development of new research and scholarship that use the campuses and their physical and socio-ecological structures for experimentation and education to develop and advance sustainability solutions.

The success of a Living Lab is not just in the testing but also in the approach and collaboration. There are many campus partners involved in this work, from Mason Facilities, the 10 schools and colleges, and 600 faculty members, to the University Libraries and a university- wide Sustainability Council.

Frank Strike, vice president of Mason Facilities and Campus Operations, says the vision to see our campuses as a Living Lab sprouted years ago, when teams recognized Mason had the internal expertise to find solutions to the university’s challenges right here, and that could additionally have an impact on the student experience.

“This benefits students who get another opportunity for a hands-on approach to their learning experiences by approaching the work across disciplines, which is a priority for Mason, and by sharing teaching models across programs and operations,” says Strike.

The streams around the Fairfax Campus are a critical part of the university's stormwater management system. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

Water, Water Everywhere

Mason Pond is a popular place to hang out and the backdrop of countless graduation photos, but not many people realize that it is a critical part of Mason’s stormwater management.

“The stormwater channels that look like streams are the actual stormwater system,” says Mason researcher Jennifer Sklarew, PhD Public Policy ’15, a professor in Mason’s Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “The pipes outflow into those streams, and then everything goes into the pond.”

Sklarew is currently working with students on a hydro-power project, supported by the Patriot Green Fund, that will attempt to use that stormwater as a source of cleaner electricity by installing microturbines with battery storage at two sites on the Fairfax Campus.

The university just completed a stream restoration project that not only improved the flow of the waterways but also added asphalt sidewalks and some lighting so the campus community can enjoy the paths.

Project manager Deniz Callahan of Facilities says Mason faculty members were involved in planning early on and provided some advice and expertise. This included a list of native plants that could improve the health of the riparian buffer without introducing invasive species. There are also plans for a “foragers’ forest” to be established along the path.

But that is just the beginning when it comes to how Mason handles water resources on our campuses by using research and technologies that can be applied to the broader community.

At Mason Square, Mason Innovation Partners encountered a serious infrastructure issue that posed a frequent stormwater challenge for the area surrounding the new Fuse building. The existing county culvert was undersized and couldn’t handle the amount of stormwater that regularly comes through Arlington.

Replacing the culvert required precise coordination with the future building’s foundation design and intricate sequencing to control the constant flow of stormwater as it was diverted from the old culvert pipes to a new 12’ by 6’ box culvert.

Facilities also has an extensive list of mitigation protocols it applies, including illicit discharge detection and elimination and runoff control for the construction site and storms.

Pondering the Pond

Earlier this year, Mason graduate student Jamie Roth worked with the Patriot Green Fund and Facilities to purchase and install a weather monitoring station and trail cameras by Mason Pond.

Working with students in two statistics classes, Roth and others have been gathering data about the Yoshino cherry trees and the environmental conditions by the pond. Mason statistics students have collected and analyzed data on the bloom date of the cherry trees as a part of their coursework in STAT 490 Capstone in Statistics and STAT 634 Case Studies in Data Analysis and have integrated it with Mason’s local meteorological data. As a result of their work, the variations can be tracked over time to build a more accurate model for the bloom date of the cherry trees at Mason.

This research builds on the international Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition, which Department of Statistics professors Jonathan Auerbach and David Kepplinger help organize annually. This competition assembles data on the peak bloom date of cherry trees all around the world from Kyoto, Japan, to Vancouver, British Columbia.

“We hope to use the long-term data on Mason’s cherry trees to raise awareness and bring the concept of climate change closer to home,” says Roth.

Smart hives are just on of the ways Mason's honey bees play a role in the Living Lab. Photo by Sierra Guard/Office of University Branding

Buzzing with Activity

Since the Honey Bee Initiative was launched in 2013, the project has led to a large number of innovative teaching and research projects and public–private partnerships.

A multidisciplinary team of Mason researchers has been working on a project at the Science and Technology Campus to see if the honey produced by bees can help locate missing persons. Perennials featuring some of the honey bees’ favorite flowers have been planted at the Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory in support of ongoing research to determine if chemical traces of human remains can be identified in the plants or in the honey produced by the pollinators.

Engineering students are also working to make the campus apiaries into smart hives. A team of electrical and computer engineering students, mentored by Mason engineering professor Nathalia Peixoto, used the smart hive implementation as their senior cap-stone project.

Over the course of an academic year, the team designed and installed an internet-of-things-enabled sensor array, which is powered by solar panels, to monitor carbon dioxide and temperature in real time to track and predict the health of hives located by Pres-dents Park on the Fairfax Campus.

Getting Smart About It

Green Assessment and Decision Guidance Tool (GADGET) is probably the least visible Living Lab project, but it’s among the most comprehensive and complex. College of Engineering and Computing professor Alex Brodsky and his team are working to develop a tool that will help Mason reduce our carbon footprint and achieve carbon neutrality by 2040 in the most cost-effective way.

Brodsky and his team are gathering data on things like heating and cooling efficiency, energy costs and storage, and contractual agreements to create an algorithm and a computer model that university leadership will be able to use to project costs and savings and make sound decisions regarding Mason’s space and energy needs.

Having smart buildings like Mason’s Horizon Hall is also affecting the way Mason teaches data science. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, engineering associate professor David Lattanzi is working with a team to improve the educational experience for students by integrating data science into Mason’s engineering curriculum and providing hands-on experiences with Mason’s own smart buildings.

Supporting Researchers

Mason’s Living Labs have a dedicated webpage and other resources, thanks in part to the work done by Judit Ungvári, ISE’s research and innovation officer, and Sarah D’Alexander, MBA ’23, sustainability program manager for University Sustainability.

Ungvári and D’Alexander can help researchers obtain the necessary approvals and permissions to do their research on one of Mason’s campuses. Other resources available to the campus community to assist with research include funding, such as the Patriot Green Fund and ISE’s seed funding for Living Lab research projects, and infrastructure, like the Living Lab DataVerse, an accessible online archive of campus datasets provided by researchers that was created in partnership with University Libraries.

“Whenever I talk about sustainability work at Mason, I always emphasize that we really rely on collaborations, partnerships, and support from the entire Mason community in order to do this work,” says D’Alexander. “And I’m so excited to be able to say that Living Labs have had so much support.”

What’s Next

Coming online this fall is the Smart Grid Lab at Mason Square, which will enable students and researchers to conduct various hands-on experiments, work with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations, and analyze simulation data related to the campus’s power and energy systems.

“We can start observing the campus energy flow and collect data,” says Mason engineering professor Liling Huang, who directs the lab. “That can support our future research in data analytics, machine learning, digital twins, computing, or cybersecurity of the smart grid and smart cities.”

A student-led project to convert the Presidents Park Hydroponic Greenhouse to solar energy is also coming to fruition this fall with the installation of solar panels. Funded by the Patriot Green Fund and Facilities, the ground-mounted solar installation, a first at the Fairfax Campus, will provide a utility cost savings to power the greenhouse in the long term and decrease the university’s carbon footprint.

Shayla Brown, Sarah D’Alexander, and John Hollis contributed to this story.

This feature is from the Fall 2023 Mason Spirit magazine.

Get a closer look at Mason as a Living Lab

Topics

Sustainability

Mason as a Living Lab

Mason Living Labs Initiative

Budding scientist monitors Mason’s iconic cherry blossoms

Colleen Rich — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 17:39:03 +0000

Budding scientist monitors Mason’s iconic cherry blossoms Colleen Rich Mon, 03/27/2023 - 13:39

In This Story

David Kepplinger

Jonathan L. Auerbach

Over the last year, �� graduate student Jamie Roth has been leading an interdisciplinary research project alongside faculty members in biology and statistics.

Mason's cherry blossom monitoring team (from left) includes Jonathan Auerbach, Jamie Roth, David Kepplinger, and Daniel Hanley. Photo by Genamarie McCant/Mason Facilities

Roth designed this project as a long-term opportunity to teach Mason students to collect, process, analyze, and communicate about data using resources available on campus. The long-term data will reflect how Mason’s local ecosystem responds to the effects of climate change and create a visible marker for an otherwise invisible impact.

By having Mason statistics students collect and analyze data on the bloom date of the cherry blossom trees at Mason Pond, as a part of their coursework in STAT 490 Capstone in Statistics and STAT 634 Case Studies in Data Analysis, and integrating it with Mason’s local meteorological data, variations can be tracked over time to build a more accurate model for the bloom date of the cherry blossom trees at Mason.

To implement this project, Roth received funding from Office of University Sustainability’s Patriot Green Fund, a grant from Mason Facilities that allows the campus community to develop infrastructure solutions that reduce Mason’s environmental impact as well as support student research projects that explore sustainability topics in the region.

Trail cameras and a weather station monitor the campus cherry blossoms over time. Photo by Genamarie McCant/Mason Facilities

With this support, the project team, which includes faculty members Jonathan Auerbach and David Kepplinger in the Department of Statistics and Daniel Hanley in the Biology Department, worked collaboratively with Mason Facilities Project Manager Nick Valadez to determine the best locations to mount trail cameras and a weather station in order to monitor the cherry blossoms over time. This was key to the project because even a minor variation in the microclimate can affect phenological events, like bloom times. Once that information was determined, Abu Monjer, a project manager in Facilities Management, supported the installations in time for the project to launch for this year’s blooms.

“This project has been a great opportunity for me to tie together local climate data to the flora on the Mason [Fairfax] Campus and hopefully lay groundwork for future environmental projects,” said Roth, who is majoring in biostatistics.

This research builds on the international Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition, which Auerbach and Kepplinger help organize. This competition assembles data on the peak bloom date of cherry trees all over the world, from Kyoto, Japan, to Vancouver, British Columbia, and this project will bring Mason into this global arena, ensuring our ecosystem is represented.

This initiative is a pilot project for the Institute for a Sustainable Earth’s Mason Living Labs Initiative, which is designed to encourage and support students, faculty, and staff to pose questions, experiment, gather data, monitor changes, and propose novel solutions to a range of sustainability challenges associated with the university’s campus environments and its socio-environmental systems. Learn more about the Living Labs initiative and the Cherry Blossom Monitoring project during the virtual event launch on April 12, 2023, at 2 p.m.