Dr. Huilin Gao, assistant professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received a 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her research in environmental sustainability.
The NSF awards the prestigious CAREER grants to outstanding junior faculty members to help them advance their research and teaching activities. Gao’s project, “Effects of River Inflows on Coastal Ecosystem Sustainability under Climate Change, Urbanization, and Flow Regulation,” will continue through March 2020.
“I am very excited about receiving this honor and I am grateful for the support from my colleagues, the department and then college,“ said Gao. “In the past several decades, Texas' population and economic growth have led to dramatic land cover changes from vegetated land and bare land to impervious areas. The direct consequences are amplified urban runoff and degraded water quality. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to advance the frontiers of knowledge about environmental sustainability and to transform this knowledge into action.”
The research in Gao’s project has three specific objectives. The first is to identify the relationship between inflows and phytoplankton productivity. The second is to evaluate the impacts of urbanization and climate change on inflows and phytoplankton productivity. The third is to investigate the responses of phytoplankton productivity to flow regulation, both with and without co-occurring climate change and urbanization.
The educational objectives of the project are to teach environmental sustainability to high school students by working with high school teachers and by participating in student events, and to promote undergraduate and graduate environmental sustainability education by integrating education modules into courses and mentoring the students.
Gao’s project will create new knowledge leading to reliable predictions of phytoplankton productivity under a changing environment. The interdisciplinary research approach will help close several critical knowledge gaps by using a combination of in situ observations and state-of-the-art remote sensing data to clarify the complex relationships between inflows and phytoplankton productivity.
By implementing a systems-level model that estimates inflows and productivity simultaneously, impacts of watershed management plans on ecosystems can be evaluated directly.
The research will provide decision makers with a powerful tool to understand the interactions among climate change, urbanization, flow regulation, and ecosystem sustainability.
Gao received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005 and joined the faculty at Texas A&M in 2012. Prior to coming to Texas A&M Gao was a research associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington (2008-2012) and a research scientist in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2005-2007).
The NSF established the CAREER program to support junior faculty within the context of their overall career development, combining in a single program the support of research and education of the highest quality in the broadest sense. Through this program, the NSF emphasizes the importance of the early development of academic careers dedicated to stimulating the discovery process in which the excitement of research is enhanced by inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning. For more on the NSF and the CAREER program visit the NSF website.