Shailja Gangrade in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences was awarded a 2026 ECF Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate the impact of industrial contamination on water quality and microbial ecosystems at Providence public shoreline access points, specifically Public Street and India Point Park. The community-engaged project addresses concerns regarding public health and the effects of climate-induced runoff from neighboring industrial sites.

In partnership with the People’s Port Authority, the project includes:

• Resident participation in soil, air, and water sampling to monitor contaminants like metals and petrochemicals.
• The collection of samples before, during, and after major storm events to understand how extreme precipitation mobilizes industrial pollutants.
• Educational activities, such as microscope viewing of biological materials and the co-creation of data visualizations in English and Spanish.

Data from this study will inform the City of Providence’s redevelopment plans for shoreline access and help state agencies establish enhanced bacteria testing protocols for beach monitoring and shellfishing closures.

Alison Tovar and Joseph Braun, professors in the School of Public Health, lead this working group, which aims to co-design an AI-enabled platform for equitable food action. The project utilizes a community-engaged workflow to ensure the platform is feasible for real-world school settings. For their project, Tovar and Braun will:

• Facilitate sessions with school leadership, food service staff, and educators to help define priority questions and feasible data indicators.
• Work with data system experts to prototype tools that quantify food waste and streamline decision-making for district staff.

The project will deliver a community-validated platform and a pilot-ready roadmap, positioning schools to simultaneously reduce their environmental footprint and improve the diet quality of students.

Led by Matthew Kraft — a professor in the Department of Education and founder of SustainableED — this working group will investigate how environmental conditions interact with the built environment in schools to affect student outcomes. The research explores the cumulative impacts of heat and pollution on student experiences, documents inequities in exposure and adaptive capacity across schools and students, and explores which potential investments in school facilities increase resilience, enhance sustainability, and reduce inequity.

Working with state education and school building authorities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the group plans to:

• Provide a practice-oriented analysis of the impacts of heat.
• Integrate novel measures of facility and surrounding area building conditions as moderators of heat exposure.
• Examine how these factors contribute to educational inequality.

An interdisciplinary team led by Scott AnderBois, Professor of Linguistics;  Paja Faudree and Parker VanValkenburgh, Professors of Anthropology; and James Kellner, Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary, Organismal Biology will explore climate action models by partnering with the Indigenous Cofán Nation of Ecuador to analyze and strengthen the GuardAmazonas Cofán (GC), the main territorial-protection program ensuring ecological integrity of the Cofán Nation’s legalized homeland, including 450,000 hectares of high-carbon-sequestration forest. Researchers will utilize a mix of ethnographic methods, remote sensing, and sociolinguistics to:

• Document the GC’s history and operations and assess the GC’s success in slowing or stopping forest loss and other ecological transformations that contribute to climate change.
• Investigate the GC’s contribution to Cofán ethnolinguistic vitality, including the strengthening of national Cofán identity, the transmission of ecological knowledge, and the maintenance of mutually reinforcing relations between language, culture, and territory.
• Improve the GC’s process of collecting, archiving, and utilizing spatial data, including drone LiDAR that can be employed to calculate forest biomass and claim carbon credits.
• Share results on the program’s successes with funders committed to fighting climate change, especially donor institutions focused on work with Indigenous Peoples.

The project aims to provide a scholarly and policy-relevant blueprint for equitable climate solutions that prioritize the rights and cultural identity of Indigenous Peoples while safeguarding critical global carbon sinks.