Brigham Young University
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

As mentioned in the points of distinction, the BYU Ballard Center for Social Impact invites students to conduct research and work on projects with global and community impact.

• Ballard Briefs written by students and published by the Ballard Center have covered topics such as natural resource mismanagement in Yemen and the impact of climate change in the United States. Cash prizes are awarded for the best briefs. 


• Social Impact Labs focus on poverty alleviation and climate vulnerability. For example, when a BYU team visited a brick kiln in Nepal in 2024, nutrition and dietetics students recorded vital statistics, examined diets, and measured lung function of the workers; nursing students collected saliva and blood samples and used pulmonary ultrasounds to identify inflammation in the lungs; biology students analyzed blood serum to determine how particulate exposures impacted inflammatory responses among the workers; and civil and construction engineering students assessed community development challenges with infrastructure, housing, farming practices, community governance, and the quality of water, soil, and air in the region.

Additionally, mentored research is an opportunity for students to participate in scientific research with the guidance and supervision of a professor. The College of Life Sciences, for example, has more than 100 research labs, with student projects focused on climate change and other sustainability issues.

More broadly, BYU's Inspiring Learning initiative seeks to transform the educational experience of students through experiential learning. Some 30,000 experiences have been funded to date. See AC-8.

In 2024, an Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) Origination Awards for environmental stewardship was announced by BYU's associate academic vice president. 

IDRs foster new research that relies on collaborative partnerships across departments and colleges. There are two types of grants. Track 1 offers $60k per year for two years to teams with tenure-track faculty from at least two colleges and three departments at BYU. Track 2 offers up to $20k per year for two years to teams that include tenure-track faculty with members from at least one college and three distinct departments or programs at BYU. 

Each year, three Track 1 awards and two Track 2 awards are typically funded. Recipients of past IDRs include partnerships from (1) Plant and Wildlife Sciences, Geography, and Statistics to study the use of remote sensing and spatiotemporal statistics to develop prescription maps for variable rate irrigation systems, (2) Geology, Statistics, Electrical and Computer Engineering to study integrating thermal and radar imaging to reconstruct the advance and retreat of glacial ice, (3) Plant and Wildlife Sciences, Teacher Education, Dance, Civil and Construction Engineering, Geology, and Biology to study transforming water education to address the global water crisis, (4) Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Plant and Wildlife Sciences to study smart seeds, a platform for widely dispersed soil sensing, and (5) Public Health, Nursing, Food Science, and Cell Biology to study poverty-related household air pollution.

Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary research are not explicitly mentioned in university guidelines or policies for faculty promotion and/or tenure, but collaboration with colleagues, including those in other disciplines, is encouraged and counts toward requirements and responsibilities for citizenship, which may include serving as scholarly referees, serving and leading in professional organizations, or other activities consistent with faculty members' disciplines. As stated in BYU's Rank and Status Professorial Faculty Review Procedures, “departments and colleges will define internal and external citizenship expectations for CFS [continuing faculty status, comparable to tenured status at other colleges and universities]. Faculty members might meet those expectations by collaborating with colleagues in teaching, scholarship, citizenship, or student mentoring."

The mission of the Harold B. Lee Library is to acquire, organize, preserve, and make readily available collections of scholarly and related materials in all media; to assist patrons in finding and using information available at BYU and elsewhere; and to encourage lifelong learning. Increasingly, sustainability research is driving activity in each of these mission areas.

In 2022, the library funded a doctoral student’s research project, “Holistic Framework for Sustainability,” through its Library Research Grant program. This project looked at how sustainability is viewed in civil and construction engineering literature as part of a larger objective to identify a cross-disciplinary understanding of sustainability. The library supplied extensive publication data that was used to form a corpus for linguistic analysis.

In 2021 and 2022, library faculty members supported development of a proposal for a BYU Multidisciplinary Research Grant by faculty from Civil & Construction Engineering, the Marriott School of Business, and Linguistics. The library provided information relating to building a corpus of journal abstracts, possible classification systems, and a pilot set of data. It also provided meeting space for this multidisciplinary group. 

Subject librarians support research teams by training them in the use of research tools and by helping researchers effectively find relevant information. Their efforts have supported research broadly, but one example of sustainability research includes recently published work by researchers of sustainable design methodology in mechanical engineering. Research guides are available to students and faculty that make discipline-specific resources more visible. A search for key words like “sustainable” and “sustainability” yields a wide variety of resources available through the library, not just on sustainability in general but also in targeted areas like social responsibility, business ethics, and green resources. 

The library's Geospatial Services and Training Lab is one of the most engaged partner organizations on campus. Beyond heavily supporting students from Environmental Science and Sustainability, Wildlife and Wildlands Conservation, and other sustainability-related academic programs, the lab also supports the BYU Student Sustainability Initiative, a self-governed by providing weekly meeting space and by assisting data collection and visualization efforts driving campus-wide awareness campaigns. in 2021, it also hosted a multidisciplinary geospatial information systems symposium, with more than half of the presentations focused on environmental stewardship or social impact.