Cornell University
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

Cornell Atkinson Center engages undergraduate students, graduate students, professional students, and postdocs each year in a range of sustainability-related funding, training, mentoring, and networking programs that take students beyond the classroom and into hands-on research and professional experiences on campus and across the globe. Below are highlights of our core student and postdocs programs. In addition to these, students and postdocs often work as research assistants on our faculty-funded grant projects.

Small Grants Program - Graduate Funding for Cornell Atkinson Thematic Areas

Eligibility: Cornell graduate students, professional students, and postdocs; supplemental funding for undergraduate research assistants is available for Small Grants awardees.

Cornell Atkinson’s Small Grants support pioneering research with the goal of creating practical sustainability solutions. These grants prioritize projects that align with the Center's four research areas: increasing food security, reducing climate risk, accelerating energy transitions, and advancing One Health.

Sustainable Biodiversity Fund - Protecting Earth’s Biodiversity

Eligibility: Cornell graduate students and postdocs from all disciplines; supplemental funding for undergraduate research assistants is available for Sustainable Biodiversity Fund awardees.

The Sustainable Biodiversity Fund supports innovative research on the most pressing questions in protecting biodiversity. Applicants are encouraged to propose interdisciplinary projects that will convert knowledge into actions that preserve biodiversity and its global ecosystem services.

Postdoctoral Fellowships - Sustainability Innovation Leaders

Eligibility: Completion of a Ph.D. before the fellowship start date; all disciplines welcome to apply

At Cornell Atkinson, collaborating defines our approach to catalyzing change. The Cornell Atkinson Postdoctoral Fellowships in Sustainability and the new Cornell Atkinson-Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Postdoctoral Fellowships forge connections between postdocs and external partners, including government agencies, for-profit businesses, nonprofits, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In the last five years, Cornell Atkinson has supported postdoctoral fellows in ambitious, cross-disciplinary research while building a core group of leaders capable of transforming sustainability public opinion, products, practices, and policies.

Sustainability Leadership Program - Training for Sustainability Impact

Eligibility: Cornell Atkinson, Joint Cornell Atkinson-EDF, and EDF Postdocs are eligible for all program workshops.

The Cornell Atkinson Sustainability Leadership Program, designed in partnership with EDF, is a sustainability-focused, interdisciplinary research opportunity to support the development of skills in interdisciplinary, cross-sector, and community collaboration; science communication; policy impact; and career design. The training aims to help Postdocs develop into leaders who prioritize listening, responsiveness, respect, and equality in their sustainability research and collaborations. Starting in 2019, participants who complete the research program will earn a Sustainability Leadership Certificate. The research program reflects that these “researchers working on sustainability are aware of the urgent challenges facing us globally, but they face a number of institutional barriers when attempting to design, implement, and report research for both the academic and nonacademic worlds. Taking knowledge to action effectively requires a range of skills in the areas of collaboration across disciplines and sectors.”

Summer Internships - Hands-On Sustainability Experience

Eligibility: Cornell undergraduate and graduate students

Each spring, (through the Atkinson Center) ten Cornell students are selected for the Hands-On Sustainability Experience Summer Internship which offers immersive, hands-on experience at the intersection of science, policy, community, and industry. These internships expose student scholars and emerging scientists to the inner workings of leading environmental advocacy groups, such as Environmental Defense Fund due to connections with Cornell Atkinson. Working on cutting-edge sustainability issues in dynamic organizations, interns gain subject matter expertise and workplace skills. Selected students are hired for 8-12 weeks to conduct sustainability-focused research, including data collection, data analysis, and data communication, within their partnered organization.

The Academic Venture Fund (AVF) is a foundational program at Cornell Atkinson supporting the next generation of sustainable solutions. Since 2008, the AVF has worked to seed original, interdisciplinary research that is not likely to find funding elsewhere because the projects are novel, risky, need early data to establish traction, or involve new teams working together.

The AVF provides roughly $1.5 million in funding annually, typically supporting 10 to 15 projects a year across a range of themes, including food security, climate risk, energy transitions, and one Health.

AVF projects often draw in external partners from industry, government, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as local leaders and community members.
Since 2008, AVF grants totaling more than $16 million have funded 146 projects. These projects have led to tens of millions in follow-on funding and have engaged more than 330 individual Cornell faculty members and more than 100 students as Research Assistants.
Please see our AVF webpage for more details on the 11 projects awarded in 2021 https://www.atkinson.cornell.edu/grants/faculty/avf/
The Cornell Atkinson Rapid Response Fund (RRF) facilitates urgent or time-sensitive research, workshops, and other activities within a broad range of sustainability initiatives. The RRF positions faculty to seize unique opportunities for small research projects with funding of up to $10,000. RRF awards can be used to generate preliminary results needed to compete for targeted external funding or to help finance sustainability-related events. RRF proposals are evaluated by the Cornell Atkinson leadership team on a rolling basis.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cornell Atkinson issued a special request for proposals in spring 2020 for seed funding to enable faculty to respond to unique opportunities related to the pandemic and sustainability.
Cornell Atkinson leadership evaluates RRF proposals on a rolling basis during the year. We have received 12 applications in 2021, and 10 received funding (4 COVID-19 related RRF projects and 6 standard RRF projects). Total funding awarded thus far in 2021 is $96,837.
For a full list of recent RRF awards, click here. https://www.atkinson.cornell.edu/grants/faculty/rrf/

Cornell Atkinson brings together experts and innovators to deliver large-scale, long-term sustainability solutions. Through the Innovation for Impact Fund (IIF), we support basic and applied research with a clear pathway to impact and an emphasis on actionable, short-term results.

IIF issues calls-for-proposals that are designed with our partners—leading players in practice, policy and products—to jointly develop and test evidence-based solutions to some of the world's more intractable sustainability problems. Successful IIF projects create interdisciplinary teams with both Cornell and external partners, demonstrate new concepts, pilot applications of scientific discoveries, and implement real-world practices that can shape development policy or programming, develop tools, and build research and development capacity.

The Cornell Atkinson Center also has a number of programs aimed at supporting and preparing the next generation of sustainability scholars, including postdoc fellowship programs, graduate student grant programs with supplements to mentor undergraduates, internships, a cross-campus graduate group of more than 150 students from 15 disciplines, and a certificate-earning program in sustainability leadership. These programs encourage innovative, interdisciplinary research with a focus on diverse perspectives and engaging partner organizations and communities.

For more, please visit: https://www.atkinson.cornell.edu/grants/postdocs/postdoctoral-fellowships/

Cornell University has a large number of centers encouraging collaboration across disciplines and with external collaborator (including the Cornell Atkinson Center); this approach to research is highly valued and often considered as a strong supportive activity in cases of faculty tenure and promotion.

The Cornell Atkinson Center's faculty funding supports Cornell faculty in the natural sciences, as well as in the social sciences, humanities, and arts who are working in the sustainability arena. Positive outcomes include studying the motivating roles of humor and anger in promoting climate change action and developing messages that use emotion to increase political engagement (https://as.cornell.edu/news/atkinson-center-names-2018-19-ssha-faculty-fellows).

Additionally, the Center's Academic Venture Fund (AVF) stimulates interdisciplinary research in sustainability at Cornell and promotes activities with the potential to attract external partners in industry, government, NGOs, and foundations. The AVF provides over $1.5 million in funding annually. The fund typically supports 10-15 projects a year across a range of energy, environment, and economic development concerns and supported 11 projects in 2021.

Recent examples include:
“Expanding the Repertoire of Community-led Climate Justice Practices”: Communities are facing impacts of planetary change that are occurring in the blink of a geological eye. A ‘Repair and Redress’ approach generates knowledge and tools with which communities can respond to environmental damage and create climate accountability. This team will gather representatives from communities facing significant sustainability challenges with non-profit and peer organizers to create a multimedia user’s guide for community climate accountability and a toolkit of design specifications for software platforms to advance community-led climate justice. This work will culminate in a public conference at Cornell and smaller events in the communities involved.
“Climate Change Preparations Informed by Local Forest Inventories”: Climate change poses risks to Sub-Saharan African countries, including higher temperatures, higher frequency and intensity of droughts, and reduced agricultural yields. Researchers aim to use participatory training to bolster more climate-resilient farming practices in Malawi. Preliminary research shows farmers using agroecological methods are more likely to create fallow land and restore forests. Farmer researchers will map the forest quality and quantity in a 1000 km2 area of 24 villages using a combination of GIS and visual forest assessment after training from Malawian forest scientists. These results will provide solutions for conserving biodiversity, ensuring food security, and building community resilience.

For more, please visit: https://www.atkinson.cornell.edu/grants/faculty/avf/

Cornell Atkinson participated in interdisciplinary research by Paul Bolger, a Fulbright Scholar and manager of the Environmental Research Institute at University College Cork, Ireland, leading to two publications in 2021 on the value of interdisciplinary research for university faculty.
The first paper, “Study of faculty perceptions and engagement with interdisciplinary research in university sustainability institutes,” explores faculty perceptions of interdisciplinary research, their levels of engagement in interdisciplinary work, and how they view the role of the research institute in enabling interdisciplinary research.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-020-00616-7
The second paper, “Delivering on the promise: how are sustainability research institutes enabling interdisciplinary research?” highlights eight modes by which sustainability institutes are supporting, and can further support, interdisciplinary research within universities.
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJSHE-10-2020-0415/full/html

The Cornell University Library system offers Library Guides for assisting with research in many departments, including Environment and Natural Resources. Please see the following link for a list of departments and sample guides: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/home.

The Cornell Library System also created a series titled “Academic Libraries for Sustainable Development” designed to respond to the question, “What can academic libraries do to help build a better and more sustainable future for the world?” This four-part webinar series brought together librarians and thought-leaders around the world to address the toughest issues facing the planet as outlined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

https://www.library.cornell.edu/about/partnerships/academic-libraries-sustainable-development-webinar-series/