George Washington University
ER-15: Sustainability Research Identification

In 2010, a multidisciplinary faculty committee drawn from seven GW schools provided a strategic plan to launch a sustainability research initiative. The faculty committee defined sustainability research as: research that addresses the impact of environmental change on society and the technological, political, and economic responses to these challenges. Ultimately sustainability research attempts to answer the question of how best to manage human interactions with the environment in a way that prevents or minimizes environmental degradation over both the short and long term.

The Faculty Committee is actively engaged in identifying sustainability research at GW through guidelines it established in 2010. For this STARs update, the Director for the Sustainability Academic Program and the Executive Director for Sustainability together refined that inventory by school, based on further website review of faculty bios and published papers, along with information provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research, which tracks sponsored research across the university. The resulting document was then shared with members of the pan-university Faculty Sustainability Committee, who were tasked with reviewing and vetting submissions for their individual schools, thus providing a quality peer review. GW has many research centers and Institutes. Foremost, is the Sustainability Institute, which provides an organizing function for sustainability research. Yet many other centers and institutes contribute significant research, including the GW Solar Institute, Center for Urban and Environmental Research, Center for Risk Science and Public Health, Institute for Corporate Responsibility, Rodham Institute, Institute for Crisis Disaster and Risk Management, and the Redstone Center. A full listing of GW centers and institutes is available from the URL provided. This listing, along with the identified faculty and their research interests, as posted on the GW Sustainability page, provides clarity on GW's research footprint.

(1) In late 2014 a new website will be launched to better showcase the university's sustainability research inventory but it is not available at the date of this submission. (2) The faculty profile page provides a brief description of faculty research and teaching interests to give readers a sense of the breadth of work underway at the university: https://sustainability.gwu.edu/faculty-profiles