Stonehill College
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

The Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program includes a highly competitive summer option and academic year opportunities. Sustainability research is one of several areas faculty and students research. In addition, there are at least five regularly offered courses that include projects in which students research and advocate for greater sustainability on campus and in neighboring communities.
Below is a sample of recent SURE Projects:

Assistant Professor of Biology Brittany Cavazos & Anna Varholak ‘26: Pollinator-mediated plasticity in floral traits. (Summer 2024 SURE Project)

Professor of Biology Bronwyn Bleakley, Caitlin Swanson '24 &Cedric Henry '24: Influence of Light Pollution on Burying Beetle Parental Care and Physiology (Summer 2023 SURE Project)

Associate Professor of Biology Nicholas Block, Julia Bennett ‘25 and Margaret Gallagher ‘25: Assessment of Crescent Butterfly Species Limits in New England (Summer 2023 SURE Project)

Assistant Professor of Biology Martha Hauff & Jillian Callahan’ 23: Dynamic Food Webs of the Northeast Continental Shelf (Summer 2023 SURE Project)

Assistant Professor of Computer Science J. Timothy Balint, Assistant Professor of Biology Robert Harbert, and Adam Falcone, ’23: Procedural Generation of Vegetation Maps. (SURE 2021)

Assistant Professor of Biolog, Martha Hauff and Jillian Callahan’ 23: Dynamic Food Webs of the Northeast Continental Shelf (SURE 2021)

Associate Professor of Environmental Science Kristin Burkholder, Cassandra Calabro ‘22 and Meredith Kime ’22: Analyzing Model Skill: A Comparative Study of Pathways in the Gulf of Maine (Calabro) and Analyzing Variability in the Gulf of Maine's Spring Bloom (Kime). (SURE 2021)

Learning Communities (LCs) at Stonehill College feature linked or collaboratively taught classes from different disciplinary perspectives and are designed to foster students’ abilities to integrate learning--across courses, over time, and between campus and community life. Integrative learning goes beyond academic boundaries, because integrative experiences often occur as students address real-world problems that are unscripted and sufficiently broad to require multiple modes of inquiry and multiple perspectives. Integrative learning also involves internal changes in the learner, changes that indicate growth as a confident, lifelong learner, including the ability to adapt one’s intellectual skills, to contribute in a wide variety of situations, and to understand and develop individual purpose, values, and ethics. Integrative learning, whatever the context or source, builds upon connecting both theory and practice toward a deepened understanding. LCs are all about making connections, and these connections often surface in reflective work, self-assessment, and creative endeavors of all kinds. LCs bear variable credit, depending on the design, and may fulfill other Cornerstone requirements (e.g. Natural Scientific Inquiry, Statistical Reasoning, Moral Inquiry, etc.).
In addition to Learning Communities, the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program includes a highly competitive summer option and academic year opportunities. Sustainability research is one of several areas faculty and students research.
Recently Assistant Professor of Computer Science J. Timothy Balint, Assistant Professor of Biology Robert Harbert, and Adam Falcone, ’23 researched the Procedural Generation of Vegetation Maps. To create plausible natural landscapes, a program must know the type and placement of vegetation. While this placement is more tedious for a designer than changing high-level environmental effects, such as the average rainfall over the past century, vegetation generation can be easily procedurally generated. However, the generation removes all control a designer would have, and so far, ignores all high-level environmental effects. This project bridges the gap between high-level environmental effects and low-level vegetation generation by mapping those parameters to satellite derived vegetation maps using Generative Adversarial Networks, a form of machine learning. (SURE 2021)

Established in 2007, the Center for Teaching and Learning supports Stonehill's teaching mission by providing dedicated services and resources to our faculty. Staffed by a full-time director, the CTL consults confidentially with faculty about classroom concerns, organizes small and large group conversations around timely pedagogical questions, and supports faculty research about teaching. The CTL awards Innovation in the Classroom grants.

Organized by the MacPháidín Library and the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Faculty-Librarian Partnership Program (FLPP) offers faculty members the opportunity to explore how they can better collaborate with librarians to further their curricular goals. Participating faculty receive a $1000 stipend and dedicated support from a research librarian in one of their classes.

Additionally, one of the College's archivists, Jonathan Green, researched Stonehill's own environmental history as part of the Farmhouse Writing Fellows. He later led an open discussion entitled "Memories of the Landscape: Stonehill College's Environmental History" in 2018.

https://www.stonehill.edu/faculty/grants-awards/
http://www.stonehill.edu/offices-services/sure/