University of California, Santa Barbara
AC-10: Support for Research

UC Santa Barbara offers a wide array of fellowship programs, including several targeted towards sustainability. Here are several examples: The Institute for Energy Efficiency (http://iee.ucsb.edu/programs/fellowship-program) supports graduate students through two competitive fellowship programs including the Hollbrook foundation fellowship and the Peter J. Frenkel Foundation Fellowship. The Hollbrook foundation fellowship is designed to attract and support outstanding prospective graduate students with a research focus in energy efficiency to UC Santa Barbara. Another example would be the Peter J. Frenkel Foundation Fellowship which recognizes outstanding graduate research in energy or energy efficiency. These awards are granted to students who demonstrate academic excellence and a commitment to effecting vital change in the field of energy efficiency. Please find more information on our fellowships programs:http://iee.ucsb.edu/programs/fellowship-program The Bren School hosts several fellowship programs that provide opportunities for Master’s and PhD students. One one of them is the Eco-Entrepreneurship (Eco-E) Fellow Program that provides recruitment incentive awards to promising eco-entrepreneurs who are pursuing a two-year Master of Environmental Science & Management (MESM) degree with a focus on Eco-Entrepreneurship at the Bren School. Additionally the Latin American Fisheries Fellowship (LAFF) Program offers a prestigious fellowship for early-career and aspiring marine environmental professionals to earn a world-class graduate degree from UC Santa Barbara's Bren School. The third fellowship is the Sustainable Water Markets (SWM) Program which supports MESM and PhD students who study both market mechanisms that can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of water exchange and help keep water in rivers, as well as the science that informs the structure and operation of water markets. Please find more information about specific information regarding each of the above fellowship programs: http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/admissions/fellowship_programs.html The Chancellor’s Sustainability Undergraduate Research Program supports undergraduate students from disciplines across campus (including the Fine Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Engineering) to pursue research related to sustainability. It encourages undergraduate initiatives for campus and community-level sustainability projects and offers students in all academic disciplines an opportunity to actuate and apply their education in sustainability and it facilitates partnerships between faculty, staff, students, and the community.

UC Santa Barbara is committed to prioritizing the Environment as an interdisciplinary theme for our research and teaching as part of our 2007-2025 strategic academic plan. UC Santa Barbara's Academic Senate Sustainability Work Group offers a Sustainability Champion Program and a Climate Action Champion program which are funded in part from core campus funds and in part from UC Office of the President. The primary goal of the programs is to recognize faculty innovation and encourage ongoing research and teaching in sustainability. Faculty submit competitive proposals that promise to engage undergraduate and graduate students in sustainability issues and provide campus-wide leadership and visibility in sustainability in education and research. Awardees are selected by a committee, based on the merit of their proposals; recipients receive funding to support activities including, but not limited to, graduate and undergraduate research assistants; and all awardees are required to lead an annual Freshman Seminar in Sustainability. The current Climate Action Champion is Dr. Gretchen Hofmann, a marine biologist whose research focuses on the responses of marine species to future ocean change such as ocean acidification and ocean warming. Dr. Hofmann and her lab group are trying to understand whether and how marine species can adapt to future changes in the ocean. With the help of the award she will engage students in her research and will form student action groups.These groups will be trained to engage audiences in the public and in general outreach settings. The project’s hope is to create a team of outreach specialists on climate change issues that are important to the California coast. In order to reach a more general audience, articles about the research are going to be published on different websites. Her team will include a number of undergraduate outreach specialists on climate change issues that are important to the California coast, which are directly connected to ecological issues and to issues of food security. A joint science and art show with Lily Simonson, depicting Antarctic organism will engage off-campus stakeholders. Link to her website: https://www.eemb.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/hofmann. Ecological sustainability depends critically on the ability of world food production to manage increasingly limited natural resources. The current Sustainability champion Professor Chandra Krintz strives to address pressing agricultural issues by investigating a unifying cyberinfrastructure and agriculture analytics that enable precision, agronomics-driven farming. Her current project “SmartFarm” focuses on providing growers with a secure and easy to use data analysis and decision support system. Through the sustainability championship program she will give farmers and ranchers the opportunity to learn about and experiment with SmartFarm directly and to engage with UCSB students. The award will be used to support undergraduate and graduate research on SmartFarm. The project implements outreach activities such as workshops and meetings in the Santa Ynez valley in conjunction with local partners such as the Sedgwick Reserve and Industry startups. These events provide a forum in which the community (growers, ranchers, students, researchers, engineers, vendors, state/local officials, etc.) discuss and collaborate on ag-related sustainability issues, policies, and regulations, and to share information that helps and engages the community as a whole. More information on the project  here: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ckrintz/racelab/smartfarm.pdf

University of California, Santa Barbara provides an array of support for sustainability research through the library including a number of active library guides that pertain to sustainability and active subscriptions to article databases such as Sustainability Science Abstracts, Environment Index, and the Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management database. Last year a particular effort was made to purchase an extensive collection of literature on climate change, such as the 2016 Environmental Research Handbook, in order to ensure a strong sustainability collection. Additionally research guides for sustainability-focused courses are available, for example "Writing about sustainability" (http://guides.library.ucsb.edu/content.php?pid=582161) The course guides provide a variety of information and resources, such as links to databases, articles, websites and techniques for accessing other library sources. A collection of general Environmental Science resources including information on Green Careers, Endangered Species, Field Guides, Environmental Science resources in the Santa Barbara area, and information on Sustainability in Higher Education are also available (http://guides.library.ucsb.edu/envi?hs=a).