University of Maryland, College Park
ER-15: Sustainability Research Identification

A major charge to the Council on the Environment--a University of Maryland advisory group on research, education, outreach, and economic development as they relate to the environment--is to coordinate and oversee strategic efforts to place the University of Maryland at the forefront of environmental and earth system science. For the purposes of the Council on the Environment, environmental and earth system science are broadly construed to encompass the physical, natural, social and human dimension sciences pertaining to environmental variability and how the Earth operates as a coupled system from global to regional scales inclusive of such fields as environmental public health.

Staff for the Council on the Environment worked with students from the School of Journalism to compile a sustainability and environmental research experts inventory. The staff and students used keywords to query the UMD experts database that is maintained by University Communications. They also read through public lists of faculty and research activities from all of the University's schools and colleges to make sure that their query of the UMD experts database hadn't missed any key faculty members. Based on these searches, they complied an online searchable database of environmental researchers organized into the following categories: Climate, Ecosystems, Energy, Food, Health, Policy, Risk Management, Sustainability, and Water.