Binghamton University now boasts a No. 1 ranking in sustainability research from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

The campus is part of a five-way tie with Florida State University; University of California, Irvine; UC Merced and UC San Diego, which each earned a score of more than 100 percent.

Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biology, says although she is not surprised Binghamton ranks at the top for sustainability research, she is glad her community is getting the recognition it deserves.

“I think we know that we have committed people here doing research on this topic that work so hard, so to get that recognition is fantastic,” Hua says. “It wasn’t on my radar, but in terms of the quality of research I am not surprised at all. My colleagues are incredible.”

AASHE ranks universities in 17 different subsets of sustainability based on self-reports. The research subset score is derived from the amount of research on sustainability, as counted by number of faculty and departments.

Binghamton’s report shows that of 601 faculty and staff who conduct research, 156 of them focus on sustainability. That 25.96 percent brought the campus well over the 15 percent needed for a perfect score.

The report also shows 42 departments have at least one faculty member who conducts research. Of the 42, 34 of them have at least one who conducts sustainability research. The 80.85 percent score also tops the “perfect” mark of 75 percent.

To put a spotlight on key subjects, the University created five Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence (TAEs) in 2013. One of the TAEs focuses on Sustainable Communities. Carl Lipo, director of environmental studies, and Robert Holahan, associate professor in environmental studies, co-chair the TAE and bring faculty together from several departments.

“The TAE’s goal has always been to bring people from across campus with a similar research interest together,” Holahan says. “There’s 10 of us from the TAE who got together and have been working on a series of papers on sustainable communities. Without having a centralized foci, a place to go once a week, how are you going to meet those people?”

In addition to sparking research collaborations, the TAE also awards seed grants to support research and hosts a sustainability lecture series. A dozen faculty and staff members make up the TAE’s steering committee; about 30 people receive the group’s newsletter.

Hua, who participates in the TAE, runs a research lab focused on wetlands ecology and conservation. Much of the lab’s research looks at artificial stressors on populations, such as the effect of road salt on amphibians.

Hua says conservation research findings need to be presented in a way that the general public can understand.

“I think how we link conservation and sustainability in our research is really through education,” she says. “What that means to me is to link art and science through art shows that tell the story of our publications, children’s books to get kids interested in ecology and parasite ecology, things like card games and lesson plans for K through 12 educators.”

Binghamton’s proposed Nuthatch Hollow Living Building is another signature effort in sustainability. Besides being a center for sustainability education, the University also aims for it to be one of the few in the world to meet the Living Building Challenge standards, which require buildings to produce more energy than they use.

Mark Poliks, chair of the Smart Energy TAE, says research and innovations in smart energy are building blocks to a sustainable future and projects like the living building.

“The Smart Energy TAE is really involved in the technology that could eventually go into a learning building, or go into a facility where energy is being managed, energy is being harvested or energy is being stored,” Poliks says.

Faculty members associated with the Smart Energy TAE fit into four broad areas: solar and thermoelectric energy harvesting, energy storage, energy efficiency in electronic systems and sensor development for energy resource management. Some researchers in this group are looking at battery efficiency and alternative energy harvesting, like solar cells, to provide a more sustainable future.

“More and more homes are having solar on it, and as the technology gets upgraded it will be both safe and affordable to have an appropriate battery pack in the house so that you can power the house in the evening and not have to rely on the grid,” Poliks says.

Lipo says Binghamton’s attention to sustainability helped him decide to come to work here four years ago. Now, he says, the AASHE ranking will promote the idea even more.

“We want our campus to be known for sustainability,” Lipo says. “This recognition will attract even more students and faculty who are passionate about sustainability and we will continue to grow in that regard.”

In a recent series of studies conducted in Binghamton, N.Y., evolutionary biologists O’Brien and Wilson set out to test whether we have the capacity to judge urban neighborhood safety just by looking at physical structures. It turns out that we do, they write in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Through a combination of interrelated studies, O’Brien and Wilson showed participants a selection of photos taken in unfamiliar neighborhoods and then asked them to rate what they perceived the social quality in each of these environments might be.  In one study, participants were asked to determine if the residents living in the photographed areas were friendly with each other, shared favors and, most important, would be able to organize against crime or other threats. The responses were then compared to the results of a previous study O’Brien and Wilson conducted in which participants were asked to rate their own neighborhoods on a similar scale. Interestingly enough, the ratings between the two study groups proved similar. If an outsider thought a neighborhood looked safe, people living in it were able to verify it. By demonstrating the agreement between the two groups, O’Brien and Wilson had clear evidence that the “naïve” participants were in fact accurate when comparing to the measures of community and safety drawn from the neighborhood survey.

The question remained, however: What information in the streets and buildings of a neighborhood help an individual to come to these conclusions?

“Sociologists have long understood that signs of ‘disorder’ — loose garbage and broken windows — indicate a weak community that is vulnerable to criminal behavior,” O’Brien said. “And further investigation verified that participants were indeed equating unkempt lawns, peeling paint and unchecked litter with a lack of safety. We already know that most of us use available cues to judge people we’ve just met. Why not neighborhoods? The information is there, the question was just whether we pay attention to it or not.”

It appears that we do, and O’Brien and Wilson have termed this ability “community perception.” Our internal “neighborhood antenna” homes in on certain elements in ways that we’re sometimes not even fully aware of.

But there’s more to it than just making a mental note; our antenna can influence whether we stick around in a particular neighborhood and how we behave while we’re there. According to O’Brien and Wilson, studies of cities have shown that the maintenance of physical structures is directly correlated to the strength of ties between neighbors, which in turn is responsible for the crime level. Taking the theory one step further, O’Brien and Wilson hypothesized that our willingness to establish those ties revolves around whether we think our neighbors merit our trust and cooperation.

To test the effectiveness of these ties, they had participants play a game involving money with residents who they were told were from the pictured neighborhoods. When viewing disorderly scenes, participants were less likely to trust their partners and tended to play selfishly. From this reaction, O’Brien and Wilson were able to make an interesting observation: Disorderly neighborhoods tend to discourage cooperative behavior because they signal to observers that they need to be distrusting. So it would stand to reason that the more effective neighbors are at developing a culture of prosocial behavior, the more cohesive and cooperative — and ultimately, the safer and more physically attractive — the entire neighborhood becomes.

However, O’Brien and Wilson also discovered that even our gut instinct needs a reality check. Again looking at the photos, participants were called upon to rate what they thought the self-esteem levels might be of adolescents living in the various neighborhoods. Overwhelmingly, adolescents living in disorderly neighborhoods were assumed to have low levels of self-esteem and as such, were considered to be untrustworthy and more likely to get up to mischief. But when the participants’ responses were compared to the data from the previously administered survey from residents in their own neighborhoods, these opinions were not particularly accurate.

“There are many things occurring in a neighborhood that may or may not be related to each other,” O’Brien says. “But people create only one snap judgment that encompasses all of these things. Buildings and streets can provide reliable information about a community ability to govern itself, but not necessarily about how local residents live their own lives. And that’s where our perceptions can go awry. In situations where you’re trying to navigate an unfamiliar neighborhood, you don’t have time for ambiguities — it’s either all good or all bad. But at the same time, when it all gets lumped together, you get inaccuracies.”

The question O’Brien and Wilson are now considering is that since we know people are attentive to disorderliness, what can communities do to motivate their residents to clean up their streets, houses and lawns? O’Brien has some thoughts and is already working on a related project with the City of Boston, whose residents can use an iPhone or Droid app to report graffiti, code violations and other environmental concerns directly to the mayor’s hotline. In the coming months, O’Brien will be working with other researchers to experiment with new features on the app that might energize people’s desire to clean up their own neighborhood.

The Binghamton study and a range of other research activities under way in the region are contributing to the Binghamton Neighborhood Project (BNP), a collaborative effort of Binghamton University faculty and community partners that is designed to provide science-based solutions to real-world challenges in the area.

Pamela Mischen’s research demonstrates that one program may have failed because the right people weren’t talking.

Traditional scholars of public policy trying to figure out what went wrong with a program might study the legislation behind it, or its funding. But researchers largely have ignored the dynamics inside the agencies that carry out policy, said Mischen, associate professor of public administration at Binghamton University.

That’s a mistake, she said. “Those turn out to be the most important things.”

To understand why policies fail or succeed, it’s essential to learn how people form networks within an organization, or among groups that collaborate, Mischen said. The tools she uses to explore those communication pathways come from complexity theory, a discipline that public-policy scientists haven’t called upon in the past. Mischen looks at service agencies in the same way that other scholars look at ant colonies, hurricanes or human cells.

Complexity theory examines complex systems — networks of interconnected agents that depend on one another. The agents might be ants, meteorological events or proteins. “In an organizational network, those agents are individuals,” Mischen said. In a coalition, they’re organizations. Members of a public-service network perform different tasks toward a common goal, and the work of each member affects the work of all the others.

Also, agents in a complex system share feedback that helps to shape future activity. When a school nurse notices that fewer second-graders are getting sick after their teachers launch a “wash your hands” campaign, she might urge the principal to expand that program to other grades.

Negative feedback discourages change; positive feedback spurs successful innovation, Mischen said. “Somebody is saying, ‘That really worked. I’m going to make the conditions such that you can continue to do that.’”

To learn how a new organization forms network pathways, Mischen worked with two Binghamton colleagues, Kristina Lambright, assistant professor of public administration, and Craig Laramee, assistant professor of bioengineering.

In 2007, they gave a social networking survey to 37 case workers who gathered in Binghamton for a program on self-injury among adolescents. The researchers chose this group in part because they expected that the case workers, who came from throughout Broome County, N.Y., might one day form a coalition.

The survey focused on trust and information flow. Asking each subject about his or her relationship with every other person at the meeting, it tried to determine who trusted whom and why. It also asked whom the subjects turned to for information about their work.

One surprise was that trust didn’t define how the case workers formed information networks. “We started with the assumption that the people they trust would be some of the most important people they would go to for information,” Mischen said.

Instead, the study found that people seek information from: a) the people they communicate with most, regardless of whether they trust them; b) people who have given them information before; and c) people they consider experts, leaders or the most active members of the network, assuming they have access to those people. Trust plays a role only in whether one person considers another an expert.

Among other things, the study suggests that people in an organization seek information from the same sources again and again. “Over time, we build information pathways within networks that are independent of perceived expertise,” Mischen said. “They’re probably there because they’re convenient. That doesn’t bode well for good information sharing.”

The easiest sources of information aren’t necessarily the best ones, and they don’t offer fresh insights. “This is an explanation for why a group of people may not produce good decisions. Information tends to get recycled,” Mischen said.

Mischen’s research helps her advise local organizations in her work as director of Binghamton University’s Center for Applied Community Research and Development. For instance, she is helping the Broome County Youth Bureau transform itself into a network-administering organization. In that capacity, rather than simply redistribute state funds to local organizations, the Youth Bureau will coordinate the work of local agencies and not-for-profits that serve young people.

To help promote better collaboration, the Youth Bureau is conducting a social network analysis of local agencies. “We want to know how networks are communicating,” said Beth Roberts, the Youth Bureau’s executive director. “Once we know that, we can see where the potential challenges, gaps and barriers are.” It’s important to know, for example, whether employees at all the agencies know about the full range of youth recreation programs available in the county, so they can refer young people to the programs that will serve them best.

“Pam’s work in the center has really influenced how the Youth Bureau looks at its mission, and how we are implementing programs in the community,” Roberts said. “We’re looking at things through a different lens.”

Climate change and its anticipated health effects vary by place, with broad regional impacts and disproportionate risks among various populations. Emerging diseases are among the most far-reaching consequences of global warming. In the decades ahead, we need to develop a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. That will require partnerships with health professionals and policymakers.

What’s an emerging disease?
Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, or ERIDs, are infectious diseases that have increased in incidence or geographic range, recently moved into new host populations, recently been discovered or are caused by newly evolved pathogens. Noteworthy also is their timeline; diseases have been classified as ERIDs if their incidence in humans has increased since the 1970s or threatens to increase in the near future.

ERIDs have received a lot of public attention due in part to recent pandemics and how rapidly they are diffusing globally. For example, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was the first pandemic to emerge in the 21st century. Following its initial diagnosis in November 2002 in Guangdong, China, it spread to more than 30 countries within six months. About 8,450 cases were diagnosed globally, with a 10 percent fatality rate.

Within a couple of years, concerns about SARS were overshadowed by the emergence of the H1N1 virus, which originated in Mexico and the southern United States in April 2009, and then spread to more than 206 countries in less than seven months. As of November 2009, H1N1 — also called swine flu — had infected 526,060 people, killing at least 6,770.

Commenting on this worrisome trend, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant noted that we might be entering the age of pandemics. This certainly may be the case since more than 30 new diseases have emerged or expanded their geographic territories during the last three decades. Some, such as the drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and tuberculosis, pose significant global health risks.

The climate change connection
Scientists are beginning to piece together the causal links between ERIDs and global warming. The underlying factors, the routes and the pathways of disease transmission, however, are complicated with potentially long latency periods. Alongside climate change and environmental disturbances, the underlying factors include the changing demographics of communities and human behaviors (urbanization, migration, risky behaviors); increasing global trade and travel; changes in industrial and agricultural practices (including food production, processing and distribution); the breakdown of public health measures in many countries; the overuse of antibiotics; and the development of resistant or new strains of disease pathogens.

More recently, some diseases have re-emerged because of bioterrorism (as in the case of anthrax), conflicts in world regions and persistent inequities among populations. Human susceptibility to ERIDs has also increased due to the aging population (longer life expectancies) and the adverse and synergistic effects of HIV/AIDs and other autoimmune diseases.

The spatial variability of climate change, the regional differentiation of its impacts and the rapid and intense spread of emergent diseases all suggest the need for a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. Such a framework will require a deeper level of understanding of the biophysical changes that are occurring in these places, the demographic characteristics of those areas and the range of social, institutional, technological and behavioral adaptations that are — or, in some cases, are not — being put in place to alleviate these challenges.

Like the anticipated changes in climate, the potential for loss of life as a result of exposure to these hazards varies. Some places, particularly low-lying coastal areas and floodplains, urban heat islands and disease vector border regions, are more likely to bear the brunt of these hazards than others. Societal impact will also vary from place to place, with disparate risks among different populations depending on pre-existing disadvantages such as racial/ethnic disparities and income inequalities.

Within the United States, for example, Hurricane Katrina uncovered the deep divide by race and class in New Orleans. Our study of the hazardous exposures arising from this 2005 catastrophic meteorological event showed that the most vulnerable populations living in the maximum inundated areas were minorities and low-income populations. This study confirmed that the biophysical attributes, socio-demographic characteristics and the local context of communities are key drivers of vulnerability when evaluating the health impact of climate change.

A recent call for public health preparedness for global climate change published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine underscores the need to formally incorporate a place-based approach in developing health strategies for these environmental threats. A focus on place, the authors argue, would emphasize the local nature of both human exposures and responses to these hazards. A spatial perspective would bring attention to the local areas that would be most affected by these events. The geographically based approach will showcase the strengths of the local people, enabling the collective participation of local stakeholders in environmental health planning to promote sustainable and livable communities.

Why look to geographers for answers?
Geographers bring numerous tools to the table to work with public health professionals and policy makers. Geographers can offer a number of analytical approaches and technologies for disease surveillance and intervention, including geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, geostatistics and cartography.

One such example can be drawn from the landscape epidemiology approach, which relies on geospatial methodologies to delineate the geographic territories of transmissible diseases. Using this approach, the ecological niche of a transmissible disease can be delineated by overlaying the spatial distribution of the pathogenic agent with the distribution of the disease vectors and host populations. Within this distribution range, one can determine the biophysical and social conditions that favor the survival and transmission of the disease pathogen. This approach has been used to monitor vector-borne ERIDs such as the West Nile virus and Lyme disease in the United States.

Another example of geography in action can be seen in the fight against malaria, another ERID. The disease is now endemic in 109 countries, with nearly 3.3 billion people at risk, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, poverty, armed regional conflicts and the scourge of HIV/AIDS have all contributed to the persistence of this disease. These conditions, along with increasing globalization and international migration, have heightened concerns about its potential emergence or re-emergence in temperate regions. In the United States, for example, malaria is now the most commonly imported disease, with more than 1,000 cases reported each year. With the anticipated changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity, there’s a real possibility of re-emergence in the United States.

The use of geospatial models to predict malaria risk and transmission has been quite informative, with projected net increases in the global at-risk population to 8 billion by 2080. Though these models have been criticized for using coarse spatial resolutions and overly emphasizing temperature changes, the results provide a valuable starting point for countries to develop public health strategies. Along with the development of the predictive models, geographic fieldwork and site-specific activities have been beneficial in assessing the social, economic and behavioral factors that influence disease transmission, and the treatment or preventive practices used in high-risk communities.

One such study was recently undertaken in a low-income community in Sierra Leone, in which we assessed the prevalence, severity and duration of malaria episodes among 731 residents; their risk factors; knowledge, access and use of reliable treatment options; and the efficacy and benefits of alternative therapies. Chloroquine was still the most widely used therapy for malaria in this community despite the growing resistance of p falciparum parasites to this drug. The research findings provided a useful context for developing a health intervention program for the community. Educating residents about the environmental risk sources of malaria, in addition to promoting the use of bednets, homeopathic methods and artemisia-based therapies, offers hope for reducing the malaria burden in this community.

These efforts demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagements to develop and advance meaningful and sustainable approaches for dealing with environmental risks and health challenges that affect the livelihoods of residents in vulnerable communities.  As the threats from global climate change continue to emerge, the need for scientific networks that bolster such initiatives and collaborative partnerships across disciplines such as geography and public health becomes even greater.

For more on this topic

The Age of Pandemics by Larry Brilliant

The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009

Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America, published by the University’s own Global Academic Publishing, draws on the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference held at Howard University. But it’s not merely the proceedings of the convention; the writers recast their papers in language suitable for undergraduates. The timely volume includes essays on topics ranging from health and health care to anti-predatory lending legislation and pieces focusing on places such as Buffalo, the Texas Panhandle and Washington, D.C. The book explores major themes in geography, including how humans interact with their environment and help shape it as well as migrations and how they affect people’s origins and destinations.

Frazier, a professor, and Tettey-Fio, an associate professor, both contributed pieces in addition to editing the book. Department Chair Florence Margai and Assistant Professor Mark Reisinger also wrote for the volume.

Frazier and Tettey-Fio have taught as a team in the past, and their rapport is evident as they discuss race and ethnicity as well as how they’ll use the new book in Geography 103: Multicultural Geographies of the U.S., a course each teaches.

The two rattle off a list of places changed by new communities. Allentown and Pennsylvania Dutch country are increasingly Latino, for instance, while Bosnians are reshaping Utica. Southeast Asians have transformed Flushing.

“Groups want to preserve their ethnicity,” Frazier said. So you’ll see Spanish signs in Allentown and different restaurants and churches than you might have found before. “The landscape informs you of who’s there and how they’re transforming it.” He and Tettey-Fio are not shy about citing these examples in the classroom.

“Students can see that even the towns from which they come have become laboratories for what’s discussed in class,” Tettey-Fio said. “Students can really relate to this material.”

Tettey-Fio and Frazier are interested in how organizations such as refugee resettlement offices and political institutions such as the Federal Housing Authority contribute to the transformation of these places.

“Also, we tell students that this is not something new,” Tettey-Fio said.

The United States has a long history of immigration and of bringing in cheap labor, but Tettey-Fio and Frazier often find that students are surprised by how much that need for cheap labor has influenced policy.

Students are also forced to confront some of their own stereotypes in the course, too, whether about the idea of “model” minorities or about the persistence of the black ghetto.

“You have to talk about race as a social construct in this country,” Frazier said.

Tettey-Fio chimed in with the perfect example. “I didn’t know I was black until I got here,” he said with a laugh. “I used to think I was African, or Ghanaian.”