MCSI Global

Global Engagement in Sustainability Grants Collaboration between MCSI and the University Center for International Studies(UCIS)

New grants in Global Engagement in Sustainability enable people to share, develop and expand their research, teaching or professional practice beyond the campus. Created by Dr. David Sanchez (MCSI) and led by Ariel Armony (Vice Provost, UCIS) and John Stoner (Executive Director, UCIS) the grants encourage engagement activities with partners beyond the general campus and region. Partners can be national or international, from either inside or outside of higher education, and are working in areas that strongly align the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Sara Baumann, Public Health Jessica Burke, Public Health

Harnessing Human-Centered Design (HCD) for Intervention Development in Global Public Health: A Community-engaged Pilot Study in Nepal

Kevin Bell, Bioengineering Cynthia Salter, Public Health

Medical Design for Low Resource Environments

Frayda Cohen, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

Connecting the Global and Local: Sustainability and the Challenge of Food Waste in Rome, Italy

Patricia Documet, Public Health

Using PhotoVoice to explore environmental sustainability among Latinos in an emerging community

Michael Glass, Urban Studies Educational Bridges toward Sustainable City-Regions: Reciprocal Exchanges between Auckland (NZ) and Pittsburgh (PA)

Marcela Gonzalez Rivas, GSPIA Caitlin Schroering, Geology and Environmental Sciences

Realizing Sustainable Development Goal 6: Challenges and Opportunities

Elizabeth Oyler, East Asian Languages and Literatures

Imagining Global Cities of the Future: A Cultural Exchange Class on Sustainability between Pitt and Konan University (Japan)

Sustainability of Island Nations: Guam

Pitt students travelled to the island of Guam with Dr. David Sanchez to look at Sustainability from an island perspective. Meeting with industry, government, nonprofits, university leaders, and cultural organizations, they explored engineering sustainability challenges and opportunities in Guam by considering social (culture, history, governance), environmental (natural resources, built infrastructure, impacts of industry) and economic (production, imports, development) systems.

Climate Change as a National Security Issue for Small Island Nations

Dr. David Sanchez received a Global Academic Partnership grant to explore sustainability challenges for Pacific Island Nations in Micronesia. He worked in collaboration with IPIKU government, educational, and nonprofit leaders of in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, and Guam. Together, they hosted an international webinar series on “Climate Change as a National Security Issues for Small Island Nations”. The series featured internationally recognized government leaders, climate envoys, climate scientists, and environmental lawyers discussing the challenges facing Pacific islands in Micronesia. Image: IPIKU Directors and Collaborators

Engineering Perspectives of the Renaissance & Sustainability: Florence

Drs. Melissa Bilec (MCSI) and Anne Robertson (Mechanical Engineering) developed a month-long, 6-credit series of courses for students to gain insight into the great minds of the Renaissance. Important principles of engineering and physics developed during the Renaissance were compared with today’s practices in engineering sustainability alongside art history contextualizing the thoughts and social situations of renaissance engineers in Florence.

From Dortmund to Brazil

MCSI coordinated a campus visit for a delegation from Sister City Dortmund, Germany, and City of Pittsburgh collaborators. Topics included circular economy, carbon neutrality, hydrogen, and food systems. MCSI also host a delegation from São Paulo, Brazil, with whom we talked about greenhouse gas emissions, Sustainable Development Goals, and sustainability metrics on the university, industry, and global levels.

Ayrshire, Scotland

Through MCSI funding, Drs. Strathern and Stewart conducted exploratory fieldwork on conservation practices in rural areas in Ayrshire, Scotland. Between July and October 2021, they collected numbers of relevant cases from media sources as well as independently collected discussions and accounts from local community members and farmers, which demonstrated a quickening interest in environmental issues in conjunction with plans for an Environment Summit in November 2021 held in Glasgow. They now have a corpus of firsthand materials related to these issues awaiting further analysis, which will assist in incorporating the data into teaching and research on environmental consciousness in rural communities in Lowland Scotland. They will be following up these results with further work this summer, seeking to pursue sustainability concerns that can feed into Mascaro Center related topics.