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UPDATED: April 29, 2021 at 1 a.m.

An annual Syracuse University research grant has allowed students and faculty members to pursue sustainability-related projects this year.

SU’s Campus as a Laboratory for Sustainability grant was established alongside SU’s Climate Action Plan. The plan, which the university introduced in 2009, aims to completely eliminate SU’s net emissions of greenhouse gases by the end of 2040.

The grant awards up to $75,000 per project and has provided funding for sustainability projects since 2016. Six projects received funding in April 2020. Several students and faculty who received the funding said that it helped make their projects possible over the past year.

Valeria Vilanova, a junior architecture major, and Lilian Khao, a sophomore architecture major, were the only students this year to be awarded funding for their project, “Syracuse Architecture Goes Green.”

The project focuses on recycling materials and creating storage space for SU’s architecture program. It also aims to decrease the amount of waste the program produces.

“The idea of the project is that for every studio space, there will be a shelf with bins marked with different labels of different materials, like cardboard, chipboard,” Vilanova said.

The next step of the project is to involve more architecture faculty so they can start using the shelves in their own studio spaces and classrooms, Vilanova said.

Seyeon Lee and Louise Manfredi, two assistant professors in SU’s School of Design also received funding for their project, “Does SU Housing Care About the Environment?” which focuses on engaging and educating students on waste management.

The pair conducted a similar project for the School of Design last year using an SU grant of about $18,000 they received. After the success of that project, Lee and Manfredi worked together and expanded waste management to housing at SU.

“At the end of our first year, we were recognizing how much we’re saving, how we were really changing behaviors,” Lee said. “Our project was starting to make noise, and students are talking about it.”

Lee and Manfredi offered lecture-style tutorials to students in learning communities as a way to reach students living in dorms. The tutorials helped educate students on how to be more sustainable and how Onondaga County is dealing with waste, Lee said.

Nina Sharifi, an assistant professor at the School of Architecture, was awarded a grant as well and used it for her project, which analyzed the environmental efficiency of a South Campus apartment.

The apartment, located on Winding Ridge Road, is not insulated and has no mechanical ventilation systems nor baseboard electric heating, Sharifi said.

“These characteristics are very representative of the problem in New York state that we want to solve,” she said. “We could start to correlate design to environmental quality, like air quality on the interior, as well as energy performance, which we’re studying.”

Undergraduate students have also worked on the research team analyzing the drawings of the building for the project, Sharifi said.

“They’ve been running all sorts of analyses,” Sharifi said. “They’ve been running energy models. They’ve taught themselves essentially.”

The South Campus apartment is linked to a bigger retrofit project that will begin construction in summer 2022. The insulation and renewable energy in the new building are expected to be net-zero, or carbon neutral, Sharifi said.

“There’s a big problem with that when you’re trying to achieve net-zero because when you have a poorly insulated building, then you have a lot of infiltration, a lot of heat loss in the wintertime, and a cold climate like ours and here in Syracuse,” Sharifi said.

The School of Information Studies will also help develop interactive visualizations for students to understand data from the project once it’s complete. Sharifi and her team are also considering creating an app that will help users understand energy consumption.

Lee recommended other students and staff to apply for the sustainability grant, as it could lead to further involvement and development in research. Programs such as these also present unique opportunities for students, professors and researchers to contribute to a more sustainable SU, she said.

“If you think about it, just about every college has some kind of environmental sustainability project, either small or big,” Lee said. “A lot of people should definitely apply, and that could become a good starting point to a bigger, maybe national, grant.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, Valeria Vilanova’s name was misspelled. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on April 27, 2021 at 10:41 pm