2025 Sustainability Summer Fellowships for Graduate Research Partnerships

Green Procurement -  City of Fairfax (Summer Sustainability Fellowship)
The City of Fairfax is seeking a dedicated and detail-oriented summer fellow to assist in implementing the city’s future Green Procurement Policy. The fellow will work closely with city departments to develop a comprehensive suggested purchasing guide that aligns with the policy's sustainability standards. This effort supports the city's ongoing commitment to reducing its environmental footprint and promoting sustainable practices across municipal operations.

Fellowship Details:

Research Supervisors:
The fellow will be supervised by Melissa Pennett and Patti Innocenti, who will provide guidance, support, and oversight throughout the fellowship. They will ensure alignment with city goals and facilitate coordination with key stakeholders.

Scope of Work:

• Collaborate with city departments to assess current purchasing practices.
• Conduct research on sustainable products, vendors, and certifications that meet the future Green Procurement Policy criteria.
• Develop a suggested purchasing guide with specific recommendations and resources for sustainable procurement.
• Facilitate meetings and workshops with department representatives to gather input and provide guidance on sustainable purchasing practices.
• Prepare a final report summarizing findings, recommendations, and next steps for policy implementation.

Expected Skills and Expertise:

• Strong research and analytical skills with an emphasis on sustainability and environmental policy.
• Preferred familiarity with green procurement principles and sustainable product certifications,
• Excellent communication and coordination skills to engage with multiple city departments effectively.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and experience with project management or collaborative tools (e.g., Trello, Asana) is a plus.

Potential Products/Outcomes:

• A detailed suggested purchasing guide tailored to the City of Fairfax's future Green Procurement Policy.
• A final presentation summarizing key findings, research methodology, and implementation recommendations.
• A comprehensive report documenting the fellow’s work, including research findings, engagement summaries, and the purchasing guide.

Handshake Job #9684618, Click here to apply

Future Earth:  Nature Positive Summit

Future Earth Australia (FEA) has begun to scope the development of our next national strategic plan, focusing on biodiversity and climate change. Following the global FE report on Research Priorities in Climate Change and Biodiversity, the Fellow will help tie Australian “nature positive” initiatives with global perspectives. We offer an opportunity to engage in consultation and co-design activities aimed at shaping Australia’s approach to these critical issues. The Australian Government recently hosted the first Global Nature Positive Summit, which provided a platform for discussing nature repair and climate action. Linking national, regional, and global priorities under Nature Positive and Net Zero frames will be critical.

Coordination and facilitation of a series of workshops across Australia will gather a diversity of stakeholders, rights holders, and decision makers to gain mutual understanding and canvass opportunities. Leveraging existing FEA membership activities and expertise in this area will be the first step in the co-design process. The fellow will work closely with FEA team to make sure that the strategy gathers diverse perspectives, including those of First Nations Peoples, researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders.

This will be applied transdisciplinary research using stakeholder engagement and strategy development with mentoring by the Sydney Environment Institute. The process and strategy will directly influence Australia’s cross sectoral understanding of this nexus and outline Australia’s contribution to address biodiversity and climate change issues globally. FEA uses knowledge brokering for research impact to policy makers and implementation partners.

Mentor: Professor Danielle Celermajer - based in Australia

Key activities include:

• Conducting research to find out current policy and initiatives related to biodiversity and climate change across FEAs membership and Australia.
• Assisting in stakeholder engagement, including preparing consultation materials, coordinating meetings and collecting feedback.
• Analyzing findings to identify gaps, opportunities, and priorities.
• Preparing or co-facilitating stakeholder workshops to canvass views, priorities, gaps and opportunities when it comes to how Australia approaches climate and biodiversity issues.

Skills:

We welcome applicants with a background in sustainability, environmental science, ecology, biodiversity, or related disciplines, and a passion for collaborative problem-solving.

Potential product:
The Fellow will help facilitate the preparation or delivery of co-design workshops for relevant experts, local and Indigenous communities, and stakeholders. The research will build a societally relevant strategy for how Australia can help halt and reverse biodiversity decline, while contributing to net zero pathways. The research impact will be facilitated through FEA and the Australian Academy of Science.

Handshake Job #9684671, click here to apply

Future Earth:  Research on Sustainable Lifestyles

A current and major activity of the Future Earth Knowledge Action Network on Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production is completion of the Handbook of Research on Sustainable Lifestyles (currently under contract with the UK-based published Edward Elgar and being edited by a the KAN's Management Team). The Handbook will include 45 chapters and revised drafts of nearly all of them have been completed (or will be completed by December 15). An upcoming task will be to edit and prepare the full contents of the manuscript for delivery to the publisher by early July 2025. The Handbook will be a major achievement and contribute to the organization of a recognizable domain of research centered on the concept of "sustainable lifestyles" which for the past several decades has tended to be overshadowed by an (over)emphasis on technological and engineering focused conceptions of sustainablity. Even the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals underemphasizes the centrality and importance of lifestyles as a critical component of a meaningful and purposeful compsite of strategies needed to limit greenhouse gas emissions, to reduce pressure on biodiversity, and to manage a host of other local- and global-scale socioenvironmental challenges. The Handbook will be a critical reference manual for both experienced researchers and newcomers to this important field.

Mentor: Maurie Cohen (Professor and Chair, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology)

Scope of work: Fellow will work closely with Maurie Cohen and other members of the Handbook's editorial team (Magnus Bostrom, Sylvia Lorek, Ria Lambino, and Steven McGreevy) to edit the full contents of the forthcoming Handbook. They will also serve as a research assistant for the introductory chapter that will serve as an overview of the volume and provide a framework the more than three dozen chapters that will be part of this volume.

Skills: Basic familiarity with word processing software (MS Word and Google Docs) is essential. Applicants do not need to have specific editorial experience but an active interest in developing such a skillset through active engagement on this project should be demonstrated. Prior experience formatting illustrations, figures, and other graphical content would be a plus.

Potential product: Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption which will be part of Edward Elgar's popular series of handbook publications. See https://www.e-elgar.com/products/handbooks/.

Handshake Job #9684688, click here to apply

Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are ubiquitous across the world’s biomes. Mountains are no exception and urgent measures are needed to bend the curve and safeguard the essential capacity of mountain ecosystems and their biodiversity to support human populations. Since the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assessments of ongoing trends in the Earth System and its components have become a key source of scientific information for governments and decision-makers. As of today, no such assessment exists for mountain ecosystems and species. With a first-of-its-kind global assessment of mountain biodiversity research and trends, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA) program is filling this gap. By doing so, it takes advantage of the increase in the amount, coverage, and accessibility of mountain biodiversity data, the growing volume of mountain biodiversity literature, developments in text annotation and analysis, and increasingly well-organized communities of experts. The mining of unstructured text using rule-and pattern-based approaches, regular expressions, and a custom-built thesaurus is already in place and piloted for scientific literature in English. To achieve global coverage and inclusivity, existing approaches need to be extended and streamlined for applicability in other world languages. Within the 10-week fellowship, the applicant will collaborate with GMBA in (1) adapting and optimizing the current text mining workflow for application in Chinese (or Spanish) literature, (2) applying it to the ongoing global assessment of mountain mammals, and (3) contributing to the ongoing development of Artificial Intelligence-based approaches for meaning and relationship extraction from unstructured text. The fellowship is a unique opportunity to part take in ongoing efforts to address the open problem of knowledge recognition and extraction from non-English scientific literature and to develop a first-of-its-kind open-access and FAIR repository for and global assessment of mountain biodiversity.

Task 1: Translate relevant GMBA libraries for literature mining and annotation to Chinese (or Spanish). This includes but is not restricted to the GMBA library of mountain range names, of mammalian-related terms, as well as GMBA’s general thesaurus of ecological and evolutionary terms.
Task 2: Create a corpus of annotated Chinese (or Spanish) scientific literature on mountain mammals using the output of Task 1 applied to OpenAlex and other language-specific scientific repositories
Task 3: Capitalize on the outputs of task 2 to develop datasets of annotated publications in Chinese (or Spanish) for the training of Artificial Intelligence approaches to relationship extraction and named entity recognition

Skills:
-        Communication skills in English and either Chinese or Spanish-speaking
-        R programming – essential
-        (mountain) biodiversity and ecology – highly desirable
-        text mining, processing, and analysis tools – desirable
-        Artificial Intelligence, database programming (postgreSQL), open research data ecosystems – desirable
-        Geo-processing (ArcGis or QGis) – desirable

Mentor: Dr. Davnah Urbach (GMBA executive director), - [email protected]
in collaboration with Mark Snethlage

Potential products or outputs:
Taks 1: a custom-build thesaurus of mountain biodiversity related terms in Chinese (or Spanish)
Task 2: an annotated corpus of mountain mammals literature in Chinese (or Spanish)
Task 3: Chinese or Spanish training datasets for named-entity recognition and relationship extraction
All outputs are shared following open science principles and acknowledge authors individually. Based on Task 2, the fellow will become part of the global mountain mammals assessment co-author team and be offered co-authorship on individual products. We support and facilitate individual publications based on project outputs.

Handshake Job #9684700, click here to apply