Every Month as part of our CUNY CREST Monthly Bulletin, the CUNY CREST Institute Executive Director, Dr. Reza Khanbilvardi, sends a message to the CUNY CREST Community on updates of the organization.

Below is the message for April 2022 sent to faculty, colleagues, stakeholders, and peers of the CUNY CREST Institute.

Throughout the month of April the CUNY CREST Institute celebrates Earth Day and uses this time to focus on different environment issues. One of the Institute’s focuses this month was Environmental Justice. Through environmental justice, we advocate for knowledge to be spread to different communities, especially to underserved communities.

This month, Reza Khanbilvardi, Kaveh Madani, Farshid Vahedifard, Alireza and Ermagun received a new grant from NOAA- Collaborative Science, Technology, and Applied Research (CSTAR) Program with proposed project, “Integrating Environmental Justice into NWS Services to Reduce the Vulnerability of Historically Underserved Socially Vulnerable Communities (HUSVCs) to Extreme Weather Events”. We plan to share the value and importance of Environmental Justice education and create awareness among the underserved communities.

Currently, a number of our faculty are in the process of submitting four grant proposals to the National Science Foundation, the US Department of energy, and other agencies. We encourage all our scientists to look at the grants highlighted through our Monthly Bulletin in order to identify appropriate proposals and apply to them.

As we are starting to come out of this pandemic, the CUNY CREST Institute plans to upgrade some of its field and laboratory equipment for the faculty and students as they begin to return to post-pandemic in-person research, training and learning.

Currently, we have been going to public schools throughout New York City, establishing and upgrading our 19 weather stations network (HydroMetNet). The weather stations do not only serve as hub of information for researchers but also the data obtained is also being planned for use by some of the high school students that are a part of the High School Initiative in Remote Sensing of the Earth Systems Engineering and Sciences (HIRES ) Internship program in the Summer of 2022.

HIRES has received more than 110 applications from students throughout New York City! We are currently in our recruitment process to accept 25 eager-to-learn students to join our program. We are always looking for new Research Mentors to join our program to give the students an opportunity to create a research project. If you are interested to learn more about the program, please email our HIRES Program Coordinator, Ms. Carolina Perez, cperez1@ccny.cuny.edu or cresthires@gmail.com

Beginning this month, we plan to highlight our student’s education and research accomplishments. This month we are delighted to highlight Said A. Mejia Manrique, Juan P. Montoya Rincon, and Dr. Jeongwoo Hwang for their accomplishments! You can read more below. Said A. Mejia Manrique is also planning to attend the Frontiers in Hydrology Conference that will take place from June 19th-24th, 2022 in San Juan, Puerto Rico! We wish him the best of luck!

We look forward to bring more news and success stories to our readers in the future edition of our monthly bulletin,

Happy reading!

Reza Khanbilvardi