Faculty Fellows
Faculty Fellow Research Program
About the Program
Fall 2009 CUERP Faculty Fellow
Fall 2008 & Spring 2009 CUERP Faculty Fellow
A significant level of collaboration between natural, social and policy sciences is imperative to innovative environmental research and effective policy analysis and design. Thus CUERP's fellowship draws upon the skills and expertise of Loyola’s talented faculty to enhance cutting-edge science that addresses the needs of an urban ecosystem impacted by human development.
The Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Environmental Research and Policy (CUERP) solicits proposals for its Faculty Fellows program. The mission of CUERP is to promote
interdisciplinary environmental research and education, and advance environmental health,
sustainability and environmental justice in the Chicago metropolitan area and beyond.
The goal of this program is to provide faculty with release time from teaching for one semester to
come to CUERP and conduct research related to the Center's mission. CUERP Fellows will receive a
one semester release from all teaching responsibilities in their academic unit, while retaining their
commitments to service in their department.
Possible activities of CUERP Fellows can include:
• Conducting research on urban environmental issues
• Writing an external grant proposal for research on urban environmental issues
• Conducting preliminary research in preparation for writing an external grant proposal
• Assembling an interdisciplinary team to work on an urban environmental project
The Center has several staff members (among them a GIS specialist, a Coordinator, a post-doc fellow and a
graduate student) that are available to assist CUERP Fellows in these activities. In addition, the Office
of Research Services will help faculty in locating funding opportunities and in proposal preparation
through the expertise of a professional grant writer.
In addition to the activities described above, CUERP Fellows will be expected to:
• Work jointly with the other current CUERP Fellows (if applicable) to organize a monthly seminar
series on topics related to the mission of the Center. This seminar series should occur during the
semester that the Fellows are participating in the program, and it may include speakers from within
Loyola or from other institutions.
• Submit a brief written summary of their activities and accomplishments as a CUERP Fellow to the
CUERP Director following completion of the program.
• Give a presentation to other CUERP faculty summarizing their activities. These presentations will
be given by the CUERP Fellows in the semester following their participation in the program.
Applicants should submit a 2-3 page proposal describing their plans and indicating the semester for
which they are applying (Spring or Fall). The CUERP Fellows Committee will select 2-4 Fellows for
each year with preference given to strong interdisciplinary projects that involve more than one CUERP
member. Faculty may also apply in groups of 2-3 to work as a team.
Proposals should be submitted to: Dr. Nancy Tuchman, CUERP Director
Deadlines for proposal submission are:
September 1 - for Spring semester Fellows
November 1 - for Fall semester Fellows
Fall 2009 CUERP Faculty Fellow
Konstantin Läufer is a professor in the computer science department. His plan as CUERP fellow is to continue building the computational infrastructure for studying the interrelation between environmental science, public health, and social justice in the context of CUERP's ongoing Chicago Clean Air Clean Water project.
The proposed infrastructure will play the role of a data gathering and publishing hub. Besides drawing data from Loyola's own monitoring stations and mobile sensors installed on short-term rental cars, this hub will invite citizen scientists to upload data from GPS-capable smartphones [pic with map could go near here] or through a web portal, as well as pull data from existing sources such as the EPA. The hub will expose its combined data not only through the web, but also via a public application programming interface (API). This allows interested parties to analyze our data programmatically or combine it visually with, say, demographic data in a web application mashup.
Completing this infrastructure will also require solving various engineering problems. The computers hosting the stationary and mobile sensors need to function reliably in harsh environments while using minimal energy; the operating system and application software running on them to expose the data to the hub will have to work under these platform constraints. Mobile sensors might not always connected to a network and have to cache data until they can offload it to a server. Public servers have to be scalable to sustain potentially heavy loads. 
FAll 2008 & Spring 2009 CUERP Faculty Fellow
George K. Thiruvathukal an associate professor in the computer science department, is focusing on the application of computational thinking to study urban environmental science and its intersection with public health and policy. Our work builds on the work of a previous CUERP Faculty Fellow Research Program project by focusing on the problems of air and water pollution in urban areas. In a recent article entitled What Are Your Breathing? (Chicago Tribune, September 28, 2008) residents in the Chicago metropolitan area are said to be exposed to high levels of air pollution. Although the Clean Air Act of 1990 was intended to reverse this effect, this recent report suggests that the problems run much deeper and need to be studied more closely and monitored continuously to see whether any real improvement is taking place. The environment is part of a dynamic system and can change for the better or worse over time, as the Tribune article discussed.
We start with the assumption that gathering all the environmental data that one would find interesting for long-term study is a daunting task, one that parallels the challenge of mining all web pages, and requires an enormous amount of (growable) disk storage. Furthermore, we contend that most environmental data are not published in real time (some available only at weekly/monthly intervals) nor in a format that is conducive to outside analysis (e.g. XML or simple web services). To truly understand whether environmental policy is effective requires the availability of a large-scale data set that keeps on growing and can be used to assess policy and health (and other societal) impacts on an ongoing basis. We argue that data are at their best when the latest data can be accessed or analyzed by anyone.
In addition to gathering data from multiple sources (e.g. EPA) and making it available in a form that is conducive to analysis (e.g. a data warehouse with online analytics) a separate problem exists that is an artifact of collecting data at fixed locations. Mobile and distributed computing (and sensor technologies) can play a significant role in gathering data from unmonitored locations. In addition, the same can be used to refine data being obtained by fixed monitoring equipment. While this would seem easy, deploying mobile/distributed environmental monitoring is non-trivial. Many projects monitor from vehicles. This brings a challenge as this method often picks up artifacts associated with urban transport. In Chicago, many choose to take transit, walk, or bike and any mobile sensing solution in this vein requires one to consider a number of challenges: power, weight, and safety (of both the equipment and the commuter).
Dr. Thiruvathukal's fellowship is focused on developing the technology platform(s) to do mobile/distributed sensing, aggregating and indexing existing sources. And building a scalable repository that can be used by collaborators, citizen-scientists, students (secondary and university), and others (through social networks or customized portal software). Our project makes extensive use of free/open-source software, especially Linux (the operating system in both embedded and server forms) and GNU (GNU's not Unix) development tool.
Fall 2007 CUERP Faculty Fellow
Christopher Peterson, Ph.D., is the Director for Loyola's Environmental Studies/Science Program and a professor of Biology. Dr. Peterson's CUERP Fellowship research project title is: "Mediation of denitrification by algal/bacterial interactions in stream periphyton: Role of successional development in species identity".
Fall 2006 CUERP Faculty Fellow
Martina Schmeling, Ph.D., Fall 2006 Faculty Fellow, is a chemist and professor of Chemistry at Loyola University Chicago.
Dr. Schmeling's CUERP research project will investigate air pollution issues in Chicago. The project has four components: processing and interpretation of five of data; organic aerosol pathways; identifying needs for air pollution research and impacts to health based upon results collected from the Loyola University Air Station (LUCAS); and the installation of a second air pollution collection site at Loyola's Water Tower Campus.
This research will advance the state of knowledge with respect to Chicago's air pollution and contribute to the future research projects related to air pollution and health.
Spring 2006 CUERP Faculty Fellow
Kenneth M. Johnson, Ph.D., Spring 2006 Faculty Fellow, is a demographer and professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. 
His research (PDF) focuses on population redistribution and demographic trends in urban and rural regions of the United States and on the implications these trends have on people and the environment. Dr. Johnson (PDF) is sought out frequently by journalists reporting on migration and census data.
Dr. Johnson's work of looking at demographic trends is instrumental to CUERP's mission and goals, as changes in size and distribution of the human population have environmental implications. Opportunities are available to use trends in a way that can influence policy to foster long term viable sustainable development.