University of Tennessee at Knoxville
AC-9: Academic Research

Number of faculty engaged in sustainability research was taken from the list kept by the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment (ISSE). Number of faculty engaged in research is not tracked by the university, so 1,537 represents the total number of full-time instructional faculty.

01/2015—Dr. Bruce Tschantz (with ISSE's TNWRRC) was invited to Washington, D.C. by Homeland Security and FEMA to present a historical perspective on the development of the 1979 Federal Guidelines for Dam Safety to the Joint Meeting of the Interagency Committee on Dam Safety (ICODS) and the National Dam Safety Review Board (NDSRB) held January 21, 2015. Tschantz, who coordinated federal and nonfederal dam safety policy and program efforts for the Carter Administration from 1977-80 following the 1976 failure of Teton Dam, challenged the federal agencies to consider several contemporary dam safety issues, including hydrofracturing effects, cyber terrorism/hacking, public safety around dams, coal combustion residual (CCR) impoundments, and risk-informed decision making (RIDM), as the Joint Committee begins to update the Guidelines that President Carter, in October 1979, directed 22 federal agencies to adopt and implement. 03/2015—Dr. Jack Parker made a presentation at the REMTEC conference in Denver, Colorado on March 3 titled “An Integrated Approach to Multi-Strategy DNAPL Remediation Considering Uncertainty Using Stochastic Cost Optimization.” 05/2013—Mary English, a Senior Fellow at ISSE and a Fellow for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, has written a policy brief, "Should the Federal Government Sell TVA?" The brief was spurred by the Obama administration's April 10 statement that it intends to review options regarding the Tennessee Valley Authority, including divestiture. In 2014, she was appointed to the Tennessee Valley Authority's Integrated Resource Plan working group. 01/2013—Dr. Joshua Fu (with ISSE, UT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education) and colleagues published a study in Environmental Research Letters that addresses climate change in the Southeast and shows that residents might have to brace themselves for a wilder future, as climate change sets our weather onto a roller-coaster path.