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Rethinking Waste in St. Louis: Embracing a Circular Economy Through Data

Written by MBDH

By Francie Fink

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

We’ve all experienced it: that moment when a shiny new product catches our eye, and we justify the upgrade with a quick, “Well, I’ll need a replacement sooner or later . . .” Before we know it, the old item is forgotten—tossed in a drawer or discarded altogether.

This “single-use” mindset isn’t limited to phones. Every day, restaurants discard uneaten food, fast fashion fuels massive textile waste, and holiday shopping arrives wrapped in mounds of plastic. These examples represent the “linear economy”—a global system based on extracting resources, creating products, and discarding them after short-term use. It’s a cycle that drives waste, inefficiency, and environmental harm.

St. Louis has long played a pivotal role in America’s economy and history. Positioned at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, it was a 19th-century trade hub and an industrial leader. As the host of the 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis showcased groundbreaking innovations in urban design, manufacturing, and science, including sustainable landscaping techniques. Its Forest Park remains a triumph in green space preservation, spanning 1,371 acres with 30,000 trees.

Yet, St. Louis also grapples with a history of environmental injustice. Communities of color have disproportionately faced the consequences of industrial pollution, lead poisoning, and elevated asthma rates. Illegal dumping remains prevalent in neighborhoods already lacking stable access to food, compounding challenges like food insecurity and ineffective waste management.

In response to these challenges, organizations in St. Louis are redefining the city’s relationship with waste and resources. CircularSTL, a coalition led by 10 Billion Strong, earthday365, Race to Zero Waste, and other environmental leaders, is championing the concept of the circular economy—a system designed to reduce waste by keeping materials and products in use for as long as possible. Unlike the “take-make-waste” cycle, the circular economy promotes principles like repair, reuse, remanufacture, and recycle.

Globally, less than 10% of the economy is circular. But in St. Louis, CircularSTL is working to change that. Partnering with local organizations like Washington University’s Office of Sustainability, Cortex Innovation District, and many others, 10 Billion Strong is uniting independent efforts under a shared framework to tackle waste and build a more sustainable city.

10 Billion Strong, known for its global sustainability projects in 101 countries, has empowered over 25,000 people and diverted more than 45 tons of plastic waste. The nonprofit’s CEO Patrick Arnold co-founded Circular STL along with three other St. Louis-based environmental leaders, in an effort to effect change close to home. The team’s idea was to use data to better characterize not just the problem of waste generation and management in St. Louis, but also the city’s ongoing solutions.

To achieve this, CircularSTL partnered with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) through its Community Development and Engagement Program to create a circular-city dashboard. This tool uses key indicators—such as waste management efficiency, energy use, and food systems—to assess the region’s progress toward a circular economy. By visualizing the problem and highlighting ongoing solutions, the tool empowers policymakers, businesses, and residents to take informed action. 

The concepts of food waste and resource recycling differ significantly, making comparisons challenging. For example, tracking the volume of textiles recycled is quite different from measuring the weight of plastic diverted from landfills. Recognizing the need for an organized approach to address these complexities, project leaders prioritized gathering and interpreting St. Louis-specific data. They collaborated with over 50 stakeholders from local government, nonprofits, businesses, and academic partners to refine circular-economy indices and develop metrics tailored to the city. Two community meetings further identified gaps in data collection and potential sources to fill them.

The team was intentional about their approach. “Our methodology is to focus the data on solutions, not just the scope of the problem,” said Patrick Arnold, Founder and CEO at 10 Billion Strong. “With problems like food waste, we view it as a numerator and denominator challenge. The denominator represents the waste and the numerator represents the solutions. We know the denominator is huge, so we’re focusing on the numerator.”

In September 2024, CircularSTL hosted a symposium to share key findings and highlight progress. Questions like “Where is food waste being properly managed?” and “Where is e-waste being recycled?” were explored by speakers, panelists, and presenters. This progress was largely driven by the emphasis on data collection and analysis. For some organizations, this “culture of data” was a new but invigorating shift.

Pictured: CircularSTL partners present data and policy recommendations to community stakeholders.

“Taking part in the St. Louis Regional Circular Index program introduced me to a wide array of initiatives, from innovative startups to established businesses, that are all working towards sustainable resource use,” said project partner Chris Oestereich, Circular Economy Connector at Linear to Circular. “I joined the project to learn and contribute to a shared vision for a more circular and sustainable future for the region and beyond and I’m really happy that I did. I met so many passionate people and they left me excited about our shared trajectory.” 

Teresa Bradley, CEO of national nonprofit Race to Zero Waste, echoed that sentiment: “Thanks to the grant, and due to our outreach efforts, I learned there are many businesses in the St. Louis region contributing towards the circular economy. It was such a special day at the CircularSTL Symposium to learn best practices, network, and learn from each other.” 

The symposium was an incubator for new ideas. One presenting startup, Sustain-a-Plate, featured their software, which uses AI technology to streamline the inventory process for grocers. The technology takes the guesswork out of inventory management, sending alerts when products are nearing expiration and suggesting timely discounts or promotions to keep shelves fresh and waste low. It’s a shining example of how smart tracking can make a big impact.

A dedicated data science team is now finalizing the development of a community dashboard, with a preliminary version nearing release. The creation of this dashboard has involved an extensive data-collection process involving numerous community organizations, a case study in collaborative data-sharing. The dashboard will showcase and track metrics decided upon in community engagement meetings. 

Participating organizations will share, among other data points, pounds of food waste prevented, pounds of composted material, and pounds of inorganic material diverted from landfills. The project has tracked nearly 20,000 tons of materials diverted from area landfills over the past year and anticipates this number to grow significantly as additional community members submit their data. Partner organizations will update these figures annually, offering a dynamic snapshot of progress. CircularSTL hopes the public-facing tool will inspire both organizations and individuals to embrace the principles of a circular economy.

The work of CircularSTL is a testament to St. Louis’ potential to transform from a linear to a circular economy, leveraging its history of innovation and community collaboration. As the city pioneers this shift, it’s not just building a more sustainable and equitable future for its residents—it’s setting an example for communities worldwide. With continued collaboration, data-driven insights, and a commitment to rethinking waste, St. Louis has the opportunity to prove that a circular economy is not just an aspiration but an achievable reality.

Learn More/Get Involved: 

Learn more about CircularSTL by visiting the initiative’s website. To learn more about the lead organization, 10 Billion Strong, browse their impact and areas of focus here. If you are interested in learning more about the circular economy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides basic information about the concept here.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to learn more about other Community Development and Engagement projects we’ve supported. The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

ag food water, blog, CDE, Smart, Connected, & Resilient Communities

Minneapolis’ Energy Burden: An Improved Model for Determining Which Households Pay More Than Their Fair Share for Energy

Written by MBDH

By Francie Fink

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

As of 2020, almost a third of American households reported difficulty in paying energy bills, or were forced to keep their home at an uncomfortable and potentially unsafe temperature to save money. With increasing summer temperatures and more extreme winter temperatures anticipated in years to come, this statistic is likely to become only more alarming. Policymakers and researchers have developed a metric to standardize which homes pay more than others towards energy bills, as a proportion of their annual household income. That metric, called a household’s “energy burden” can be calculated and expressed as a simple percentage:

(Annual money spent on energy costs)/(Annual household income) * 100.

You might now easily calculate your own household’s energy burden. You might also easily see how this proportion can be alarming: for instance, for a household making $25,000 a year with $2,000 towards energy bills in that same year, that family’s energy burden is 8%. Common standard is that 6% energy burden or higher constitutes an energy-poor household, this being the average energy burden of a household between 0–80% area median income (AMI). A tricky characteristic of this calculation for policymakers hoping to intervene is that we often don’t have accurate, accessible data on household income. This component is key in accurately estimating household energy burden and is essential for effectively directing assistance to those who need it most.

Minnesota can experience bitterly cold winters and, thus, its households rely on dependable heating. Energy bills can rack up for low-income households, particularly for those heating with expensive fuels and inefficient equipment. In the Twin Cities, for households less than 30% AMI, the average household energy burden for Minneapolis is 10%—and for St. Paul, 7%. While incoming Inflation Reduction Act funding and existing utility programs provide an opportunity for energy-efficient upgrades and bill assistance, respectively, it’s currently very difficult for administrators to know which households can benefit most. If a family is seeking assistance through Minnesota’s Energy Assistance Program, as of now, they must first find that the program exists, then fill out a somewhat lengthy application with an income-verification step. Or, if program administrators aren’t able to reach target households, these households might instead engage in risky financial behavior, such as taking on loans to keep the heat on.

A small group of researchers at the University of Minnesota’s (UMN) Center for Sustainable Building Research partnered with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) to improve the methodology of estimating household income in an effort to enable proactive outreach to families experiencing high energy burden.

“Energy burden is often addressed as something that has to have already been experienced,” says Diba Malekpour Koupaei, Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Building Research. “We aim to be proactive by keeping an eye out for households that may currently be experiencing it or could face this challenge in the future. This approach has the potential to increase our capacity for outreach to those most in need of intervention.”

The team, led by Malekpour, aimed to develop a framework for estimating household income using what is called the House Price-to-Income Ratio. The metric is essentially exactly what it sounds like, and its main purpose is to gauge the affordability of a home for a given family. The UMN group realized they might be able to use this metric for something else: income estimation in the context of energy burden. The value of a home might just be a good predictor of its occupants’ income.

Researchers can and frequently do use microdata, or unidentifiable, individual-level data, from open sources like the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS has information on income, home value, and energy costs for a sample of American homes, so it can be valuable for energy-burden studies. Previous research by the UMN and other groups couldn’t identify a correlation between household income and home value within the dataset. Building on work from another study, however, the UMN team was able to use a relationship between home value and income when matching up deciles of these two metrics.

The relationship between household income and home value wasn’t a strong enough predictor when analyzing individual data points. But when the entire distribution of home values was matched on a decile basis to the distribution of incomes, a significant relationship revealed itself. When both datasets are split into equal 10% parts, a linear regression model can be established for each matched pair of deciles. For example, the lowest 10% of home values are compared to the lowest 10% of incomes, and so on up to the highest deciles. This shows the relationship between household income and home value more effectively than traditional methods.

Through some trial and error, the UMN was able to use the decile-to-decile approach to establish a relationship that can be used across the country, not just in Minnesota. In practice, this relationship can be used to estimate income at the Census block level, when geomatched with local home assessment data. Using the 6% threshold for the amount of earnings a household can spend on energy costs before becoming overburdened, the research team was able to take their findings one step further. Solving for “amount of money spent on energy costs annually” in our original energy-burden equation under 6% energy burden and a given income, one can find the maximum amount of money a household is able to spend yearly before becoming overburdened. The graph below shows that, interestingly, different neighborhoods in Minneapolis have noticeably different annual energy budgets. See, for instance, that single-family homeowners in downtown and uptown communities can spend more on energy each year before being overburdened than the Powderhorn and Phillips communities. The same, though, might not be true for those in multifamily housing.

Chart of estimated annual energy budget for different Minneapolis communities and neighborhoods
Pictured: Estimated annual energy budget (maximum annual spending on energy costs before being overburdened) for different Minneapolis communities/neighborhoods. MF= Multi-Family Dwelling; SFA = Single-Family Attached Dwelling; SFD= Single-Family Detached Dwelling

The MBDH supported Malekpour and her team’s research in 2024. The team’s work has resulted in a methodology manuscript currently in submission. The publication will come up in a lookup table and can be used anywhere as long as there is assessor data available. The assessor data will serve as a broadly available source for home value in determining the relationship to household income. The team hopes to make their methodology publicly available, potentially changing the game for energy-assistance and home-upgrade programs seeking out families vulnerable to high energy costs in relation to their earnings.

Also in the works is an interactive geographic information system (GIS) interface that uses the methodology to convey household energy budgets on a regional or even more granular scale. The interface would allow individuals to contribute their own income, home-value, and energy-cost data anonymously to hone the model. The UMN team hopes to recruit graduate students to incorporate this voluntary data in the near future.

Get Involved/Learn More

Learn more about the UMN Center for Sustainable Building Research here.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Smart, Connected, & Resilient Communities

(Q)-Stabilizing the Ogallala Aquifer: Kansas’ Peer-to-Peer Learning Approach to Sustainable Irrigation

Written by MBDH

By Francie Fink

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

The Ogallala Aquifer is an incredible feat of nature—a fresh groundwater resource that underlies eight states, or 174,000 miles. The Ogallala contains sediments deposited by flowing water six million years ago. Water percolates through the layer of hardened sediments and settles, recharging the aquifer’s groundwater layer. Since the early 1900s, humans have tapped the Ogallala’s underground reserves for water. The aquifer has become in many ways the backbone of the High Plains, a subregion of America’s Great Plains. Kansas is one state that still relies heavily on the Ogallala’s water. The livelihood of those in Western Kansas, in particular, are tied to the aquifer, as most of Eastern Kansas uses surface water for agricultural practices.

Problems arise when the rate of water withdrawal from the aquifer exceeds the rate of its recharge. The “thickness”—that is, the level of water—of the aquifer varies geographically. In Kansas, water levels have dropped, on average, 28.2 feet since the mid-20th century. By 2100, 24% of Kansas’ land could run out of water entirely. It’s not so surprising, then, that perhaps no other user group is more concerned with the rate of water withdrawal from the Ogallala than farmers. In Kansas, it’s both folks who produce crops and folks who raise livestock that have a stake in the water-conservation effort. That’s because these two industries depend on each other. In plain terms, “cows need food to eat.” At the core of the Ogallala water-level issue is irrigation—the practice of watering crops—in this case, with groundwater. The more efficient a farmer’s use of water, the lower the rate of depletion. But regulations governing water in Kansas are complicated. Most notably, as per the state’s Water Appropriation Act, all farmers using water for irrigation are required by law to obtain a permit and report yearly water usage or else pay a hefty fine and perhaps forfeit their water allocations for the following year. In times where water is scarce, the more senior permit holders have first dibs on water.

The North Plains Groundwater Conservation District’s (NPGCD) Master Irrigator (MI) Program trains and educates producers on advanced conservation practices in irrigation. The program began in Texas and has since expanded to Oklahoma and Nebraska. The 32-hour curriculum of the full MI program focuses on water and energy conservation and doesn’t sacrifice producers’ goal of profit maximization. The blueprint of this program is well known to Kansas State University’s (K-State) Kansas Center for Agricultural Resources and the Environment (KCARE), where director Suzan Metzger and irrigation specialist Jonathan Aguilar have long sought a venue and curriculum that allows producers and processors to share regionally specific best practices for irrigation. But developing a Kansas-specific full MI Program requires extensive time and resources. The K-State team wanted to get the conversation started right away.

A working farm in western Kansas using recommended irrigation technology
Pivot nozzles used for water conservation in irrigation systems

Pictured Left: Field day in western Kansas, where the public was invited to visit a working farm to see recommended irrigation technology in practice. Photo Credit: Grace Roth, Kansas State University.
Pictured Right: Pivot nozzles used for water conservation in irrigation systems. Photo Credit: Grace Roth, Kansas State University.


Metzger’s team partnered with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) to develop their own program, called “Master Irrigator Lite.” This bite-sized, day-long event was introduced in February 2024 to (1) engage producers and processors in best-practice sharing for irrigation and (2) establish a steering committee to plan curriculum for future iterations of the MI Program in Kansas.

“MI Lite was intended to spur the interest of the producers. It was a shorter version of what the full program would be,” said Aguilar, Professor and Water Resource Engineer at Kansas State University. “We tried to understand what producers are doing already and asked what they would like to see if the full program was implemented in Kansas. Producers are eager to implement something similar to what other states are doing, but Kansas will have a slightly different flavor than other states, in part because we are so data rich.”

Participants and program staff spoke on lots of water-related topics at the MI Lite Program, but conversation centered around one particular water-conservation practice, called the “Q-stable approach” to irrigation. Remember how Kansas has so many regulations around agricultural water use? A benefit of that system, although it is complex, is that the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) uses data from mandated water meters to determine and map aquifer levels across the state. The KGS uses reported water usage to determine how far off a district, county, or township is, on average, from pumping water at a sustainable rate. That annual water usage that results in a sustainable pumping rate is called the Q-stable rate (in acre-feet per year). The methodology takes into account water inflows (recharging the aquifer) and outflows (pumping). Geographies are categorized as either above or below the Q-stable rate, and individual water usage can be benchmarked against the goal Q-stable rate for the next year. This evidence-based approach to water management is both effective and easy to adopt. While new water-saving nozzles and evaporation-reduction technology can be useful, it involves investment and substantial operational changes.

“The value that the Ogallala Aquifer has and continues to bring to all Kansans is unmeasurable,” says program participant and farmer, Brant Peterson. “For generations it has been the lifeblood of the economy as well as the people that drive the economy. We have a responsibility to our previous and future generations to make some changes to ensure the life of the aquifer.” Peterson continued, “The Kansas Master Irrigator Lite event I attended was exciting to see a regional group that was focused on coming up with workable solutions to conserve water and sustain economic viability for everyone.”

The MI Lite Program was a success, according to its participants and program coordinators. Twenty-two livestock and row-crop producers and processors from Western Kansas came for a full day of practice sharing, panel discussions, and networking. Several other regional partnerships were represented at the event, including the Kansas Geological Survey, Kansas Department of Agriculture, and Groundwater Management District 3. Overall, participants were energized by the peer learning. A post-event survey showed promising results for the continuation of this learning and practice sharing. All participants said that the event helped them to learn more about local hydrology and how water use impacts the Ogallala Aquifer, and 60% of participants indicated they were interested in serving on an advisory committee for the future of the MI Program in Kansas. The K-State team is now hoping to host a series of distinct workshops for farmers that will give them “microcredentials” in the Q-stable methodology and other water-conservation practices.

Learn More/Get Involved

Learn more about Kansas State’s Master Irrigator Lite Program here.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development, water

Sense South Bend: A City’s Campaign for Transparent Environmental Metrics

Written by MBDH

By Francie Fink

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

South Bend, Indiana, is starting to see the effects of climate change. In both 2016 and 2018, the city experienced devastating flooding that inundated roads and low-lying areas. According to the 2023 South Bend Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment, extreme heat days have steadily been increasing—with the average number of days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit projected to increase by at least 5 and at most 50 by mid-century. Most recently, though, wildfire smoke from hundreds of miles away quite literally turned the sky a different color, setting an eerie backdrop for South Bend residents struggling with respiratory issues and concern for the future of the air they breathe. Wildfire smoke and its visible threat highlighted other concerns: vehicle emissions on hot, sunny days increasing ozone levels and industrial processes releasing harmful particulate matter.

South Bend Climate Trends Snapshot
Pictured: South Bend Climate Trends Snapshot, South Bend Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment

The City of South Bend’s Department of Innovation and Technology and Office of Sustainability, whose missions involve improving residents’ access to technology and mobilizing residents to the climate emergency, became increasingly interested in initiating an environmental health campaign. The problem? City officials lacked real-time, hyperlocal data on air quality to inform public health interventions. Levels of primary pollutants, such as ozone and fine particulate matter, can vary substantially even within a city. This fact poses challenges for cities like South Bend, that rely on air quality readings from one state-owned regional environmental sensor. When identifying locations for cooling centers, for example, there are limited data to identify where extreme heat persists. Schools on one side of town might experience poorer air quality than those on the other on any given day and decide to postpone outdoor recess accordingly.

A new City campaign, called Sense South Bend, would accomplish three main goals:

  • • increase the collection of high-quality environmental data;
  • • inform the public on the availability of these data and actions to take during different air-quality levels;
  • • inform local public health and climate change interventions.

Alex Bazán, South Bend’s Director of Sustainability, says of the initiative “SenseSB provides on-the-ground data that will allow the City to develop policies and programming that equitably serve community members. It has provided opportunities to engage with residents and community partners to discuss air quality, climate change, and how as a community we can work together to improve quality of life.”

To obtain 24-hour air-quality readings at the neighborhood level, the City of South Bend partnered with TELLUS Networked Sensor Solutions. TELLUS’ wireless environmental sensors, when deployed, can measure over nine pollutants and related metrics. Analysis of these long-term data on particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, ambient temperature, and more will allow City of South Bend officials to determine priority geographies within city limits for public programming and infrastructure to address poor air quality and associated health concerns, such as asthma and heart disease. South Bend deployed 22 sensors on city-owned assets, across city limits, over the course of Spring 2024.

Perhaps most relevant to South Bend’s ultimate goal of providing easily digestible and high-quality air-quality readings to residents, however, is TELLUS’ AirView model, which reflects a real-time interpolation of sensors. The more sensors that are deployed, the better the interpolation. The end result is a color-coded map of city air quality, ranging from healthy to hazardous.

AirView interpolation of South Bend's air quality for a given day.
Pictured: AirView interpolation of South Bend’s air quality for a given day, accessible at southbendin.gov/air-quality.

Once South Bend obtained more accurate, geographically focused data, they needed a plan to make air-quality data accessible to the public. They also wanted accompanying guidance on actions to take during air-quality emergencies. Which groups are particularly vulnerable to poor air quality? What are easy actions to reduce air pollution? Are there thresholds for joining in outdoor activities during poor air-quality events? These remained complex questions with ambiguous answers.

The City of South Bend partnered with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) through its Community Development and Engagement Program to host a Graduate Environmental Health Fellow, who, over the course of the Spring 2024 Semester, gained learning experience in research, community engagement, and science communication while helping to build out the City of South Bend’s environmental sensing initiative, aptly named Sense South Bend: Air Quality.

Francie Fink, a Master of Public Affairs candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison concentrating in Energy Analysis and Policy, was onboarded as the City’s Environmental Health Fellow. From January through May 2024, she conducted research that ultimately informed the creation of a public-facing webpage and accompanying knowledge-based article, social media education campaign for air quality, and supplemental outreach materials for the Sense South Bend: Air Quality initiative.

“Working with the City of South Bend in this role was an incredible experience,” said Fink, “In March, I presented on Sense South Bend to the city’s Environmental Research Coalition, a group formed to strengthen the connection between community-based scientific research and local government. They were interested in how my research complemented ongoing City efforts.”

The MBDH also supported the professional development of Barbara Dale, Project Manager in South Bend’s Office of Sustainability. Barbara attended the Health Effects Institute’s Spring Conference and brought back important insights, which were incorporated into City messaging around air quality. An important one? Often, groups most vulnerable to poor air quality, such as communities living near highways and outdoor workers, don’t necessarily consider themselves sensitive.

Francie Fink, Environmental Health Fellow, at South Bend area's Bike to Work Week in May 2024.
Barbara Dale, Project Manager in South Bend's Office of Sustainability, at the Health Effect Institute's Spring Conference in Philadelphia in April 2024.

Pictured Left: Francie Fink, Environmental Health Fellow, tables for Sense South Bend at South Bend area’s Bike to Work Week in May 2024.
Pictured Right: Barbara Dale, Project Manager in South Bend’s Office of Sustainability, attends and represents South Bend at the Health Effect Institute’s Spring Conference in Philadelphia in April 2024.


The initiative’s webpage hosts the AirView map with the Environmental Health Fellow’s findings and recommended guidance based on the following air-quality levels: good to moderate, unhealthy, very unhealthy, and hazardous. The guidance outlines sensitive groups and checks on physical activity. For instance, for residents in orange zones on the map, the air quality is unhealthy and sensitive groups, such as those with heart/lung disease and pregnant women, should make outdoor activities short and easy, monitoring symptoms for shortness of breath and heart palpitations.

Sense South Bend: Air Quality will lay the foundation for additional environmental sensing initiatives in South Bend, like Sense South Bend: Water Quality and Sense South Bend: Mobility. Already, residents have interacted with the webpage and social media posts, sharing notices of days with poor air quality and engaging in discussion around the sources of air pollution. Some residents have even expressed interest in purchasing their own TELLUS air sensor, to help improve the network of publicly available sensors.

“As climate change intensifies the challenges of poor air quality and severe heat, real-time data from sensors across the community will help us to better serve our residents,” says Patrick McGuire, Technology Equity Manager for the City of South Bend. “We can empower residents to take informed precautions for their health and drive data-driven solutions for a more resilient city.”

Get Involved/Learn More

To learn more about the Sense South Bend: Air Quality initiative, visit https://southbendin.gov/air-quality/. For more information on the Air Quality Index and related health concerns, visit AirNow.gov at https://www.airnow.gov/air-quality-and-health/. If you are interested in contributing to the network of TELLUS environmental sensors by deploying your own device and making it publicly available, visit https://www.tellusensors.com/products/.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Smart, Connected, & Resilient Communities

Data Meets Art: Interactive Insights for Ohio at Midstory’s “Colors of Climate Change” Exhibit

Written by MBDH

By Francie Fink

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

For many Midwesterners, the impacts of climate change can feel distant, especially when compared to the more immediate threats faced by coastal regions. While Ohio may not experience the intensity of hurricanes in the Gulf, the future promises challenges like extreme heat and increased precipitation. Understanding these subtle, long-term effects often requires a closer look at data and long-term trends. And while you might not own a farming operation, your neighbors several miles south might. You wouldn’t have a way to know until seeing for yourself the trends in agricultural production over the past several decades.

Midstory, a Midwest nonprofit specializing in multimedia storytelling and research, set out to unpack trends and data addressing climate change for Ohio’s residents. The Midstory team is made up of data analysts, storytellers, and multimedia experts, all who know how to effectively communicate scientific information. Their portfolio of multimedia projects includes digital series and stories on everything from the local music scene to agriculture and homesteading in Ohio, and everything in between. They became interested in telling the story of Ohio’s changing climate in an effort to surface the gaps in information Ohio’s residents have on topics that everyone cares about, such as agriculture and air quality. Midstory embarked on a new initiative, Colors of Climate Change, to bring Ohio to the table in conversations around climate change.

Ohio’s diverse landscape is shaped by both its rural and urban populations. Home to 75,000 farms across 14 million acres and six cities with populations over 100,000, the state embodies a unique blend of lifestyles. This dynamic creates various social, political, and economic divides.

“We thought, how do we make the science or economics of climate change accessible to people? Not just accessible, but engaging,” Ruth Chang, creative director at Midstory, said.

To do this, they gathered quantitative data from various sources, including The University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University, alongside qualitative insights from interviews with policymakers, scientists, and farmers. This collaboration culminated in a permanent interactive digital series and a complementary data arts exhibit at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) partnered with Midstory to support program staff, fellows, and interns in the development of a six-part data storytelling series that explores, visualizes, and raises awareness of the current state of climate change in Ohio. The series, which included visualizations, audio episodes, and interactive maps, was a practice for Midstory in engaging with the public through a virtual medium. The team intentionally addressed six topics: (1) Ohio’s role in national climate conversations, (2) extreme weather, (3) public health, (4) agriculture, (5) economics, and (6) biodiversity.

Concept Board for the “Colors of Climate Change” exhibit
Exhibit displayed in the Toledo Lucas County Public Library gallery

Pictured: [Left] Concept Board for the Colors of Climate Change exhibit. QR codes displayed on the physical board directed visitors to additional information and graphics online. [Right] Exhibit displayed in the Toledo Lucas County Public Library gallery. Images courtesy of Midstory.

Data can be intimidating. In its raw form, it might contain hundreds of rows of information on a single topic: say, crop yield for corn, across tens of producers, for decades. Poring over these data, even in summarized form, can be tricky, and creating a cohesive narrative from it is even trickier. Marin Warshay, Editorial Fellow with Midstory, led the writing on this ambitious project and interviewed almost 50 individuals.

“There’s always this issue of explaining what you have learned, telling other people about it . . . but not many people teach you how to do that. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to have honed that skill. It’s been challenging but rewarding to put my own opinions aside and craft explainer-style stories from the data,” said Warshay of her involvement with Colors of Climate Change. Warshay went on to explain that while words matter, an important takeaway is that the science was already there: “The story was a way to explain the data, but the data can stand alone.”

From there, the Midstory team took on a new challenge: how to make the information viewable from a two-foot distance, accessible to all age groups and all levels of digital literacy. In Ohio, the effects of climate change will be felt disproportionately by marginalized and underserved communities. As part of Midstory’s online narrative outlines, for example, historically redlined communities in and around downtown Columbus will experience extreme heat more severely than surrounding areas. A key objective of the multipart project was to make the information available to all Ohioans. Even the location of the physical exhibit, the Main branch of Toledo’s library system, was intentionally selected to maximize accessibility.

The library exhibit, which ran from July to August 2024, was Midstory’s most extensive physical storytelling project to date. The Midstory team envisioned a space where art and science coalesced, transforming complex data into interactive experiences that drew in visitors from all demographics. The resulting exhibit exceeded the expectations of the Midstory team and project stakeholders alike. Visitors could engage with immersive installations, hands-on displays, and visual narratives. In one section of the exhibit, visitors heard a crack of thunder as they read about the increased frequency of storms expected in Ohio. In total, the exhibit featured over thirty 4′ × 8′ colorful boards that presented data, allowing guests to explore the impacts of climate change on agriculture, local ecosystems, water quality and availability, and public health. The exhibit fostered organic conversations among diverse groups, from students to farmers, creating a shared understanding of the critical issues at hand.

You can explore a 3D tour of the exhibit here.

Visitors interacting with the “Colors of Climate Change” exhibit
Pictured: Visitors interacting with the Colors of Climate Change exhibit. Image courtesy of Midstory.

“While media coverage often sparks nationwide conversations about climate change, we sometimes overlook how it directly impacts our local communities. When you walk into the exhibit, Ohio is the center of the story,” said Logan Sander, editorial director at Midstory.

On July 27, 2024, Midstory hosted a 200-person reception called “Climate In Context,” with a panel, community tabling session, structured time for exhibit interaction, and keynote speaker, featuring Pam Dempsey, program director of the Data-Driven Reporting Project at the Northwestern University Knight Lab.

July 27 panel discussion between a university professor, parks natural resources officer, and an Ohio farmer
Pictured: July 27 panel discussion between a university professor, parks natural resources officer, and an Ohio farmer. Image courtesy of Midstory.

The digital series and exhibit received high praise from community members and local organizations. The Colors of Climate Change digital content has reached nearly 50,000 individuals, and almost 2,000 individuals have interacted with the physical exhibit. Midstory is excited to continue the project with support from their local community foundation. The additional funding will allow them to create and produce two additional episodes in their digital series.

Learn More/Get Involved

Explore Midstory’s Colors of Climate Change digital series here. Learn more about Midstory’s other multimedia projects here.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Smart, Connected, & Resilient Communities

South Dakota Mines Students Help Collect Data for Missouri River Pipeline Study

Written by MBDH

By South Dakota Mines

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Annika Schooler, Ashley Walker, and Ava Knutson
South Dakota Mines students Annika Schooler, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student; Ashley Walker, atmospheric and environmental sciences; and Ava Knutson, civil engineering, collected and analyzed data from hundreds of smaller water systems as part of the larger Western Dakota Regional Water System Missouri River pipeline project.

A group of South Dakota Mines students spent several months collecting and analyzing data from hundreds of smaller water systems that will eventually connect to an extensive pipeline supplying water to most of western South Dakota.

The students worked with the team at Western Dakota Regional Water System (WDRWS), a nonprofit organization formed in 2021 to plan, construct, and manage the delivery of Missouri River water to communities, tribes, and other rural water systems throughout West River.

“This project is looking at the Missouri River water and making sure everybody has quality, abundant water no matter where they live in western South Dakota,” said Cheryl Chapman, Ph.D., WDRWS executive director.

The research opportunity was funded through Elevate Rapid City, thanks to funding from the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub, a network of people from academia, industry, government, and nonprofits focused on using data-driven approaches to address challenges facing science and society.

Taylor Davis, Elevate Rapid City’s senior workforce development and partnerships director, said the project-based learning experiences were open to students at higher-education institutions throughout Western South Dakota and across multiple disciplines.

“Among the five students, we had three different majors. That really provides a unique perspective,” Davis said. “These are real-world issues that these students are working on. They can apply what they learn in a classroom setting to practical application.”

The project involved research into the current water systems available throughout western South Dakota, said Annika Schooler, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student who worked on the WDRWS project. “We looked at how many systems there were, then ways in which these individual water systems could be combined into one greater system to conserve water and cost,” she said.

Piper Kocina and Molly Comfort
Piper Kocina and Molly Comfort

Schooler; Ashley Walker, atmospheric and environmental sciences major; Ava Knutson and Molly Comfort, both studying civil engineering; and Piper Kocina, geology major, worked closely with Chapman; Corey Chorne, an engineer with AE2S and program manager for the WDRWS engineering team; Mark Meyer, director of water for the state Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources; and Jennifer Sietsema, executive director for Black Hills Council for Local Governments.

“Our goal with this grant is a multidisciplinary approach to complex community problems,” Chapman said. “Part of what they have been involved with is understanding the governance structure we have for water at the state and local levels and then collecting and working with the data to understand what challenges exist.”

With the engineering team focusing on the larger water systems, the students broadened the project scope by researching the area’s smaller systems, Chorne said.

The next step is to pull the data and chemistries of the different water sources and make sure everything is compatible. “We need to do our due diligence to make sure the waters will behave together, and if they don’t then we will have to look at the treatment methods,” Chorne said.

Mines students have been invaluable to WDRWS, and the goal is to have them continue working on the large-scale water project even after graduation, Chorne said. “We are grateful to this local resource available to us so we can start building our team locally to work on this long term.”

Schooler said it was interesting to work on such an extensive project and understand all the background needed for the plan to move forward. “This was a great opportunity to meet and learn from some great professionals, learn about the water systems throughout western South Dakota, and figure out how we could solve problems in conserving water.”

Mines faculty and students have been involved with the Missouri River water study since 2017, when the West Dakota Water Development District commissioned a study with the university on the value of renewing its future use water permit. In 2019, Mines recommended renewal and further analysis on bringing the Missouri River water to western South Dakota.

blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development, water

MBDH Summer Workshops: Opening Doors to Data Science Education

Written by MBDH

By Ken Ogata

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Ferry on Lake Michigan.


As the ferry boat steadily cruised over Lake Michigan, it marked the halfway point of Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) Outreach and Engagement Specialist J.D. Graham’s journey, which spanned thousands of miles and multiple states. Throughout the summer of 2023, Graham helped organize and co-lead three data science education workshops, collaborating with colleges across the Midwest to inspire both students and educators alike. Each was funded, in part, by the MBDH Community Development and Engagement Program. The workshops aimed at educating students about data science, especially communities often left out of the gated walls of higher education.

Graham stresses the importance of being there in person, and not just working remotely from his home in Illinois. “It really does matter to be there. To see that institution, the academic culture, their leadership . . . make the little conversations with people you don’t even know,” Graham said. “But the moment I heard it could exist, I was super excited to be able to do that. I like to travel.”

Prior to his position at the MBDH, Graham worked as an educator for 21 years, gaining experience with students from elementary school through college. This included teaching at the elementary and secondary levels as well as being a life coach for high school and college students at Kankakee Community College’s Upward Bound program. There, Graham worked on programs preparing at-risk students for college, further expanding his knowledge of learners’ needs across educational stages. Graham states that this broad classroom experience across student populations came in handy when facilitating the recent data science workshops.

“I have 20-plus years of reading a classroom to know what confusion, exhaustion, frustration, and success looks like,” Graham said. “If you aren’t used to dealing with those age ranges, by the time they will tell you that they will be telling you in actions, not words.”

The first workshop was in partnership with Central Michigan University and local school districts, with the goal to raise awareness of data science as a career path, especially for students who had not been exposed to this field before. The workshop introduced the field of data science through activities with R software and analyzing real-life datasets. While data science may be an exciting topic for many, Graham and his team realized that teaching teens about it was a delicate process—one that required building relationships with the students and making sure that the pace was just the right speed.

“If you make it an exciting, entertaining version of science, then you can sneak in the more difficult and frustrating parts of science,” Graham said.

The process of building trust with the students was not limited to the classroom either.

“We actually drove to their homes to pick them up to bring them to school. And during those periods of time, it’s not silence. It’s chatter. It’s talk,” said Graham. “They’re looking for a connection and these are the openings you use to click with the kids.”

As an educator, Graham is more than aware of the hurdles that exist in higher education, especially those in minority communities. “Most of us probably experience imposter syndrome, but these students have it on level 10. The moment they step in, they feel like outsiders.”

For Graham and his team, it was not only crucial to let the students see data science as a possible future for them, but also higher education in general. Throughout the workshop, Graham and his team brought in university tour guides and a financial aid counselor to help introduce the students to federal financial aid through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form.

“It’s so important because this face-to-face connection with people is the true boots on the ground, it’s how you change ideas, and how you build memories and experiences that will last a lifetime,” Graham said. “It lowers those barriers of entry and allows them to know that this is an accessible institution, and it’s right here in my neighborhood.”

Road through the Countryside.


The second workshop, in collaboration with St. Catherine University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, shared a similar goal to the first workshop. The five-day-long STEM academy was on-site at St. Catherine University and helped middle school girls in the local community engage with science through coding, rocket experiments, and 3-D printers. But on top of the activities planned for the kids, the workshop aimed to bolster the idea of Women and Girls in STEM, and allow children to envision opportunities that seemed unattainable to them.

“Most of the students I talked to said over and over ‘I just didn’t even know this existed or that this was a possibility,’” Graham said. “Allowing them to dream, to imagine themselves there. Maybe it’s not going to be in data science. But now it brings in whole new areas of study they’ve never even considered.”

A third MBDH workshop, the Workshop on Data for Good for Education (D4G4ED), was in collaboration with Trinity Christian College near Chicago and was primarily for educators and graduate students interested in exchanging ideas regarding teaching practices about data.

“Part of my job was to find people who not only cared about social good, and how to teach social good, but I also wanted to bring together a unique group of people with diverse backgrounds, so that they could learn from each other . . . to meet with professionals and passionate thinkers who they’d never have the chance to collaborate with on their own,” Graham said. He added, “Where else could a graduate student, a professor of Africana Studies, a virtual data viz instructor, and a data manager for the Department of Defense all meet up and discuss teaching data science for social good?”

The D4G4ED workshop was not only a place for educators alike to interact with each other and share ideas, but also aimed to challenge stereotypes and barriers that exist in certain fields of study in higher education. For Graham and his team, it was imperative that the workshop was not closed off to people who felt like they lacked the technical skills for data-related education, but to unite people under the idea of data science.

“[The] program was all about getting these diverse individuals whose communities, probably more than most, care about social causes and show them that data science can be used to promote and amplify those causes that they care about,” Graham said.

Graham also mentioned that the workshop was a great way to build relationships with his peers and noted how the workshops led to personal growth for him as well.

“Whenever I get to meet new people, whether it be professional or social, it allows me to get to see new tools and how they’re used, so I can incorporate them into my toolbox,” Graham said. “Meeting new educators, you learn new techniques, but just as importantly: meeting new students from new backgrounds. With different life experiences, I have learned so much from them as well.”

Through these workshops, Graham worked to demystify higher education and the field of data science. Graham’s work echoes the need for continued work towards breaking down the barriers that prevent many underrepresented groups from participating in academia.

Get Involved

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or data science education projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities, including our Data Science Student Groups Community webinar series.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development

Workshop on Data for Good for Education for Faculty Opens for Registration

Written by MBDH

By Aisha Tepede

The continued growth of the Data for Social Good (DSG) movement provides an opportunity to increase student motivation and persistence within courses and degrees in data science. To help accelerate faculty use of data for good projects in courses, the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) is hosting a free workshop in partnership with Trinity Christian College on June 2–3 near Chicago. Some travel support is available, including for early-career faculty and those from primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) and minority-serving institutions (MSIs).

The Workshop on Data for Good for Education (D4G4ED) aims to provide professional development opportunities for instructors seeking to engage their students through meaningful social good projects within a classroom setting and to learn about the latest developments in this field.

The workshop is meant to inspire, educate, and most importantly, allow faculty to share and prepare materials for use within their teaching context. The workshop will support faculty in developing their teaching to better incorporate the DSG movement, which provides a natural connection to relevance with grassroots-level improvements in our society while promoting the broad applicability of data science. This important component of increasing persistence and success for our current generation of students is connecting their coursework to meaningful change or outcomes.

The workshop aims to create networking opportunities for students, faculty, schools, and social good organizations, relating to nonprofits and governments with data science and analytics needs. This event facilitates a venue for sharing successes from projects and courses that use DSG while acting as an onboarding and support platform for faculty and schools interested in including DSG within their schools.

The two-day workshop will consist of facilitated sessions to highlight existing teaching practices around data for good, including Plenary Talks, structured workshop sessions, a “Marketplace of Ideas and Innovations,” group working time, and a networking session.

Guest speakers at the workshop include Dr. Dharma Dailey from the eScience Institute at the University of Washington and Dr. Richard Blumenthal from the Computer and Cyber Sciences Department at Regis University. Each speaker has a unique background surrounding data-intensive research and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Drs. Dailey and Blumenthal will be leading workshop sessions on embedding DSG activities in course curricula, and how to engage with external clients to develop real-world projects that are appropriately scoped for student work. The speakers and the workshop session aim to increase knowledge and interest in research, social good, and curricular-innovation goals.

This workshop is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through the MBDH Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program, through a proposal developed by Karl Schmitt, Data Analytics Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Data Analytics at Trinity Christian College.

Get Involved

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or data science education projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development, news

Building hands-on data science skills with the Midwest Carpentries Community

Written by MBDH

By Aisha Tepede

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Science relies more and more on software and computing technologies, but researchers often don’t receive the training they need to effectively use these tools. A worldwide organization called The Carpentries is trying to help with hands-on training that is developed and taught by a community of volunteer experts.

Since 2012, the organization has run 3,799 workshops in 68 countries and trained 4,108 instructors. Moreover, they have had the ability to deliver 35 collaboratively developed, open lessons to 95,000 novice learners for at least 110 member sites. The organization has since been a pillar for a global and inclusive community in order to provide and teach coding and data skills. The Carpentries clusters its instructional content into three brands: Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry.

To build the community at local and regional levels, The Carpentries are helping to facilitate subgroups in geographic areas. The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) co-leads the Midwest Carpentries Community (MCC), which is open to all in the 12-state region, regardless of institutional affiliation.

The MCC began as a proposal from Dr. Sarah Stevens at the University of Wisconsin to the MBDH Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program, which incubates new community initiatives.

Through monthly meetings and other activities, MBDH and the MCC members showcase The Carpentries instructors and best practices at academic institutions and other organizations, and provide a welcoming venue to develop collaborative efforts toward building regional capacity for The Carpentries instructors at smaller and underresourced institutions in 12 Midwest states.

The MCC strives to foster a community of practice to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration. It will be developing a centralized website to coordinate trainings and subject-matter workshops, and will be using mentoring programs to empower community members to act as hosts and instructors. The organization provides an interpersonal network through connections with other institutions, both domestically and internationally. Sarah Stevens stated,

“The project aims to build ‘hands-on data science instruction capacity,’ by using the existing curriculum and workshop model of The Carpentries, which includes communities of instructors, trainers, maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.”

“Our partnership with Sarah and the University of Wisconsin has been very successful,” said John MacMullen, Executive Director of the MBDH. “In 2023, we plan to continue our monthly community calls as a part of The Carpentries new regional communities initiative. We will also open our Carpentries membership to underresourced institutions that want to train new instructors and establish new Carpentries activities.”

The MCC meets on the last Monday of each month. The Carpentries also has a Slack community that features a Midwest community channel for ongoing discussions and networking.

Get Involved

The MCC is supported by the National Science Foundation through the MBDH Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or data science education projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development

Building a Climate Asset Map with the Midwest Climate Collaborative

Written by MBDH

By Sasha Zvenigorodsky

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Climate change—two words that have become increasingly popular throughout the scientific community as the world begins to see its destructive impacts across the globe. Though the rise in climate concerns for the future may appear to be a source of fear and uncertainty, many scholars, researchers, and academic organizations have regarded it as more of a call to action. This is where the Midwest Climate Collaborative (MCC) comes in.

Midwest Climate Collaborative Logo

The Midwest Climate Collaborative is headquartered at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, directed by Heather D. Navarro. This program is exclusive to a 12-state region in the Midwest and serves as a coordinating group for cross-sector responses to the ongoing climate crisis, with the objective of spreading knowledge about the issue as well as encouraging leadership and cross collaboration between various organizations to address the problem.

The MCC is a relatively new organization that was launched following the conclusion of a Think Tank series that was centered around outreach and engagement for climate action. By the end of the series, it was apparent that there is a plethora of great climate work being done across different institutions throughout the Midwest. Despite this, there are issues in their ability to connect and achieve collective success. Thus, participating Think Tank partners came together to craft strategies and objectives for the MCC, which was ultimately launched in January of 2022.

Throughout this past year, the MCC has established a variety of different strategic projects. One, launched in collaboration with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH), is called the Climate Asset Map (CAM). This project has a goal of helping audiences such as researchers, practitioners, and community groups to easily access and contribute to climate action information that already exists in the region.

Currently, many governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) local to the Midwest have limited resources to find and implement the latest climate research. The CAM serves to bridge this gap via an online, user-friendly interface. The assets of CAM could include data sets, research labs, training programs, and more. “Above all, I want this project to encourage people to invest in the Midwest,” says MCC Executive Director Heather Navarro.

As of now, the CAM group is moving forward in conducting a needs assessment survey with the help of a funded partnership with the MBDH. The needs assessment survey will help with the development of the CAM by determining which resources would be most beneficial for potential users to achieve success within their climate work. The survey results will be shared at the Midwest Climate Summit in February 2023, and will be distributed electronically over email and social media.

Although the fight against climate change is not an easy one, the MCC has worked as a catalyst to create a strong, interconnected Midwest region, which will certainly make it easier.

Get Involved

Contact the MBDH if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Smart, Connected, & Resilient Communities, water

MBDH Partners on New Data Science Workshop for Underrepresented High School Students

Written by MBDH

By Aisha Tepede

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Deciding what to do after high school can be overwhelming. There are various academic and career options that are provided but many students may feel uncertain and unprepared to make those big decisions. In central Michigan, high school students from several rural towns have the opportunity to learn about data science concepts for future careers at a summer workshop cosponsored by Central Michigan University and the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH).

Central Michigan University (CMU) holds inclusivity as core to its mission. According to the CMU mission, vision and values site, the institution prides itself on inclusion, and the student body and faculty “thrive on student-centered education and fostering personal and intellectual growth to prepare students for productive careers, meaningful lives, and responsible citizenship in a global society.”

The university’s dedication to growth goes beyond its current students and into its larger local community. With the institution having a strong and historic relationship with the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, the partnership allows for the advancement and improvement of community members’ quality of life. With Native Americans being underrepresented at major points in the academic data science pipeline, it speaks volumes that the university is seeking collaboration to engage with high school students early in their career planning and help them understand potential career paths in data science.

Mohamed Amezziane
Mohamed Amezziane

After seeing the lack of programming geared toward at-risk high school students in the community, CMU faculty members, Dr. John E. Daniels and Dr. Mohamed Amezziane developed a proposal to create a data science workshop for high school students from underrepresented and tribal communities. Daniels and Amezziane stated, “We wish to target students who are unsure about their future but might not be considering college due to financial issues or uncertainty in a major. Often, these students come from underrepresented groups and are overlooked as potential university students.”

With support from the MBDH, CMU will partner with several high schools in rural central Michigan to offer a 5-day summer workshop at CMU, introducing approximately 35 rural and underrepresented high school students to data science. Participants, including student members of the local Ojibwa Tribe, will be recruited with the support and recommendations of their local high schools.

Upon completion of the workshop, students will be more familiar with data science, will analyze data using open-source statistical software (R), and will learn how to prepare and give a professional presentation summarizing their assigned research project. The context of the assigned learning modules and project will be on making healthy lifestyle choices (nutrition, alcohol/drugs). Data used in the workshop will come from selected sources, such as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). According to the website, NHANES is a resource that consists of demographic, socioeconomic, dietary, and health-related questions designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States.

Central Michigan University’s Data Science program was started 18 months ago and is attempting to generate interest among the local student population. The flexibility and versatility of data science provide an opportunity to attract and recruit students who might not fit the typical college-prep template. Not only does the program hope to foster students’ interest in data science but the CMU Admissions staff will also offer assistance to students on how to apply to data science programs, fill out Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) financial aid forms, and address possible application barriers that would prevent students from completing a successful admission application.

Through best practices and student feedback from this 5-day program being evaluated, there are plans to make this a yearly event. Overall, the university hopes to see an increase in the number of students pursuing Data Science as a major at CMU or other regional colleges and universities. In addition, by personalizing the data sets, Daniels believes the students will connect how using statistical software could be used to make better decisions in their own lives.

John Daniels
John E. Daniels

Our workshop will focus on making healthy lifestyle choices,” Daniels said. “Instead of preaching about smoking, drinking, or texting while driving, we hope to use data science as a vehicle to demonstrate the consequences of one’s lifestyle choices and at the same time learn about all of the tools and techniques data science has to offer. The methods we will be teaching can be applied to a variety of research questions and data sets. Perhaps this will inspire some students to recognize the value of data science and to pursue it in higher education.”




Joseph (Jeff) Inungu
Joseph (Jeff) Inungu

Dr. Jeff Inungu, CMU Professor and Director of the Master of Public Health Program, believes that by using the lens of public health and data science, “Experience and integrative learning offer students opportunities to gain skills that are highly desirable and prepare them to become leaders who are able to meet the ever-changing challenges of promoting, protecting, and enhancing the health of vulnerable communities.”

Regarding the long-term goals for the workshop, Daniels says, “Overall, the program will continue to focus on data science, reinforce the healthy lifestyle context, and gradually increase the number of workshop participants. The desired outcome is a steady increase in data science majors in our geographic area.”

When the workshop concludes, the team will work with the MBDH to assess the impact of the project and make resources available for faculty at other institutions to use in developing similar events on their campuses.

Get Involved

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation through the MBDH Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Contact the MBDH to learn more, or if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here. We invite participation in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development, Smart, Connected, & Resilient Communities

MBDH Learning Innovation Fellows Program Builds on Success with Second Cohort

Written by MBDH

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub and the Gala Sustainability Learning Initiative at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability continue to build on the success of last year’s Learning Innovation Fellows pilot program with a second cohort of fellows. The student fellows, hailing from a range of midwestern institutions, work with faculty advisors at the intersections of the Midwest Hub’s “Cyberinfrastructure and Data Sharing” and “Data Science Education and Workforce Development” themes. The program brings together data science and sustainability, delivering open-access, data-enriched learning tools on the Gala platform, along with experiences and mentoring for student fellows.

Teams

Alternative Transportation Scenarios
Shanshan (Shirley) Liu

Shanshan (Shirley) Liu (Student Fellow) is a PhD student from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include transportation electrification policy and planning, sustainable transportation systems, and transportation energy. Shirley’s project is based around Shelie Miller’s case study, Assembling Our Transportation Future, which asks readers to think about transportation policy hinge points in American history. She is using Python to create tools that allow students to analyze scenarios of alternative vehicle adoption and evaluate them from the perspective of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Shelie Miller

Shelie Miller (Faculty Advisor) is a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Her research uses life-cycle assessment and scenario modeling to identify environmental problems before they occur. Miller’s research group works on a variety of energy-related topics, including the energy-water nexus, bioenergy, refrigeration in the food system, and autonomous vehicles.





Modeling Rainforest Carbon Cycling
Anneke van Oosterom

Anneke van Oosterom (Student Fellow) is a sophomore double majoring in biology and data science at St. Catherine University. She is currently involved with the biology department at St. Kate’s through the Biology Club and as a microbiology lab prep assistant. Through the fellowship she is creating a systems model using the Insight Maker modeling tool to demonstrate carbon cycling in tropical rainforests for Ann Russell’s forthcoming case Healing the Scars: Tropical Rainforest Carbon Cycling (developed through the OCELOTS network for tropical ecology).

Ann Russell

Ann Russell (Faculty Advisor) is a terrestrial ecosystems ecologist at Iowa State University, with special expertise in the biogeochemistry of tropical and managed ecosystems. Her research addresses links between traits of plant species and ecosystem processes, focusing on species and management effects on belowground processes, and subsequent implications for human impacts on soil fertility and carbon sequestration. Her research is designed to enhance our understanding of human impacts on the biosphere, improve biogeochemical models, and help guide selection of species for sustainable management of agroecosystems.


Scenario Planning for the Rouge River
Julie Arbit

Julie Arbit (Student Fellow) is in her final semester as an environmental policy and planning student within the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan (UM). She works as a research associate for the Center for Social Solutions at UM, where her main project focuses on equity in flood risk, response, and recovery. Julie is using ArcGis Online and Python to create scenario planning tools for the case The Rouge River: Redlining, Riverbanks, and Restoration in Metro Detroit.


Perrin Selcer

Perrin Selcer (Faculty Advisor) is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan Department of History. He works at the intersection of environmental history, history of science, and international relations.







Accessible Data Science Tools for Water Utilities
Thien Nguyen

Thien Nguyen (Student Fellow) is a second-year computer science undergraduate and sustainability enthusiast at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). He has previously worked with UMN’s Institute on the Environment, writing geospatial analysis algorithms in Google Earth Engine to observe soil degradation in Senegal’s Peanut Basin. Thien is working with PhD student Matt Vedrin to create tools for a PIT-UN funded collaboration working to help classrooms, communities, and workforces confront challenges in the monitoring and improvement of drinking water distribution systems.

Lutgarde Raskin

Lutgarde Raskin (Faculty Advisor) is a professor at the University of Michigan School for Civil & Environmental Engineering. She works to rethink engineered systems to better harness the power of microorganisms to treat water and recover resources from waste streams. Dr. Raskin and her team work to understand and improve various aspects of the engineered water cycle microbiome to improve human health using sustainable design approaches, with a focus on biofiltration, disinfection, distribution, and building plumbing biostability.



Get involved

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the MBDH Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

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New MBDH Community Development and Engagement partners

Written by MBDH

By Qining Wang

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) recently partnered with multiple institutions in the region for new data science activities under its Community Development and Engagement Program. This program incubates new projects and provides support to help them grow.

In the last proposal cycle, the MBDH Seed Fund Steering Committee selected three projects to support, led by the Tribal Nations Research Group (TNRG), St. Catherine University, and Trinity Christian College.

TNRG Digital Agriculture Meeting

The TNRG, together with the University of North Dakota and Grand Farm/Emerging Prairie, will host a one-day workshop in 2022, at the Microsoft Business Center in Fargo, North Dakota. This workshop will connect tribal colleges and universities working with their local tribal governments to extend digital agriculture and educational opportunities to Native farmers.

Approximately 30% of the nation’s Native population and 20 of the 37 of the nation’s tribal colleges and universities are located in the MBDH service area. Because of this, the MBDH is well-positioned to engage tribal stakeholders on issues related to Data Science Education and Workforce Development. This is especially true in the context of Digital Agriculture, where many of these institutions are working with their local tribal governments to extend agricultural programs and educational opportunities to Native farmers.

Tribal communities have not had the dedicated capital for building a resilient and sustainable infrastructure for harnessing food on their lands for a long time. The lack of such infrastructure creates food insecurity that can be detrimental to Indigenous peoples. In addition, due to climate change, it is crucial to build sustainable farming practices that can provide sufficient food and preserve the ecosystem everywhere in the long run.

One way to realize optimal farming practices is to incorporate digital agriculture, which integrates digital technologies into crops and livestock management. Technologies such as machine learning and big data analysis tools can improve agricultural production while minimizing the harm to the ecosystem. For instance, by correlating multiple parameters related to crop growth using machine learning, farmers can better predict crop yield based on other parameters such as nutrients in the soil, weather, and fertilization. Those technologies can therefore make information on ecosystems, crops, and animals more findable and interpretable to farmers.

However, implementing digital agriculture on tribal lands involves extra layers of nuance. Data scientists and agricultural experts must conduct digital agriculture research in tribal regions under proper data sovereignty standards, such as the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Indigenous peoples are entitled to know what data is collected and how data scientists use and analyze their data. The data should enable Indigenous peoples to derive benefit from any fruits of the research involving tribal communities.

This workshop will serve to increase the accessibility of digital agriculture in Native communities, emphasizing respecting the culture, traditions, and sovereignty of the Native people. In addition, this workshop will enlist more tribal stakeholders nationwide for broader engagement in digital agriculture, potentially developing a Data Science Workforce Development and Education proposal for Native communities. Anita Frederick, the President of TNRG, will lead this workshop and present the importance of Data Management and Data Sovereignty.

“Outreach to Indian tribes is often difficult for non-tribal entities and individuals,” Frederick said. “As a direct result, tribal populations are often left out of initiatives that could help to address some of the economic, health, and other societal conditions that tribes face. Clearly, American Indian citizens must have access to the opportunities envisioned in the Big Data Revolution. The proposed project is a first step in helping to close the growing Big Data gap that is emerging between Indian country and the rest of the nation.”

St. Catherine Data Science Boot Camp

MBDH will also support a data science program “created by women for women” at St. Catherine University (aka St. Kate’s), one of the USA’s largest private women’s universities, located in St. Paul, Minnesota. This program aims to cultivate a new generation of women and historically underrepresented data scientists. In addition to teaching data science and data analytic principles, this program will also raise students’ awareness of using data science in ethically, socially, and environmentally just ways.

Introduced in the fall semester of 2018, the data science program at St. Kate’s reaches both current and prospective students of the University. Monica Brown, the Mary T. Hill Director of Data Science at St. Kate’s, will lead the program’s two initiatives in 2021-2022. Working alongside her colleagues at St. Kate’s for over 13 years, Brown aspires to make data science and data analytics principles accessible to every student in the St. Kate’s community.

Brown will launch a one-week Data Science Boot Camp in the summer of 2022. This boot camp will provide hands-on coding experience to middle- and high-school students, particularly those historically excluded from data science. In addition, Brown will invite data science professionals to speak about future career opportunities. Overall, this program aims to enable younger students to envision themselves as future data scientists and to elicit their passion for coding and data science. The lessons learned organizing this event will be shared with others who wish to do so with their own student populations.

“St. Kate’s is grateful for the partnership with MBDH towards the support of a boot camp,” said Brown. “We very much look forward to bringing younger students onto our campus to encourage and empower them through data science activities.”

Trinity Data Science for Social Good Workshop

The third project to be incubated under the MBDH’s Community Development and Engagement program will be an annual workshop and conference on Teaching with Data for Social Good (DSG) in summer 2022. DSG addresses the importance of teaching data science for positive social impact, and this conference serves as an opportunity that encourages teaching faculty to include DSG in their curricula proactively.

Trinity Christian College, a faith-based institution located on the outskirts of Chicago, will host this meeting. The workshop chair will be Dr. Karl Schmitt, an assistant professor in the Data Analytics department at Trinity and the coordinator of the Data Analytics program.

The meeting format resembles that of regional professional society meetings, consisting of a workshop, keynotes, and contributed talks. To provide more practical assistance to teaching faculty incorporating DSG, faculty will directly generate teaching materials that include DSG in the primary workshop sessions. Additionally, faculty will also have a chance to practice teaching DSG by actively advising student teams participating in a colocated datathon. In this student competition, student teams will use data science to solve practical problems.

“An important component of increasing persistence and success for our current generation of students is connecting their coursework to meaningful change or outcomes,” Schmitt said. “Through the Workshop on Data for Good in Education, the MBDH will be supporting faculty in developing their teaching to better incorporate the Data for Social Good (DSG) movement. This provides a natural connection to relevance with grass-roots level improvements in our society while promoting the broad applicability of data science.”

Beyond these outcomes, Schmitt said, “the workshop will be a professional development opportunity for all instructors seeking to more deeply engage their students through meaningful social good projects within a classroom setting. It will inspire, educate, and most importantly, allow faculty the chance to share, and prepare, materials for use within their own teaching context.”

Get involved

Learn more about other Community Development and Engagement partnerships, and contact the MBDH if you have an idea for a project to help build the data science community in the Midwest.

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in any of our community-led Priority Areas. The MBDH has a variety of ways to get involved with our community and activities.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

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Building a Midwest Carpentries Community

Written by MBDH

By Raleigh Butler

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is committed to building data science instructional capacity in the Midwest region, particularly at smaller colleges and universities, such as predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs).

One avenue for this is the Midwest Carpentries Community, a partnership between the MBDH and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the Hub’s Community Development and Engagement (CDE) incubator program.

The project aims to build “hands-on data science instruction capacity,” by using the existing curriculum and workshop model of The Carpentries, an international member-supported organization that strives to teach data science and coding skills on a global scale. The organization is structured around three lesson programs: Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry, which are “communities of Instructors, Trainers, Maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.”

In this post, we will focus on a discussion with Sarah Stevens, who leads the Midwest Carpentries Community. Stevens is a 2021 member of the Executive Council for The Carpentries. She is also a Data Science Facilitator at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in the Data Science Hub within the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and American Family Insurance Data Science Institute.

How did you get involved with The Carpentries?
“I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois. My degree was in molecular and cellular biology, but I did a minor in informatics. And when I came to graduate school, I found that none of my classmates had done any coding and they didn’t know computation. And almost all of them had to learn how to do some computational analysis over the course of grad school. So to help support [them], I started a community of practice around helping each other with our computational needs and learning from one another. I was trying to bring people together not just to discuss the biology in our research, but actually the computation in our research, and in doing so I also got connected with The Carpentries community. There’s been an ongoing Carpentries community since long before my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And my advisor recommended ‘maybe you should sign up for instructor training so you can learn how to teach these things better.’”

What are some of the main projects you’ve worked on during your time there, specifically in the Midwest?
“I’ve been trying to bring together researchers in the Midwest who are either running Carpentries communities of their own or want to get started with Carpentries communities. We’ve been hosting a monthly call to bring those people together to help each other, similar to the community of practice I started in grad school. I’d say probably instructor training is one of the things that I find the most useful and interesting in The Carpentries. I think it’s really cool to talk to other instructors about how to teach, and how to teach using evidence-based research, and how to teach computational skills and learn from one another.”

What are some of the skills that people develop in Carpentries workshops?
“They [the learners] come to learn R, Python, the Unix shell, and Git, but what I really want them to get is a foundation where they believe that they can learn more. I feel like a lot of people come to our workshops feeling like computing and technology is not for them. Maybe they’ve even had bad experiences trying to learn coding in the past. What I really want people to learn and come away with from our workshops is that they can learn this.”

What has been different about doing Carpentries-related activities specifically during the pandemic?
“Moving online has its own challenges. Being a part of a community of instructors, who are also all dealing with this transition to online at the same time, I got to learn a lot from what other people did and how it worked for them. So, as a community, we were able to share tips and tricks and best practices for moving online and learn from one another. That’s really one of the things I love most about The Carpentries community is being able to benefit from other instructors’ experiences.”

“I will say the worst part about moving online is that while I totally respect folks not turning on their video, it’s a little less rewarding to teach to a screen. You do get feedback, like the sticky note feedback we collect in Google forms and people typing in chat, ‘this was a great workshop.’ But you don’t get to see them actually overcome that boundary of ‘I didn’t think I could do it—and I can do it now or this makes sense to me suddenly.’ And so it’s a little less rewarding to teach online, I will say, but I do feel like it’s been a good learning experience of having to pivot and practice these skills in a different way of teaching and checking in with learners.”

You proposed the Midwest Carpentries Community project for the MBDH CDE program—what did you perceive as the need for that?
“I’m seeing communities start to form in other places across the world. And I think it’s really great for creating new Carpentry communities and teaching these important skills across the globe. I was running into people from other institutions who had interacted with The Carpentries in some way. I wanted to be able to share my experience with The Carpentries like at UW–Madison; what works well with the UW–Madison Carpentries community, with other folks in the Midwest and working to learn from them as well.”

“So, what works well at Illinois, what are they doing that we can learn from? Are they creating new workshops that we too could use? That’s where I saw the need—I wanted to be able to support these new instructors and new communities that we’re developing in the Midwest, and learn from the existing communities that have been teaching Carpentries workshops for a while and doing new and interesting things.”

What would you say to someone new to The Carpentries world about why it’s valuable to participate in the community beyond attending a workshop?
In addition to offering the teaching of various skills, Stevens says “I think it’s really valuable. There’s so many things you get from it, you learn a lot about building an inclusive community as that is a big part of the Carpentry community.”

She adds, “I see a lot of networking—developing an interpersonal network and being able to find employment in the future is also a benefit of this, but you make connections with other institutions and learn from them and other organizations across the globe, really, and so it’s a great opportunity to learn from others, not just being in the workshop, but observing other people in our community and their activities they’re up to.”

Get involved

Contact the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub if you’re aware of other people or projects we should profile here, or to participate in our activities, which include a data science student community and the national BD Hubs monthly webinar on data science education and workforce development.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub is an NSF-funded partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and is focused on developing collaborations in the 12-state Midwest region. Learn more about the national NSF Big Data Hubs community.

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MBDH Learning Innovation Fellows program – first cohort projects

Written by MBDH

This story is part of a series on partnerships developed by the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub with institutions across the Midwest through the Community Development and Engagement (CDE) Program.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub Learning Innovation Fellows Program, housed at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, enables teams to form for work toward better understanding of the intersections of the Hub’s “Cyberinfrastructure and Data Sharing” and “Data Science Education and Workforce Development” themes.

Our fellows work with faculty and teaching staff to create innovative interactive data analysis activities that can nest within sustainability science case studies. They design, prototype, and pilot these features in classrooms within the MBDH network. The program leverages talent and resources from two existing, open-source science learning environments. Gala (www.learngala.com) is a community-based, responsively designed sustainability science learning environment. Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBESHub, or Qu) is a virtual center for faculty development and open educational resource sharing (https://qubeshub.org) that has had long-term support from NSF, formalizing and professionalizing open educational resources.

Through a series of virtual “Networkshops,” we connect undergraduate data science majors, graduate/professional students, faculty, and professionals. We can thus be inclusive, incorporating into classrooms problem-driven, data-rich material that speaks to lived infrastructural and environmental challenges from a range of communities across our region, and beyond. The team includes the following:

Leadership—

Rebecca Hardin (PI) is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (UMSEAS), where she leads collaborations on the open-source, open-access learning platform Gala (www.learngala.com) and research group on Digital Justice. Rebecca also coordinates the Environmental Justice Field of Specialization and related Certificate program at UMSEAS.



Ann E. Russell (Co-PI) is an ecosystems ecologist, with special expertise in the biogeochemistry of tropical ecosystems. She is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University, and PI of the NSF Research Collaborative network ALIVE: Authentic Learning in Virtual Environments.





M. Drew Lamar (Co-PI) is a mathematician and Associate Professor of Biology at William & Mary. His teaching and research are highly interdisciplinary in nature, using techniques and concepts from mathematics, statistics, biology, and computational sciences. Drew is Co-PI and Director of Cyberinfrastructure for the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) virtual center, with an interest and passion in open-source software development, quantitative biology education, and development of education gateways.

Ed Waisanen (Program Manager) is Program and Platform Lead for Gala (learngala.com). He has a master’s degree in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan, with a focus in Environmental Informatics and a background in multimedia production. Ed is focused on developing tools and communities that emphasize curation, open exchange, and narrative approaches to deepen learning.





Teams—

Data Learning for Restoration Ecology

Kyra Hull (Fellow) is a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a first-year graduate student at Grand Valley State University, studying Biostatistics. Kyra is working on the following case about forest restoration, which is bilingual (Spanish and English versions): https://www.learngala.com/cases/a3224235-cdc0-44fc-a98b-46735dfef6c9




Karen Holl (Faculty Advisor) is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on understanding how local and landscape-scale processes affect ecosystem recovery from human disturbance and using this information to restore damaged ecosystems. She advises numerous public and private agencies on land management and restoration; recently, she has been working to improve outcomes of the effort of the many large-scale tree-growing campaigns.




Data Learning to Address Groundwater Contamination

Saba Ibraheem (Fellow) is a second-year Health Informatics student at the University of Michigan, focusing on data analytics and research in health care. Saba is working on the following case, which is bilingual (English and French versions): https://www.learngala.com/cases/dioxane-plume





Rita Loch-Caruso (Faculty Advisor) is a toxicologist in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, with a research focus in female reproductive toxicology and, in particular, mechanisms of toxicity related to adverse pregnancy outcomes such as premature birth.





Alan Burton (Faculty Advisor) is a Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on sediment and stormwater contaminants and understanding contaminant bioavailability processes, effects, and ecological risk at multiple trophic levels. He is also a specialist in ranking stressor importance in human-dominated watersheds and coastal areas.





Data Learning in Livestock Ecologies

Daniel Iddrisu (Fellow) is a second-year student in Masters in International and Regional Studies, with a specialization in Africa, at the University of Michigan. He earned a BA degree in Integrated Community Development from the University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana. His research focuses on health, development, gender, and environmental health. The case he is working on takes place on the Greek Island of Naxos, but comprises skills for modeling and analyzing human/livestock interactions more broadly: https://www.learngala.com/cases/livestock-grazing

Johannes Foufopoulos (Faculty Advisor) is an Associate Professor at University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, who focuses his lab research on fundamental conservation biology questions and on issues related to the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. Major research projects examine how habitat fragmentation, invasive organisms, and global climate change result in species extinction.





Data Learning on Safari

Rahul Agrawal Bejarano (Fellow) has a background in computer science and he is currently working on a master’s degree at the University of Michigan School of Environment and Sustainability, with a concentration in Sustainable Systems. Rahul uses data from a diverse range of sources to shed light on today’s environmental challenges and develop innovative solutions, and is working on identifying climate-related vulnerabilities to our supply chains. He is working on this case, about the interactions of various wildlife species in the Serengeti: https://www.learngala.com/magic_link?key=oOTYOXyDRpmY_yM4AFlnXQ


Charles Willis (Faculty Advisor) is a Teaching Assistant Professor, Biology Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota. He is currently interested in the research and development of pedagogy practices for non-major biology students. In particular, he is focused on studying student-student and instructor-student feedback in online spaces. His research is also concerned with understanding how changing environments shape plant diversity on both evolutionary and ecological time scales. Currently, he is focused on using historical specimen data to study how historic climate change (over the past century) has impacted plant phenology and diversity across North America.

Jeffrey A. Klemens (Faculty Advisor) is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Thomas Jefferson University, where he serves as program director for the undergraduate biology curriculum. His current research activities are focused on the use of agent-based models to describe habitat use by organisms in the urban environment and the role of active learning in science education, particularly the use of systems thinking and other modeling techniques to improve student understanding of complex phenomena.




Data Learning in Detroit’s Eastern Market

Ghalia Ezzedine (Fellow) is a second-year master’s student studying Health Informatics. She is interested in leveraging data and digital tools to improve population health. In her free time, she likes to try new recipes, work out, and occasionally jump off a bridge or airplane. She chose this case study because of her interest in nutrition, and the shift in foods available at this iconic marketplace: https://www.learngala.com/cases/2b92db37-de87-4321-a531-510dea225189



Josh Newell (Faculty Advisor) is an Associate Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is a broadly trained human-environment geographer, whose research focuses on questions related to urban sustainability, resource consumption, and environmental and social justice. His research approach is often multiscalar and integrative and, in addition to theory and method found in geography and urban planning, he draws upon principles and tools of industrial ecology and spatial analysis.


blog, CDE, Education & Workforce Development