S&T Faculty / Student Research Grants and Awards

Dr. Michael Cohen of Biology Department has received $25,000.00 from the CSU Entrepreneurial Joint Venture Matching Grant Program for his project entitled "Integrated biological wastewater scrubbing and biogas production".

The proposed project will support the development of an integrated biologically-based technology for cleaning wastewater and producing biofuel. He and his Co-PI's will investigate the capacity of the system to remove certain residual pollutants from treated wastewater, optimize utilization of harvested biomass as a feedstock for methane-producing digesters, and determine the suitability of the resultant sludge as a soil amendment.

 

This week Biology Master’s student Megan Wood was awarded a Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship for 2009. This prestigious fellowship provides "a unique educational experience to students who have an interest in ocean, coastal and Great Lakes resources and in the national policy decisions affecting those resources." The program matches highly qualified graduate students with "hosts" in the legislative and executive branch of government located in the Washington, D.C. area, for a one year paid fellowship.
Megan is completing her thesis at SSU studying reproduction and dispersal of seastars and mussels among coastal sites in Northern California to help inform the placement of marine protected areas now underway as part of California's Marine Life Protection Act Initiative process. Her MS research is currently supported by the equally prestigious Environmental Protection Agency STAR Fellowship she was awarded upon entering SSU's Master's Program in Biology.

 

This week Biology Master’s student Diana Humple was also awarded a Switzer Environmental Fellowship for 2008. This prestigious fellowship provides funding, research, and additional training/networking opportunities for “individual leaders who will be driving positive environmental change” and supports “projects that will have measurable positive results on environmental quality for natural and human communities.” Diana is working in the SSU DNA Analysis Facility to study the impacts of oil spills on Western Grebe populations, a sea bird species that is known to suffer severe mortality rates from oil spills on the Pacific Coast.
This award represents the fourth Switzer fellow from the Department of Biology at SSU in the past eight years (not to mention the additional finalists that have been named from this graduate program, including Catherine Hare this year).