By Denise Spranger | January 20, 2022
 
SEAS and Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR) faculty received three of the 17 Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) grants awarded by the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) in 2021.
“MIDAS is a University of Michigan (U-M)-wide institute with 420 affiliated faculty from 60 departments,” explained Bill Currie, Associate Dean for Research and Engagement and professor of Geospatial Data Sciences at SEAS. “The majority of the MIDAS affiliates are from engineering and computer science, with SEAS researchers being a minority. But in 2021, SEAS researchers were well represented among those receiving the PODS awards.” The PODS grant awardees, announced in May 2021, will present “lightning talks” on their research at the PODS Awards Showcase on March 23, 12 – 3 p.m. at Weiser Hall on the U-M Ann Arbor campus.
 

Josh Newell is one of the awardees and presenters for the project “Using Geospatial Data Science to Identify Vulnerable Communities to Climate Change”.
“This grant is enabling my research group to collaborate with colleagues from Public Health to map climate change risk due to heat, flooding, and what we are calling ‘knowledge vulnerability,’” said Newell. “For the latter, we have been using Twitter data to map climate change denialism at the zip code scale. Our overall objective is to identify communities particularly at risk due to climate change and we are using large-scale spatial data sets and modeling to do so.”
 
Co-PIs: Marie O’Neill (Environmental Health Sciences) and Carina Gronlund (Survey Research Center).
 
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