New Solutions for Our Planet

Robbins: “We are empowering scholarly talent>” Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

The new Sustainability Research Hub will make UW–Madison a preeminent destination for sustainability research and education. It will connect researchers across departments, target major federal grants, and create opportunities for undergraduate and graduate student research.

UW–Madison has produced substantial sustainability-related research in recent years, including nearly 1,200 grants supporting $130 million in research and development expenditures during fiscal year 2022. The Sustainability Research Hub will facilitate a significant expansion in this research at a time when sustainability insights and solutions are in high demand across many sectors, from governments to corporations.

“The breadth and depth of sustainability research on this campus — from engineering to agronomy, and from history and art to chemistry and geosciences — is remarkable,” says Paul Robbins ’89, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “But the challenges of coordinating all this talent, the effort required to produce the synergies needed to be competitive, and the expertise to turn all that talent into major, highly competitive, multimillion-dollar grants: those are things that the hub can address. By investing in grant writers, matchmakers, and project and award coordinators, we are empowering scholarly talent and leveraging it to do something far bigger than we are achieving today.”

Holly Gibbs PhD’08, a geographer with the UW Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, says the Sustainability Research Hub will “accelerate our capacity to get the funding needed to implement our ideas.” Gibbs leads a team that studies tropical deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and solutions for sustainable supply chains, with research that has informed policies for government, nongovernmental organizations, and companies.

“The Sustainability Research Hub will power the types of transformative collaboration that are easy to dream about but hard to put into action,” Gibbs says. “It will allow us to take more risks, join more campuswide research teams, and dig deeper to find the solutions needed by our planet.”

Published in the Fall 2024 issue