BATON ROUGE, La. (March 30, 2022) – The Water Institute congratulates the first 14 students who have been selected to participate in a two-week course in water management and resiliency in the Netherlands funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Graduate students from across the country will take part in the education program supported by a National Science Foundation grant to The Water Institute and the University of New Orleans. Over the three-year program, the grant will support up to 50 United States graduate students to collaborate with European counterparts in a two-week intensive modeling, fieldwork and flume laboratory water management training.
“Through this collaboration, the University of New Orleans is providing training opportunities to create the next generation of experts to manage water and flood management,” said Dr. Matt Tarr, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at UNO. “Expertise at the University of New Orleans is contributing to solutions for global crises in this area.”
The program, with the first session this summer, includes work with partners Deltares, Delft University of Technology and Utrecht University.
"UNO is excited to expand on its partnership with The Water Institute and provide this unique hands-on educational experience to Ph.D. students from across the U.S.," said Dr. Madeline Foster-Martinez, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, and leading the UNO team. "The topics and tools we will be exploring are crucial to meeting the coastal challenges of the coming decades, and learning from our Dutch counterparts will expand the students' perspectives on management strategies."
Congratulations to the first class of students to participate in the program. These 14 students were selected from a highly competitive pool of nearly 50 applicants:
Safiya Alpheus, Pennsylvania State University
Abigail Eckland, University of Colorado Boulder
Matthew Falcone, University of California, Berkeley
Pedro Matos Llavona, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Kelli Moran, Louisiana State University
Susannah Morey, University of Washington
Melinda Paduani, Florida International University
Riley Post, University of Iowa
Elizabeth Prior, Virginia Tech
Rachel Schaefer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jose Silvestre, Tulane University
Daniel Smith, Virginia Tech
Kayla Tarr, Arizona State University
Johnathan Woodruff, North Carolina State University
“We, and our partners at University of New Orleans, are so excited to launch this opportunity for graduate students and we were incredibly impressed by this cohort of students,” Christopher Esposito, research scientist at The Water Institute. “This is the next generation of water management experts. The training will help them not only learn new experimental and modeling tools to use in their work, but also help them make connections with other professionals in the water management community, here and abroad.”
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