Mark Van Putten, a friend of SNRE with more than 30 years of experience in environmental policymaking and nonprofit organizational leadership at the international, national, regional, and local levels, delivered the Spring 2013 Commencement Address to graduating students Saturday, May 4.

It’s the kind of scientific question tailor-made for interdisciplinary research. How does Q-fever, a highly contagious and still largely untracked disease, move among people, livestock, and wild animals, and what are the long-term effects of its presence on human health and economic systems? Answers may be closer to emerging because of M-Cubed, a new University of Michigan program that is awarding nearly 200 grants to jumpstart interdisciplinary work. The two-year, $15 million effort encourages faculty to explore major issues facing the planet, from climate change and poverty to health and energy.

J. Marty Anderies, an associate professor at Arizona State University, gives a talk as part of the Sustainability and Human Behavior Seminar Series. His talk is titled "Behavior, institutions, and the adaptive capacity of small-scale social-ecological systems: A multi-methods approach "

Amanda Carrico is a research assistant professor at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy & Environment at Vanderbilt University. She also is a faculty fellow in the Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt, where she was a postdoctoral fellow from 2009-2012. She earned a doctoral degree in Social Psychology (2009) from Vanderbilt University; a master of arts in social psychology (2005) from Vanderbilt and a bachelor of arts (2002) from Transylvania University.

The University of Michigan shows immense growth and engagement in sustainability education, research and operations, according to a new report designed to track and measure progress.