On April 22, the Steinbrenner Institute hosted it's first annual Environmental Colloquium.  The event was a gathering of environmental researchers from across the CMU campus with the purpose to explore synergies across the many environmental activities here on campus and to showcase ongoing Steinbrenner Institute successes.  Throughout the day, we heard presentations from 8 affiliated centers and 8 Steinbrenner Institute Doctoral Fellows then viewed a sample of engineering research by way of a poster session with 30 entries.  And, yes, we did have a competition for the posters as well as the Fellow presentations.

The winners of the $1500 travel awards were:
Kelly Good, Civil and Environmental Engineering, "Modeling current and potential bromide loads from coal-fired power plants in the Allegheny River basin their effects on in-stream bromide concentrations" (Poster)
Ravi Deepak and team, Mechanical Engineering, "Aroyo: A simultaneous water transportation and purification solution" (Poster)
Brian Sergi, Engineering and Public Policy, "Understanding public perceptions of energy trade-offs in climate, health, and economic cost using discrete choice analysis" (Steinbrenner Institute Fellow Presentation).

We thank our judges Professor Burcu Akinci, Engineering Research Accelerator at CMU; Mr. Lowell Steinbrenner; Barbara Granito, NAS/NAE Science and Engineering Ambassador Program; and Karl Thomas, CMU Advancement for accepting the difficult challenge to judge the graduate fellow presentations as well as the posters. 

We also thank President Subra Suresh for joining us and engaging with the student researchers during the poster session.  Discussions from the Colloquium will be used to help frame the strategic direction for the Steinbrenner Institute over the next year.  We look forward to Earth Day 2017!