By SUSAN JONES
Sustainability isn’t just an abstract idea on Pitt’s Oakland campus.
There are very real issues that staff in operations and facilities have to deal with constantly, such as stormwater runoff or food waste.
On the faculty and student side, there’s plenty of expertise and initiative to help address these issues.
But sometimes it’s hard to bring the two sides together.
A Faculty & Operations Sustainability Power Lunch on May 2, sponsored by the Office of Sustainability, hopes to bridge that divide.
This isn’t a new idea. The Pitt Sustainability Plan released in 2018 had two related goals under research:
-
Use the Pitt campus as a living laboratory for faculty and students to implement new ideas and study outcomes over time.
-
Provide more opportunities and incentives for interdisciplinary research as well as the bridging of academics and operations — promoting an environment of informing and working together.
Gena Kovalcik, co-director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, said that in 2020 there was a plan in place to bring faculty and operations staff together to work on these issues, “And as we all know, plans got changed.” They felt it was important to wait until campus was open and the meeting could take place in person, “for these relationships to be able to build between people.”
The “power lunch” from noon to 2 p.m. May 2 in the University Club, Ballroom A, will feature a discussion of faculty-led research cohorts that could be utilized for sustainability research on campus, such as undergraduate summer research, led by David Sanchez, associate professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and associate director of the Mascaro Center; or the Center for Sustainable Business Fellows, led by Terri Gregos Fitzgerald, adjunct professor, in the Center for Branding.
Daniel Bain, associate professor of geology & environmental sciences and deputy director of the Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory, will lead this discussion.
Bain said he hopes the event encourages and educates faculty on areas of the University that might be useful in their research, and creates connections with people in operations. “What I’m hoping is this really creates and makes vital some of these connections that could be there and aren’t necessarily.
“At the same time, operations really has to think about the faculty as its colleagues,” he said. “For a long time, I think that there’s been a bit of a perception of otherness. … But some of us work in stormwater, some of us work in these really complicated (areas). We can do things that are helpful, and it’s helpful to us because we’re trying to teach students how to do this stuff and it’s all real world examples. The best way I can teach is throw a real world example at a student. If they can do it, that’s what they’re going to internalize.”
Aurora Sharrard, assistant vice chancellor for sustainability, said there are some faculty who are already engaged in this type of partnership with operations, “but it’s a pretty small set and we’ve been wanting to grow those opportunities and create more relationships that help those opportunities blossom all over campus.”
On the operations side, there will be a panel of administration officials who will “talk about the challenges and obstacles that they’re facing today. Essentially, what keeps them up at night,” Sharrard said. The participants range from people in Facilities Management to financial operations to community engagement.
Bain said the most exciting thing about the event is the last third, dubbed Conversation and Matching Roundtables, where people are going to have the chance to really talk — “Everyone’s going to be in the room, so why waste that opportunity? Buddy up and figure out the twinkle of that next project.”
The idea of bringing the two sides together, Sharrard said, “is to showcase to operational folks who may be in the room what those potential partnership mechanisms might look like, because some projects may be small, some projects may be larger and more in depth and span years. … And part of it is to show off these projects that have already happened and may happen fairly regularly, so that people have a model that they can follow.”
She cited one project that’s been going on for several years that involves faculty, students and Pitt infrastructure. Melissa Bilec, co-director for the Mascaro Center, has always had a graduate student who does the Pittsburgh campus greenhouse gas inventory, which started as a partnership with Facilities Management, but now requires data from departments across the University.
Bain said he worked with students about 15 years ago to get a rain garden on the lawn next to Petersen Events Center (where the Sports & Performance Center is now under construction). That process led to him wanting to create more ties with operations, “because sometimes it was really hard to get facilities to interact with us.”
He also said when he’s teaching about stormwater he always calls facilities “so we can go look at the well they have in Sennott Square where they pump all the water that would be filling the parking garage. It’s really a way that you can see things that you wouldn’t normally see as a student.”
A sustainability class taught by Ward Allebach, in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science, also lets students “creatively think about ways they can have a positive impact on on campus sustainability,” Kovalcik said. This had led to projects like battery recycling on campus and the Bike Cave.
“I think the University has had these research and operations collaborations focused on sustainability for at least 15 years,” Sharrard said. “This is just our next step in that journey of trying to formalize and solidify our unified approach to an expanded research and operations partnership.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.