Arianne Cease and Ariane Middel, two senior sustainability scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, recently received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award. The award is given to the country’s most promising young faculty and it provides them with funding for five years to pursue outstanding research.
Cease, who is also an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability and the director of the Global Locust Initiative at the ASU Wrigley Institute, will apply the grant to her research where she “tests how nutrition, population density and historical habitat variability interact to affect migration, immune function and reproduction of locusts.” She plans to use the results to create sustainable management and policy recommendations for global partners.
Middel, an assistant professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering will apply the funding for her project to use “MaRTy (a mobile weather station) and novel modeling approaches (deep learning) to assess how people experience heat in the summer.” Results from the project will be used to develop strategies for infrastructure management and methods on how to mitigate the adverse effect of heat on humans.
Cease and Middel join 13 other NSF CAREER Program awardees at Arizona State University in 2020. The awards total $9.5 million in funding for the faculty, a substantial amount that they can use to build their research programs.
“The number of NSF CAREER Program awardees at ASU this year speaks to the excellence and creative aptitude of our junior faculty, from a range of academic disciplines,” said Mark Searle, university provost and executive vice president. “Each was selected for their innovative research and potential for leadership in their field. They are outstanding scholars, and their dedication and commitment to their research is rightly rewarded with these prestigious awards.”