Research Posters – Symposium 2026

Speakers: Enqi Yang, a senior majoring in environmental science and a passion for developing wind energy and sustainable seafood. He will be heading to University of Florida for a masters in Food and Resources Economics and Fisheries Stock Assessment.  

Sean is a sophomore studying environmental engineering and applied mathematics. He is interested in the use of modeling and data analysis in the fields of air pollution, wastewater treatment, and renewable energy. 

Presentation Description: The Hopkins Student Wind Energy Team (HSWET) is a group of enthusiastic Johns Hopkins University students competing in the 2026 National Collegiate Wind Competition. This year’s challenge explores the environmental, social, political, and economic dimensions of wind energy development in New York. Our team designed a 244 MW wind farm spanning 61 km² using 40 GE Vernova 6.1 MW turbines. Through detailed modeling and site analysis, we evaluated energy production, environmental constraints, and feasibility while teaching ourselves industry-standard tools such as FUROW, ArcGIS, and WAsP. Our approach prioritized minimizing impacts on bird migration routes, waterways, recreation areas, and permitting requirements. We also examined project financing, community benefits, and long-term business models to better understand how wind farms can support both clean energy goals and local communities. Together, this work reflects our commitment to thoughtful, responsible renewable energy development and the promise of wind power in a rapidly evolving energy landscape. 

Even as students, HSWET is deeply committed to the JHU Climate Action & Sustainability Plan. We hosted the Everyday Superheroes: Women in Energy panel featuring professionals from Ørsted and Apex Clean Energy, providing students with insight into clean energy careers and mentorship opportunities. Team members also participated in the 2025 Yale Clean Energy Conference and toured a wind turbine at the Portsmouth Abbey School. Collectively, our outreach efforts reached over 100 students, recruited 50+ active members, and connected with more than 20 industry and academic professionals—reflecting the passion and dedication of the next generation working toward a sustainable future. 

Speaker: Ursula Gately, Doctoral Student, School of Medicine 

Poster Description:  

Methods: We conducted a systematic review of school-based gardening programs and nature-based schoolyard exposures. We evaluated health, well-being, and educational outcomes among children and adolescents. Searches were performed in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Studies were screened and extracted in duplicate. Outcomes were grouped into six domains: dietary intake, anthropometrics, psychosocial mediators, physical activity/sedentary behavior, academic outcomes, and qualitative/social outcomes. Evidence was synthesized by outcome domain with explicit attribution to unique programs. 

Results: 13 studies representing 7 unique programs were included. Dietary improvements were the most consistent finding, particularly increased vegetable consumption. Psychosocial outcomes, including nutrition knowledge and self-efficacy, improved across nearly all interventions. Effects on BMI were mixed, with modest gains in some programs and null results in others. Physical activity increased in programs integrating garden-based lessons into the school day. Academic outcomes showed limited but promising improvements in reading and science. Qualitative studies highlighted broader social, cultural, and identity-related benefits.  

Conclusions: School-based gardening programs consistently support dietary behaviors and psychosocial development, while effects on BMI and academics are less clear. Future research should use standardized measures, longer follow-up, and clearer program descriptions to guide effective, equitable implementation. 

This work supports the JHU Climate Action & Sustainability Plan by advancing climate and sustainability education, community engagement, and equity-focused health outcomes. By synthesizing evidence on school-based gardening as a nature- and food-systems-based intervention, this research highlights how educational settings can promote healthier, more sustainable behaviors while addressing disparities in low-income, urban communities. The findings inform evidence-driven, scalable approaches to integrating sustainability and planetary health principles into education and community-facing initiatives. 

Speaker: Athena Zapantis, Undergraduate student, Civil & Systems Engineering, WSE 

Poster Description: The American Society of Civil Engineers holds the Sustainable Solutions Competition each year, where colleges and universities across the United States are tasked with responding to a fictional request for proposal to economically and environmentally redevelop a site.  

This year, the Johns Hopkins team, called Communities Advocating for Sustainable Environments, has the task of designing a site to house four data center buildings with an emphasis on power resilience, water management, and community engagement. All teams use the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s Envision as the primary sustainability framework. 

The team sited the project in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a rapidly developing city for data centers. To simulate a real request for proposal environment, the team conducted hypothetical stakeholder engagement and analyses to develop a proposal to tackle the complex priorities and needs of this data center development. Ultimately, the design provides public access trails by a river, restores groundwater to wells that have been drying up in the community, and implements on-site power generation that even allows the site to return energy to the grid, and a cooling system that makes existing heat-using infrastructure more efficient.  

Our proposal aligns with the guiding principles of the Climate Action and Sustainability Plan. By restoring depleted groundwater, creating access trails, and limiting potable water consumption, it exhibits the pillars of environmental stewardship and community partnership. Overall, Goals 5 and 6 of the plan underlie our design decisions as we combine the built and natural environments to create a data center that revitalizes community connections. 

Poster presentation by 4 team members. 

Speaker: Lindi Shepard, Doctoral student, Advanced Studies in Education, School of Education 

Poster Description: We report insights from an effort to integrate Planetary Health into a JHU teacher preparation program for secondary school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educators who were preparing to teach in Baltimore area schools. As a required component of their program, all teacher candidates took a new course, Environmental Science as Social Justice, and were later interviewed about their experiences. We share three innovative pedagogical practices which participants found to be most impactful in building self-efficacy in teaching about socio-ecological challenges like climate change and making such instruction relevant for students in Baltimore.  

First, recognizing the inherent interdisciplinarity of Planetary Health topics, the course was designed for teacher candidates working across a range of STEM subject areas. This created an interdisciplinary learning community where student teachers engaged with peers who held different perspectives and perceived distinct challenges and opportunities for teaching socio-ecological issues. Second, this course integrated strategies to promote social-emotional learning and educator well-being, ingredients commonly overlooked in teacher education, yet vital to address the complex emotions this work entails for both students and teachers. Third, coursework was contextualized through place-making activities with opportunities for modeling and direct practice for teachers to situate lessons from their respective subject areas within Baltimore’s local ecosystem. The challenges and successes of this work can be used to guide teacher educators and, more broadly, those interested in cross-disciplinary educational efforts to weave real-world socio-ecological issues into classroom instruction, ensuring future generations are prepared to face the complex environmental challenges facing their communities.  

Speaker: Jackson Murray is a human centered design strategist and UX specialist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who solves complex, mission-critical problems where human performance is essential. Some of the gnarly challenges he’s helped tackle include redesigning aircraft cockpits, enhancing nuclear reactor control rooms, identifying needs of futuristic NASA Mars habitats, shaping trust and safety in autonomous vehicles, and reducing time spent conducting essential maintenance on ships. His interest spans digital experiences, physical products, and operational processes, ensuring solutions meet real human needs in high-stakes, future-facing environments. This effort is in collaboration with Purdue UX Design Experience Studio. 

Poster Description: The rapid scaling of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has intensified the expansion of data center infrastructure, resulting in increased consumption of energy, water, and critical materials. Despite AI’s growing integration into everyday life, the environmental footprint of the data centers that support AI remains largely invisible to end users, designers, and decision-makers. This project examines the environmental impacts of AI-enabled data centers used to train and deploy LLMs in generative AI systems, focusing on carbon emissions, energy demand, water usage for cooling, and material dependencies associated with large-scale computation. Rather than approaching these impacts solely through technical or regulatory analysis, the project explores how design, visualization, and narrative techniques can surface the hidden environmental costs of AI usage and challenge dominant efficiency-driven narratives. The project culminates in a series of design-driven outputs such as, narrative vignettes, visual story telling prototype, and design documentation, that aim to make AI’s environmental impacts more legible, relatable, and actionable. By reframing environmental sustainability as a visible and experiential dimension of AI infrastructure, this work contributes to broader efforts to integrate environmental accountability into the design and deployment of AI systems in conversational assistants such as ChatGPT, and Gemini. 

Speaker: Lisa Nehring, Doctoral Student, School of Education 

Poster Description: The structuring of teaching and learning in traditional K-12 public schools is often criticized for being overly abstract and routinized, lacking connection to students’ lived experiences and the earth they call home. Yet young people have a pivotal role to play in addressing climate change and schools are essential in building students’ connection with local environments. Through stories of practice and research, we explore the opportunities of modern educational systems like Baltimore City Public Schools to foster students’ connection with place. City Schools’ Farm to School Program aims to connect students with their local food community—whether in the form of a farm field trip or an outdoor lesson in a school garden. Through these programs, students explore topics that create active citizenship, from planting a seed, to holding an earthworm, to uncovering the links between climate and food. Research supported through a grant from the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute and in partnership with City Schools’ Farm to School Program investigates what motivates Baltimore City educators to support students’ outdoor experiences – in other words, what meanings do teachers ascribe to learning outdoors? Using three school communities as case studies, the team is studying how individuals within schools create opportunities for teaching and learning outdoors, including the spaces where it happens, the curriculum that is used, and the outcomes of their efforts. Together these stories offer insight into both the systemic and intimate work necessary in transforming teaching and learning in urban schools for connection and engagement in climate action. 

Laura Genello, Farm to School Specialist at Baltimore City Public Schools, is a co-author of this work. 

Speaker: Isabelle Nobili, Undergraduate student, Earth & Planetary Sciences, KSAS 

Poster Description: The health of street trees is dependent upon various environmental factors, including the health and quality of the soils in which they are planted. It is critical to assess soil properties across urban landscapes to understand how urban soils can best function as water infiltrators and supporters of vegetation. This research project, a Senior Capstone Project in the EPS Department at JHU, supports a larger, multi-partner initiative to address stormwater runoff, flooding, and the urban heat island effect in the Old Goucher neighborhood by retrofitting existing tree pits into bioretention strips. The objective of this project in relation to the aforementioned initiative was to conduct a comprehensive characterization of the existing tree pit surface soils by establishing a baseline of biological, physical, and chemical properties prior to the intervention. Working in the Szlavecz Lab at JHU and in collaboration with community partner Mateusz Różański, we conducted spring and fall 2025 soil sampling in 33 street tree pits in the Old Goucher Neighborhood, collecting surface and deep soil cores and moisture and compaction measurements. In the lab, we measured the following soil health indicators: microbial biomass carbon, electrical conductivity, soil organic matter, pH, heavy metal concentrations, and texture. We found that electrical conductivity is strongly correlated to chloride and sodium concentrations in the soil; lead concentrations were high across several standards; pH was slightly acidic; soil organic matter was high; soils were highly compacted.  

This project aligns with Sustainability Plan Objectives 2.2 and 4.2 and Goal 6.  

Speaker: Isabel Horst, Doctoral student, Earth & Planetary Sciences, KSAS 

Poster Description: The patchwork of land surface characteristics that make up the urban fabric often creates significant variations in local climate across neighborhoods and along the urban/rural gradient. Alongside the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, the Urban Dry Island (UDI) effect describes urban/rural contrasts in specific humidity that are not well quantified or understood despite their direct implications for heat stress and cooling demand. We present a case study of spatiotemporal variability of the UDI in Baltimore, Maryland, a humid subtropical coastal city with well-documented neighborhood-scale disparities in temperature. Using a network of weather stations deployed across community centers, faith organizations, educational institutions, and private residences, we investigate the sub-city scale UDI and its implications for estimates of hazardous heat exposure. Our analysis includes a comparison of the sensitivity to sub-city scale UDI across multiple humidity-dependent heat metrics, including wet-bulb globe temperature and various heat indices. We find that neighborhood-level contrasts in heat extremes can differ depending on whether or not a heat metric takes humidity, solar radiation, and/or wind into account. 

Speaker: Olivia Bond, Undergraduate student, Earth & Planetary Sciences, KSAS 

Poster Description: Assisted migration is a forest management strategy in which tree populations are relocated to suitable habitats for conservation and forest productivity. Although assisted migration has benefits for productivity and survival of trees, there is a risk of that trees will be poorly adapted to new biotic environments. In this study, I investigated insect herbivory on white oak trees in an assisted migration experiment, the Urban Oak Silviculture Study, led by scientists at the US Forest Service and University of Delaware. To examine herbivory, I characterized arthropod communities on the trees, completed herbivory surveys, and measured leaf chemical traits. I found that despite higher average herbivory on trees from non-local provenances, arthropod communities did not differ. This study suggests that trees from non-local provenances are not significantly more vulnerable to insect herbivory, providing further evidence that assisted migration is a feasible strategy for adapting forests to future climates.