Center for the Environment

Research Areas

Welcome to Purdue’s Center for the Environment! The Center for the Environment is a regional resource for incubating and promoting collaborative, interdisciplinary, problem-driven research focused on some of the greatest environmental challenges we face globally. Our affiliated faculty are currently working on problems such as how to move our economy to sequester more carbon than it produces, improving the resilience of food-energy-water production and delivery systems, reducing hazardous electronic and plastic waste and promoting transformation of materials through upcycling and recycling. Affiliates of the Center are also working on reducing nutrient runoff in farm systems, understanding the fate and transport of new chemicals in the environment, maintaining and supporting global biodiversity, developing advanced sensing techniques for environmental research, and understanding the challenges to building and maintaining sustainable communities in the face of disruptive global changes. Continue reading.

 

Featured News


Welcome Back Message from Center Director Tim Filley

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion

Purdue researchers explore how sound drives Mongolian herder cultural practices

January 22, 2021

In the grasslands of Mongolia, young goat herders gather at the rivers and streams near their parents’ birthplaces and...

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BIPOC Farmers in Sustainable Agriculture

January 28, 2021

The Center for the Environment has partnered with the College of Agriculture and the College of Health & Human Sciences to present this panel discussion as part of the colleges’ joint observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Diversity Awareness Week. In America and around the world, farmers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color face unique challenges in equitable access to grow food while practicing environmental stewardship. Representatives from Purdue faculty, Purdue Extension’s Urban Agriculture program, Purdue’s Center for Global Food Security and Indiana’s BIPOC farming community will outline these challenges and potential solutions. Currently scheduled panelists include: 

  • Gary Burniske, managing director of the Purdue Center for Global Food Security
  • Zhao Ma, professor, Purdue University Department of Forestry and Natural Resources
  • Sharrona Moore (CEO / garden manager), Lawrence Community Gardens in Indianapolis
  • Nathan Shoaf, urban agriculture coordinator, Purdue Extension
  • Ariana Torres, assistant professor, Purdue University Department of Horticulture & Landscape Architecture / Department of Agricultural Economics
  • Curtis Whittaker, Sr. (owner / founder) and Freida Graves (farm manager), Faith Farms in Gary, Indiana

Tamara Benjamin, assistant program leader for Purdue Extension’s Diversified Farming and Food Systems program, will moderate this event.

Register here to attend

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