Urban-Rural System Research Coordination Network funded by the US National Science Foundation: Finding solutions to the Mississippi River basin’s biggest challenges
Ulrike Passe, associate professor of architecture and director of the Iowa State University Center for Building Energy Research, discusses the importance of considering climate and social factors in building construction and design.
A new network of researchers and community officials is working to find solutions to some of the biggest challenges within the Mississippi River watershed.
Iowa State University hosted a workshop last summer during which 82 academic experts and local stakeholders discussed a variety of issues in the watershed, including nutrient runoff, erosion, flooding, heat island effects, urban sprawl and much more – with particular attention given to the urban-rural interface.
The Sustainable Cities Research Team recently received a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a framework for analysis of food, energy and water systems for greater Des Moines, which includes the city and the surrounding six-county area, and to formulate scenarios that could result in a more sustainable city. The team includes scientists from a wide range of disciplines at Iowa State University, the University of Northern Iowa and University of Texas at Arlington.
“Modeling and data infrastructure for human-centric design and operation of sustainable, healthy buildings through a case study,” a paper coauthored by Ulrike Passe, associate professor of architecture and director of the Center for Building Energy Research, has been published in the international journal Building and Environment, Volume 170, March 2020
Ulrike Passe, associate professor of architecture, presented “Development of a Modelling Framework for Refined Residential Occupancy Schedules,” co-authored with Diba Malekpour Koupaei, Farzad Hashemi and Vinciane Tabard-Fortecoëf, at the 16th IBPSA International Conference & Exhibition Building Simulation 2019 Sept. 1-4 in Rome.
Three Iowa State University researchers have received a $50,000 National Science Foundation grant for an August workshop on “Redesigning the Urban-Rural Interface (RURI) along the Mississippi Watershed.”
Ulrike Passe and Kimberly Zarecor, associate professors of architecture in the College of Design, and Janette Thompson, Morrill Professor of natural resource ecology and management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, are organizing the workshop, which will be Aug. 12–13 in Ames. The event is intended to guide development of a sustainable urban systems research and action agenda for mid-sized metropolitan areas within the Mississippi River watershed, with a focus on relationships and connectivity among urban and rural landscapes and communities, Passe said.
Diba Malekpour Koupaei, PhD student in the Department of Civil, Construction & Environmental Engineering, presented the team’s research findings on the impact of occupancy schedules on energy consumption of residential neighborhoods at the 2019 Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD) at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta on April 8th. In her presentation, titled “A Technique for Developing High-Resolution Residential Occupancy Schedules for Urban Energy Models”, Malekpour showcased the team’s newest findings in term of using the energy-use survey results to enhance the accuracy of current energy modelling approaches.
For more information about the conference, refer to:
http://www.simaud.org/2019/program.php
You can now access the full article from SimAUD proceedings, available at:
http://www.simaud.org/proceedings/download.php?f=SimAUD2019_Proceedings_HiRes.pdf
Ulrike Passe, associate professor of architecture and director of the Iowa State University Center for Building Energy Research, was invited to lead a natural ventilation workshop at CATE 2019, Comfort at the Extremes: Energy, Economy, Climate conference April 10-11 at Heriot Watt University in Dubai, UAE. She also presented current research by her Sustainable Cities Research Group in the paper “Impact of trees on passive survivability in extreme heat events in warm and humid regions,” co-authored with Janette Thompson, Morrill Professor of natural resource ecology and management; Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, professor of mechanical engineering; and two doctoral students: Breanna Marmur, NREM, and Boshun Gao, mechanical engineering.
Passe received a travel scholarship from the Charitable Jeffrey Cook Trust to attend the meeting, which was organized by the international NCEUB (Network for Comfort and Energy Use in Buildings) and brought together experts from across the world from fields as diverse as architecture, engineering and health sciences for the first time “to discuss crucial questions and ways forward on how to best provide Comfort at the Extremes in the complex political and economic environments we occupy.”
The Sustainable Cities Team was well represented at the 2019 ISU Research Day with informative presentations by team members Diba Malekpour-Koupaei (presenting ‘A technique for developing High-resolution occupancy schedules’), Breanna Marmur (presenting, ‘The Impact of Trees on Urban Climate, Neighborhoods and Building Energy in Warm and Humid Regions), and Ulrike Passe, who gave a a Lightning Talk about the team’s progress in reaching it’s research objectives, and future goal setting. Thank you for your hard work and for sharing our teams work!
Ulrike Passe, Associate Professor of Architecture has been awarded $29,999 by the seed grant program of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) at The University of Iowa for the research project “Extreme Heat Adaptation Strategies for Buildings and Neighborhoods in the Upper Midwest Using Novel Urban Energy Modeling Techniques,” for the period July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2020.
Professors Ulrike Passe, Linda Shenk, and Caroline Krejci have been published in Taylor and Francis Online for their co-authored article on agent-based modeling (ABM), titled Agents of Change – Together: Using agent-based models to inspire social capital building for resilient communities. Topics in the paper include generating social capital, systems thinking, Agent Based Modeling, and bottom-up approaches to community resiliency.
Ulrike Passe was distinguished as a Health in Buildings Roundtable’ (H.i.B.R.) Scholar at their 2018 annual conference, held July 19th – July 20th at the NIH Nacher Conference in Bethesda, Maryland. Passe presented the teams research investigation into the micro-climate impact of building interior thermal conditions as part of a designated scholars poster session held on Friday afternoon. The poster was titled: ” Analyses of Near-building Microclimate Effects on Thermal Comfort in Low-resource Neighborhood Homes”.
Jacklin Stonewall, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, presented the teams research agenda at the Smart and Connected Communities Workshop at the University of Washington, Seattle on December 10th and 11th; this was a sponsored event as part of the NSF-funded SCC-RCN project entitled, MOHERE: Mobility, Health, and Resilience: Building Capacities and Expanding Impact.
The ISU Sustainable Cities team is having its research initiatives featured on the Midwest Big Data Hub! The blog post recognizes the teams overall agenda to combat climate change through its various targets and objectives, and highlights some of the recent achievements our team has accomplished. We are proud of all the work that our team is doing, and are grateful for the opportunity to share our goals with our supportive research partners.
Time for Action! At an Iowa news conference, Ulrike Passe, associate professor and director of the Center for Building Energy Research at ISU and Jerry Schnoor, co-director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa, met on Thursday to discuss climate change issues and building design.
October 2nd, 2018:
Professor Ulrike Passe and David Jahn (City of Des Moines Urban Forestry Team) presented their university-community partnership, titled “The Role of Urban Forests in Sustainable Communities”, at the 12th annual Growing Sustainable Communities Conference in Debuque Iowa.
We are pleased to announce the graduation of Farzad Hashemi upon the successful defense of his Masters thesis, “Adapting Vernacular Strategies for the Design of an Energy Efficient Residential Building in Hot and Arid Climate: City of Yazd, Iran”. His research, which critically explores elements of Iranian Vernacular architecture, draws new lessons on how to improve energy efficiency in future buildings using applied methods of reduced heating, cooling, and lighting demand found in his investigations. Hashemi defended his thesis on July 10th, 2018 to complete his Masters of Science in Architecture. His committee members were Ulrike Passe, Dr. Kristen Cetin and Dr. Andrea Wheeler. Congratulations on your achievement Farzad!
We are pleased to announce that authors Soumik Sarkar, Linjiang Wu, Venkatesh Chinde, Himanshu Sharma, and Ulrike Passe have had their research paper accepted to the fifth annual High Performance Buildings Conference at Purdue University on July 9 to July 12. Their paper, “A Data-Driven Approach Towards Integration of Micro-climate Conditions for Prediction Building Energy Performance,” demonstrates a powerful methodology to more accurately model and predict the energy efficiency of housing units as they relate to their various environmental and built conditions. Sharma will be presenting the team’s work at the conference.
Ulrike Passe presented team research at the 8th workshop of the NSF funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) “ Integration of the Human Dimension in Product and Process Modeling in the Creation of Resilient and Sustainable Human-Building Ecosystems (SHBE) at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. Ulrike presented the hybrid physics data modeling framework integrating human behavior and thermo-physical data into our neighborhood energy model.
We are proud to announce that the team comprised of Professor Ulrike Passe, Dr. Janette Thompson, and graduate research assistants Farzad Hashemi and Breanna Marmur have had their research paper, Developing a Workflow to Integrate Tree Inventory Data into Urban Energy Modeling, accepted to this year’s SIMAUD conference to be held at TU Delft University June 4th – 7th.
The paper demonstrates the team’s research into creating a process for integrating urban forest inventory data into a 3D energy model, a development which has been used to analyze how forest shading impacts building energy performance in Midwest cities. This specific process integrates Grasshopper 3D modeling, Meerkat plug-in for Grasshopper, and GIS data.
The annual conference, now into its ninth year, aims to promote alchemy between fields such as architecture, urban design, urban planning, building science, visualization, and simulation by highlighting emerging and cutting-edge research being done with simulation-based support systems. We are excited to have Professor Passe and Hashemi represent the Sustainable Cities team this upcoming June at the conference. Congratulations!
On behalf of the Sustainable Cities Research Group, we would like to offer our congratulations to Master student Wanyu Huang for having her thesis approved by The Graduate College review committee earlier this week. Huang’s thesis, Exploring Households’ Weatherization Adoptions: An Agent-based Approach, serves as a critical assessment of her research, and gives further agency to the multi-disciplinary Des Moines Energy project that is being carried out by the S.C. team.
Thank you Wanyu for your continued support and congratulations on your outstanding achievement!
On January 23rd, Ulrike Passe and Janette Thompson attended the 2018 National Council for Science and the Environment (NSCE) Conference in Washington D.C. to present their continued research on energy data mapping. The annual conference brings together a global interdisciplinary group of educators, scientists, advocates, and policy leaders to share their latest findings and achievements in the pursuit of more informed environmental decision making.
On November 30th, 2017 Ulrike Passe was invited to participate in the NSF-Sponsored Workshop on ‘Effective Community-University-Industry Collaboration Models for Smart and Connected Communities Research’ to speak on the panel “Building Socio-Technical Collaborations within Academia”. She talked about the opportunity for design disciplines to bring together researchers from diverse scientific, engineering and humanities fields into an integrated research teams at Iowa State University’s Sustainable City’s team.
Through learning about and using our research team’s prototype agent-based model, the Community Growers youth began to think about their community garden as a community gathering place as well as place to grow healthy food.
Linda Shenk and Mallory Riesberg present “Community Growers” Program for Youth in Des Moines at The Growing Sustainable Communities Conference in Dubuque, Iowa. The conference took place over two days (October 4th and 5th), and allowed for the sharing of research and ideas about creating more resilient communities.
Ulrike Passe, an Iowa State University associate professor of architecture, presented her paper on “Performance, data and the expanding field of sustainable design” at the 6th International Alvar Aalto Meeting on Contemporary Architecture – Technology and Humanism organized by the Alvar Aalto Academy at the Town Hall in Seinajoki, Finland, which was designed by Aalto in 1962.
“The 2nd International Conference on Smart Data and Smart Cities will present novel research concerning the use of information and communication technologies in Smart Cities, and will also provide a forum for senior researchers to establish collaborations on new research projects in this domain. A smart city cannot be defined without a better involvement of citizens (smart people).”
The Midwest Big Data Hub annual meeting will be held on October 2 – 3, 2017 in Omaha, NE. The event will hold poster presentations featuring Wanyu Huang, Prof. Ulrike Passe, Jacklin Stonewall, and Linjiang Wu.
Iowa State’s Sustainable Research group, in collaboration with Eat Greater Des Moines and Boys and Girls Club of Central Iowa, are proud to host the Hiatt Garden Party this Saturday, September 9th at the Hiatt Middle School Garden. The event will showcase the cultivation efforts of the youth leaders from the Boys and Girls Club, and will also host free activities and snacks.
For more information about the event, please visit
n March 9th, we began our 8-week Community Growers program with a leadership-minded group of 22 youth in the Baker Chapter of the Boys & Girls Club at Hiatt Middle School in Des Moines. (Project lead is Linda Shenk with team members Alenka Poplin and Caroline Krejci, ISU Extension Caitlin Szymanski, and team of undergraduate researchers Branden Cervetti, Kate Fjelstad, Kara Harmet, and Carlee Tope.) Using a methodology of spatial, socio-technical storytelling, this group will be using primarily GIS and gaining some familiarity with agent-based modeling to create and tell the story of the assets of their neighborhood and then devise and conduct an action project in their school’s community garden.
On December 15th, PIIR team members Linda Shenk, Caroline Krejci, Jacklin Stonewall, and Kate Fjelstad participated in the neighborhood Holiday Party at Hiatt Middle School in Des Moines, IA. At this fun event with robust community attendance, team members met neighborhood residents, conducted data collection through a brief questionnaire, and shared some of the team’s research through a weatherization-oriented mini-action project.
Janette Thompson, Morrill Professor and professor of natural resource ecology and management, is coordinating a tree inventory in the Capitol East neighborhood.
The goal for this year is to refine data collection about human energy behavior through action projects and novel game-based surveys. This will serve as input into quantitative, agent-based models and refined, urban-energy models regarding urban microclimate and vegetation.
The third round of funding from a presidential initiative will build four research teams that will use big data to benefit human and animal health, improve cities and build new tools for researchers.
