Other Laboratories

The Environmental Sciences Initiative also hosts a number of other laboratory facilities at the ASRC. These facilities are designed to support the research of ASRC scientists, students, and staff and house the latest equipment and resources to undertake this work.

A nationally and internationally recognized center for environmental research led by Charles Vörösmarty, Ph.D. that forms one of the core research themes in the Initiative. Drawing on inspiration from New York City as the “crossroads of the world”, it provides a unique meeting ground to introduce state of the art scientific knowledge, research and analytical capabilities, and environmental sensing technologies into an ongoing policy dialogue with decision-makers.

The laboratories of Peter Groffman, Ph.D. facilitate research that is designed to better understand 1) the role that microorganisms play in ecosystem functions related to nutrient cycling, water and air quality and soil carbon storage and 2) environmental regulation of microbes. They also help to incorporate a regional context to ASRC facilities through a formal research agreement with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies to share laboratory space.

The laboratories of Dianne Greenfield, Ph.D. study the complex environmental feedbacks between global change stressors and coastal phytoplankton ecology, physiology, and biogeochemistry. To achieve this goal, Greenfield and her lab develop and apply novel molecular tools to better study plankton populations in situ and combine these advances with traditional field and laboratory approaches.

The laboratories of Andrew Reinmann, Ph.D. focus on the carbon ecxhange between the biosphere and atmosphere, examining the human effect on biogenic carbon dioxide fluxes and carbon sequestration through a combination of field studies and predictive modeling.

The ASRC Visualization Room, one of the building’s Core Facilities, will serve as a key meeting space for research within the Initiative. Located on the same (fifth) floor as the Environmental Sciences Initiative, this facility will feature state-of-the-art display walls and high-performance computing systems to support advanced visualizations that can lead to new research insights.

Part of the ASRC’s Core Computing Facilities, this will enable the collection, management, integration, and analysis of of diverse data stacks from many data sources and of widely varying format and content, from time series data to numerous operational data feeds, to in situ sampling data, to numerical grid based data, to GIS layers of many sorts, to remote sensing data, and more.