Dr. Josiah Heyman awarded an NSF Senior Research Grant

Dr. Heyman was awarded an NSF Senior Research grant “Poor Urban Consumers Confront the Costly Future of Water.” This will help us understand the impact of climate change and more heavily processed sources of water (e.g., desalination) on the pocketbooks of the poor in El Paso. The grant is centered at UTEP and marks the beginning of a joint social science-environmental engineering initiative on the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations at the border. Dr. Heyman is also a senior researcher on the new NSF project “Information Systems meet CUltural COmpetencies (IS-CUCO): Enabling data-driven decision-making in underserved Hispanic populations,” focused on making on-line information about food security (e.g., food banks) more accessible and meaningful to people who typically use small devices such as smart phones. This is a multi-institution grant with UTEP, Northeastern Illinois, New York City College of Technology, and California State University, Dominguez Hills, all Hispanic-serving institutions.