ECS Lab partner joins panel with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
(2022). Engil Pereira, head of the UTRGV Soil Ecology Lab, talks with Secretary Vilsack about UTRGV’s newly funded VANGUARD project, led by Rafael Almeida. Watch here.
ECS Lab receives $2.2M USDA grant for a project focused on co-locating solar power and agriculture
(2022). Titled ‘Validating agrivoltaic technology with underserved producers’, or VANGUARD, this 4-year project will scale the co-location of agriculture and solar power infrastructure with underserved producers in South Texas while generating new data on the greenhouse gas and environmental benefits of ‘agrivoltaic’ systems.
Rafael Almeida receives the 2021 Hynes Award for New Investigators
(2021). Rafael received the Society for Freshwater Science’s prestigious Hynes Award, which annually recognizes one outstanding publication by an early career scientist. In his Hynes Award-winning publication (Nature Communications 2019), Rafael and co-authors used a multi-objective optimization framework to demonstrate that low-carbon expansion of hydropower in the Amazon basin relies on strategically selecting future dam sites. Read more here.
Rafael Almeida’s work on hydropower sustainability featured in the media
(2021). Rafael’s GEC paper on the consequences of climate change for future Amazon hydropower featured in O Globo, Brazil’s most circulated newspaper (see here). Yale Environment 360 also published a story featuring the work (see here).
The New York Times published an infographic featuring a database of hundreds of hydropower dams derived from a Nature Communications paper by Rafael and his colleagues (see here).