Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability

06/11/2026

We are pleased to announce the recipients of our 2026 Academic Venture Fund!

📌 Read about the awardees: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/06/cornell-atkinson-awards-drive-progress-tech-ag-sustainability

The Academic Venture Fund supports bold, interdisciplinary research that is often too novel, early-stage, or high-risk for traditional funding sources. This year's six funded projects will explore emerging sustainability challenges, from safeguarding coral reef ecosystems and strengthening food system resilience to investigating environmental drivers of wildlife disease.

By supporting new ideas and new collaborations, the fund helps researchers generate the knowledge needed to advance the next generation of sustainability solutions.

→ Awardees represent campus partners: Cornell Engineering College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine Cornell Research & Innovation

06/02/2026

05/31/2026

One person’s waste is another one’s gold.

A Cornell researcher and her African colleagues are collecting human excreta from informal settlements in Kenya, processing it to remove pathogens, and turning it into affordable, high-quality agricultural fertilizer – called KIYA Gold – that is nourishing plants while protecting human health and the environment.

“At some point it occurred to us that there was a positive feedback loop possible here,” said Rebecca Nelson, a professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science and the Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University (CALS).

“If we can use this excreta to make fertilizer, we can expand sanitation, support and improve public health and sanitation in the informal settlements, all while reducing nutrients and pathogens going into the lake.”

This research is supported by an Academic Venture Fund grant from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the McKnight Foundation’s Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems.

05/14/2026

As David Lodge retires as director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability on May 22, we celebrate his extraordinary contributions to sustainability science and practice at Cornell University 🎉

Since joining Cornell in 2016, David helped shape Cornell Atkinson into a hub for science-driven collaboration — expanding support for faculty, students, and postdoctoral researchers while strengthening partnerships that connect research with real-world impact. Under his leadership, Cornell Atkinson grew its network of collaborators across academia, NGOs, industry, and government to advance work on climate risk, food systems, energy transitions, and One Health.

Throughout his career, David has been guided by a belief that research should not sit on a shelf. From his early work studying invasive species in freshwater ecosystems to groundbreaking advances in eDNA monitoring, his research has helped inform policy, improve environmental management, and protect ecosystems at scale.

Equally important has been his ability to bring people together across disciplines, institutions, and perspectives in pursuit of solutions that benefit people and the planet — in his own research and in leading Cornell Atkinson.

We are deeply grateful for David’s leadership, mentorship, and enduring commitment to sustainability science for the public good.

Congratulations on your retirement, and thank you, David!

📌 Read more about David’s career and impact:

David Lodge, ecologist and director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, will retire May 22, 2026.

04/24/2026

Cornell University students are helping tackle one of the more complex challenges in climate science: understanding methane emissions from waterbodies and mangrove ecosystems.

Through a collaboration brought together by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, students worked with Cornell researchers to design a low-cost, portable device to measure methane emissions.

Then, the device was deployed in mangrove ecosystems in Colombia with partners at Environmental Defense Fund. Working alongside local community partners in Punta Soldado, this effort is expanding access to critical data needed to better understand these ecosystems and support long-term restoration and climate resilience.

This is what it looks like to connect student innovation with real-world impact—where hands-on learning, cross-sector partnerships, and community collaboration come together to advance solutions.

🎥 Watch the video below to learn more.
📌 And read more about the research: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/04/student-built-methane-sensor-aids-mangrove-restoration-efforts

A big thank you to our collaborators: faculty and students in Cornell Engineering, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Coastal Solutions Fellows Program| Environmental Defense Fund | Cornell Research & Innovation | and the community of Punta Soldado, Colombia 🇨🇴🤝

04/22/2026

Student-built methane sensor aids mangrove restoration efforts

In fall of 2024, a team of students and faculty met to launch a project: creating a device that could measure methane from water bodies, a valuable tool in the fight against climate change.

The kind of methane sensor device they needed didn’t yet exist. Their task – to help communities and researchers measure methane emissions accurately and protect their water bodies – required something low-cost, rugged and portable. It would need to be deployed anywhere in the world, robust to wind and rain, run off a light battery, and contain a chamber that can fill with gases and then efficiently clear those gases to enable new measurements.

“The real-world application of this was really motivating for me,” said Grace Lo ’24, M.Eng. ’25, who is now a computer engineer for IBM. “Knowing that people are going to actually put this out in a lake or out in a real mangrove forest inspired me to make this the best device I could produce within the time limit and the supplies I had. That challenges you in a way you don’t get just by doing projects isolated in a lab.”

Sixteen months later, in partnership with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), these sensors were deployed in Colombia for the first time, informing global greenhouse gas assessments and reforestation of mangroves – ecosystems that can store up to four times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforests.

In the future, the student-built methane sensor device could be used to study emissions from lakes, wetlands, dairy farm manure lagoons, abandoned gas wells and many other sources.

The student methane sensor development was supported by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. The Colombian mangrove research was supported through the collaborative research partnership between EDF and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability supported by the David and Patricia Atkinson Foundation.

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/04/student-built-methane-sensor-aids-mangrove-restoration-efforts.

04/16/2026

Nutrients recovered from animal and human waste could drastically reduce synthetic fertilizer use in the U.S., according to a new College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University study that takes into account implementation challenges like processing and transport.

In the study, published April 15 in Nature Sustainability, researchers found that animal and human waste in the U.S. could theoretically meet 102% of nitrogen and 50% of phosphorus needs for the nation’s agriculture, a value of more than $5.7 billion annually.

But they also identified a major hurdle: a frequent mismatch between the location of the waste – often in areas densely populated with people or livestock – and agricultural regions with the highest fertilizer needs.

Still, by mapping and analyzing the sources of waste and of agricultural need, the research team found that large percentages of recoverable nutrients – 37% of nitrogen and 46% of phosphorus – can be used locally, and more than half of the surplus nutrients can be redistributed to nearby regions with low economic and environmental costs.

The research provides a blueprint for harnessing the vast, untapped potential of animal and human waste to reduce the U.S.’s reliance on synthetic fertilizers, which are energy-intensive to produce, harmful to the environment and often made overseas.

Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation and the USDA, with seed funding from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

04/16/2026

5.5 million wild bees live under an Ithaca cemetery 🐝

Rachel Fordyce would walk through East Lawn Cemetery to her job as a technician in an entomology lab on Cornell’s campus. One spring day in 2022, she arrived at work with a jar full of bees.

“These are all over the cemetery,” she told her boss, Bryan Danforth, professor of entomology in the College and Agriculture and Life Sciences. They identified the bees as Andrena regularis (also known as the "regular mining bee"), a wild, solitary, ground-nesting species that is an important pollinator.

That jar revealed one of the largest and oldest recorded ground-nesting bee aggregations in the world: an estimated 5.5 million bees in 1.5 acres. That's more than 200 honeybee hives, and more than three times the population of Manhattan.

"I'm sure there are other large bee aggregations that exist around the world that we just haven't identified, but in terms of what is in the literature, this is one of the largest," said first author Steve Hoge '24.

Hoge did the research as an undergraduate in Bryan Danforth's lab. A new study published April 13 in the journal Apidologie describes a novel method for counting bees, showing these wild bees are vital pollinators for New York apples, and pointing to cemeteries as preserves of biological diversity.

The study was funded by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, the National Science Foundation, and the Federal Capacity Funds program.

03/18/2026

We are thrilled to announce Emily Bernhardt, Ph.D. ‘01 as the next Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, effective September 1!

Emily is a freshwater ecologist and biogeochemist – a scientist who studies how chemical elements and energy cycle through ecosystems. Her research aims to document the extent to which the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems is being altered by land use change, global change and chemical pollution, and examines the efficacy of efforts to protect and restore streams and wetlands.

Emily joins us from Duke University, where she is James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry. She has chaired the Department of Biology for six years, and has been a key contributor to Duke’s Climate Commitment.

She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Emily is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Freshwater Science and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). She will hold a joint academic appointment in the new Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.

Welcome back to Cornell, Emily! 🎉
📌 Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/ecologist-biogeochemist-emily-bernhardt-lead-cornell-atkinson

03/12/2026

Cornell Giving Day is HERE! 🎉
Show your support for Cornell University with a gift to the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

Today, your gift *no matter the size* fuels our mission to address the planet’s most urgent climate and sustainability challenges through student and faculty research.

🌳 Give today and your support goes further: https://givingday.cornell.edu/organizations/cornell-atkinson-center-for-sustainability