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We’re bringing all our knowledge and skills to the table

There are more pressures and demands being placed on our planet’s resources than ever before, and, thus, there is also a greater need to preserve and build capacity for the future. Our faculty are tackling these challenges as they engage in applied and practical research that seeks to help us understand and solve some of our most complex global problems. Along the way, they are also training the next generation of leaders and policymakers who will carry on this legacy.

Assistant Professor Stephanie Zick’s work takes on some of the largest and most impactful weather phenomena in the world — tropical cyclones.

Through the use of spatial methods, she focuses on the physical mechanisms that fuel storms to understand how they interact with large-scale environments and how precipitation evolves prior to and during landfall.

We’re taking on the big issues — and we won’t give up    

As a society, the environmental challenges we are facing can seem overwhelming. That’s why a sense of optimism is critical and drives our faculty-led research projects. The work that is happening in the college impacts management and policy decisions related to every aspect of the natural environment, from the atmosphere to what’s on the ground to what’s in the soil.

Below are just a few of the critical research areas in which CNRE faculty are working. Click on each to read more about the research:

Our faculty are world-renowned experts in their fields

They are scholars, researchers, innovators, and change agents. They are leaders who take on the problems of the world and look for solutions, and then teach those who will follow them to ensure that their work will continue.

They are the world’s experts and they are right here at Virginia Tech.

Find a faculty expert

Each tree’s growth rings contain a storehouse of information, but for Brian Strahm, it’s the layers of soil below the surface that are a gateway to discovery.

Strahm studies the soils that are the hub of biological and chemical activity in forest ecosystems — and the key to understanding, predicting, and regulating forest productivity and environmental quality.

Faculty research in the news