Sarah States
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Heavy rain, flooding, and summer heat are hitting cities in the Northeast harder, straining sewers, degrading streams, destabilizing slopes, and making neighborhoods uncomfortably hot. One response is nature-based solutions, sometimes called green infrastructure: meadows, woodlands, rain gardens, and bioswales, which are shallow vegetated channels that slow and filter runoff.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
green infrastructure
nature-based solutions
stormwater management
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop a county-wide green infrastructure adoption and installation plan for Allegheny County that addresses stormwater runoff, water quality, urban heat, and carbon sequestration, convening stakeholders in hydrology, stormwater engineering, land management, community engagement, and education.
- Prioritize and monitor green infrastructure installations such as meadows, woodlands, rain gardens, and bioswales, applying real-time methods to improve implementation, maintenance, and monitoring practices.
- Assess the policy and management needs of municipal staff and translate them into a municipal green infrastructure implementation guide and a communications framework for sharing the benefits of green infrastructure with residents.
More about the research
These installations can absorb stormwater, cool the air, store carbon, and improve water quality. Whether they take hold at the scale of a whole county depends as much on municipal priorities, maintenance capacity, and residents' concerns as on engineering.
Why it matters
Municipalities around Pittsburgh face flooding, polluted runoff, unstable slopes, and rising summer heat with limited staff and budgets. A prioritized county-wide plan, an implementation guide written around what municipal staff actually need, and a shared way of communicating benefits could help local governments install and maintain green infrastructure that works, benefiting more than 1.2 million residents in Allegheny County.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nasrin Alamdari
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify the hydrological, meteorological, biological, physical and geochemical processes that control nutrient export from urban landscapes into freshwater lakes.
Marcy Litvak
University of New Mexico, NM·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how forest management, disturbance and climate change water flow, carbon storage and forest health in New Mexico watersheds, using high-resolution remote sensing and a network of ecological observation instruments.
Weiwei Mo
University of New Hampshire, NH·Engineering·Early-career
Test how risk attitudes, interorganizational networks and access to life cycle assessment results shape sustainability outcomes in drinking water emergency response, using a serious game played by stakeholders.
The school
Carnegie Mellon University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $505M a year on research, 346 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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