Undergraduate Sustainability Research Award

Winners of previous awards can be accessed in the Sustainability Student Showcase on ScholarWorks, the University’s digital repository.

NOTE: From 2012-2020, the award required submission of a research paper written for a class. 

The 2021 Undergraduate Sustainability Award was a collaboration between the UMass Amherst Libraries and Lillian Kurina ’21, a Natural Resource Conservation major and part of the Waste and Recycling Fellowship through the Physical Plant. For her semester project, Lillian developed the concept of the 2021 Sustainability Award focusing on art to inspire UMass Amherst undergraduates of all backgrounds to reflect on their relationship to the environment and how they experience climate change. View Sustainability through the Arts Scholarship Submissions.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Undergraduate Sustainability Research Award!

• "The Ongoing Water Crisis in the Horn of Africa" by Raul Vera
• "Resilient Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Landscape Design in Building Sustainable and Robust Ecosystems" by Ezekiel Cochin
• "Reinforcing Cloud System Security and Sustainability with Rust-Based Particle Swarm Optimization Task Scheduling" by David Gerard
• "Grounded Podcast" by Nathaly Corella
• "Standardized Methods for Observing Plant-Microbe Interactions" by Trevor Melusen

Their winning submissions will be added to the Sustainable UMass Student Showcase collection in our institutional repository, ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst.

Congratulations to our 2023 Undergraduate Sustainability Research Award Winners! Their winning submissions have been added to the Sustainable UMass Student Showcase collection in our institutional repository ScholarWorks.

• Madeline Fabian '23 for "The Oak & The Mailbox"
• Max Feldman '24 for "A Carbon Conundrum"
• Jo Fuchs '24 and Hannah Gould '25 for "Community Classroom of Hope"
• Shivaangi Salhotra '26 for "Trash Talk: Rethinking the Notion of Waste"
• Nathaniel Wright '23 for "Thermal efficiencies of Green Walls in Building Structures in the Northeast United States"

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2022 UMass Amherst Libraries Undergraduate Sustainability Awards! 

Winners:

• What has Fast Fashion got to do with Sustainability?
  • Shakhi Begum
• Toto, We’re Not in Hadley Anymore!: Environmental, Economic, and Cultural Complexities Surrounding the Adoption of No-Till Farming on Large-Scale Farms
  • Theodore Eagle
• Community Food Action Plan
  • Adam Finke
• Urban Greening Techniques in U.S. Cities:  Public Welfare or Social Warfare?
  • Gwynnevere Klumpenaar
• Cooked Nature: What Three Classic Books on the American Lawn Can Tell Us About Our Current Struggle to Mitigate Climate Change
  • Gregory Poelker-McGee

Honorable Mentions:

• Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactors as a Treatment for Wastewater and Biogas Production at University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Brady Bell
  • Marley Norton
  • Ariel Fine
• Undergraduates Raising Awareness for Anaerobic Digestion
  • Kieran Tay
  • Nicholas Sbalbi
  • Michael Forozis
  • Flo Sabatini