Three Environmental Futures Fellows Help Communities Navigate a Changing Climate

Three new Environmental Futures Fellows will work on global sustainability through projects such as AI for stormwater management, fixing power loss after hurricanes, and policy solutions for neighborhood distribution of air pollution.

The UVA Environmental Institute announces awards to three University of Virginia graduate students as the 2025 cohort of Environmental Futures Fellows. This program awards summer funding to student researchers investigating critical issues on environmental change.

This year, the Institute is proud to announce the 2025 Environmental Fellows: Zanko Zandsalimi, Kamiar Khayambashi, and Sixuan Zhang.

“This year’s Environmental Futures Fellows are tackling some of the biggest problems communities face in a changing climate using powerful new AI tools and computer models to enhance their research,” said Karen McGlathery, Director of the UVA Environmental Institute. “I am excited once again to see such an impressive group of early-career scholars. It is a pleasure to support each of these.”

Zanko Zandsalimi

Zandsalimi is working on a tool to help cities manage rainwater better, particularly during storms. During storms, water can flood streets and buildings, but using nature-friendly solutions such as green roofs and special sidewalks that let water soak through can help.

This tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly test different ideas and determine the best mix of these solutions to stop flooding while saving money. It learns by looking at how water moves through a city and makes smart choices based on that. Zandsalimi’s project has the potential to help cities stay safer and cleaner, even as climate change brings more extreme weather.

“This fellowship provides a unique opportunity to advance my interdisciplinary research at the intersection of AI, sustainability, and urban water systems,” Zandalimi shared. “I’m excited to contribute to solutions that support climate-resilient cities while gaining valuable experience in collaborative, impact-driven science. I also look forward to mentoring an undergraduate student and sharing the outcomes of this work with the broader research and practitioner community.”

Kamiar Khayambashi

As climate change causes stronger and more frequent hurricanes, it can disable power grids in cities, making it difficult for people to get the help they need. This project aims to develop a method for helping cities and towns restore power quickly after an outage. A computer system (called G-MAPPO) can help guide repair crews to fix the power faster and in the best order. G-MAPPO works like a team, representing different components of a repair crew, that talks and learns from a map of the power grid. This system was tested in Galveston, Texas and showed it can help bring power back more quickly after a storm. This has the potential to facilitate rapid recovery efforts following hurricanes.

“This fellowship directly supports my research on enhancing power system operation and planning in the face of climate change,” said Khayambashi. “My work focuses on developing intelligent, data-driven methods to improve the resilience of electricity distribution networks against extreme weather events. It provides a valuable platform to validate our multi-agent reinforcement learning framework on a real-world test case. I’m particularly looking forward to collaborating across disciplines and mentoring an undergraduate researcher, both of which will expand the reach and practical relevance of this work.“

Sixuan Zhang

This project will use advanced computing technologies to study air pollution, specifically nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), which is emitted from sources such as cars and factories. Researchers have been using satellites to monitor NO₂ from space, but now older satellite pictures are clearer and more detailed using a powerful computer program called WGAN. The new, improved data on nitrogen dioxide is called "EON." With EON, researchers can look closely at how NO₂ has changed in different neighborhoods since 2006. This project will explore whether some neighborhoods have cleaner air than others and why that might be. Zhang believes this could have policy implications, as well.

“Receiving this fellowship means I can focus entirely on my research this summer,” said Zhang. “I’m looking forward to pushing forward on developing a high-resolution long-term NO2 decision-support tool, strengthening my technical skills, and exploring how data can drive more equitable environmental outcomes in different communities.”