RIGs and Faculty Fellows

About Research Interest Groups (RIGs)

In the fall of 2024, the UVA Environmental Institute organized Research Interest Groups (RIGs) to address emerging national priorities and growing societal demand for solutions to specific climate-related and resilience challenges.

RIGs are faculty-led communities designed to accelerate interdisciplinary, high-impact environmental research by convening researchers around strategic themes, emerging opportunities, and collaborative problem-solving.

The 2026-2027 Research Interest Groups (RIGs) are:

AI + Environment
RIG Faculty Fellows include: Antonios Mamalakis

Focused on the intersection of climate science and artificial intelligence, this group explores how AI can drive data-informed, equitable climate solutions. Researchers from diverse fields explore research priorities including how best to leverage AI to drive data-informed, equitable climate solutions, and understanding and mitigating AI’s environmental impacts. This RIG is co-sponsored by the School of Data Science.

Extreme Events
RIG Faculty Fellows include: Huilin Huang

This RIG focuses on projects in both the prediction of extreme events and the strategies to lower risk and increase resilience. Topics can include increased flooding, wildfires, more intense storms, temperature extremes, and more.

Energy + Infrastructure
RIG Faculty Fellows include: Negin Alemazkoor

This group convenes experts dedicated to reducing carbon emissions across sectors. It covers a broad range of topics including renewable energy technologies, nature-based solutions, bioeconomy and low-carbon materials, negative emissions strategies, sustainable infrastructure, and behavioral change for climate action.

RIGs Sub-themes

RIGs were created to be broad and adaptive. Within each RIG, UVA faculty are encouraged to champion specific sub-themes that reflect UVA’s strengths, emerging research directions, and opportunities for external partnership and funding.

Examples of potential sub-themes include:

• Explainable AI (xAI) for environmental decision-making
• Forecasting and community decision-support systems
• AI, energy, and environmental protection
• Grid resilience and distributed energy systems
• Wildfire risk and community adaptation
• Flood forecasting and emergency response

RIG Faculty Fellows

The RIGs are led by Faculty Fellows, who work within one of the existing groups.

RIG Faculty Fellows launch and lead a focused sub-theme. Fellows will bring together UVA faculty, researchers, students, and external collaborators to explore research within the identified sub-theme. 

RIG Faculty Fellows organize and coordinate activities such as flash talks, invited speakers, and workshops that promote collaboration and knowledge exchange, while also identifying funding opportunities and partnership pathways that can advance the sub-theme into competitive research initiatives. Fellows are interested in pursuing collaboration and building community and engagement around their selected theme.

The UVA Environmental Institute can provide the following support for RIG Faculty Fellows:

• Seed funding of up to $10,000
  Additional funding may be requested for activities such as:
              - collaborative meetings and workshops
              - invited speakers
              - stakeholder convenings, external partner and community engagement
• EI staff support is available for: 
              - administration and convening 
              - proposal development
              - workshops, speakers, and stakeholder engagement
              - facilitation of cross-school and external partnerships
              - visibility through EI communications and programming