Dr. Alexandra Zachwieja Awarded a Grant from the 2020 U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Broad Agency

Dr. Alexandra Zachwieja, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Minnesota, Duluth Campus, was recently awarded a $4,014,935 grant over a span of five years (6/1/21 to 5/31/25) from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Broad Agency, in partnership with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab (CRREL) and will act as the Co-Investigator for a project titled, "Defense Resiliency Platform Against Extreme Cold Weather (DRP)."

Dr. Zachwieja and her postdoctoral students, working with Principal Investigator Olaf Kulke, associate professor from the UMD Department of Geography and Philosophy, will model future climate change scenarios for twelve at-risk Alaskan coastal communities to identify likely community hazard locations, as well as any potential biosecurity risks related to permafrost thaw by combining cutting-edge climate data with historical and indigenous community knowledge. All maps created by the project will become part of a publicly available data platform about climate insecurity in the Arctic.