Lin Meng, an ISU Ph.D. candidate majoring in Geology, was recently awarded the 2019 Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award. This award recognizes proposals for graduate student-designed research projects that contribute to NASA’s science, technology, and exploration goals.
With the funding, Lin will work with her advisor Dr. Yuyu Zhou, her collaborators Dr. Jiafu Mao from Oak Ridge National Lab and Dr. Zhuosen Wang from NASA to investigate how light pollution and urban heat island impact tree growth in the U.S. cities using remote sensing images and modeling approaches. This project helps to answer one of the key questions in the global change field: how does the terrestrial ecosystem change under the urbanization.