-Magdalen Lindeberg
Congratulations to Sara Perl Egendorf, selected as one of four recipients of a 2020 postdoctoral fellowship from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Egendorf will be working with Cornell advisor Jenny Kao-Kniffin in the SIPS Horticulture Section and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation (OER). The Cornell Postdoctoral Fellowships in Sustainability are designed to stimulate cross-disciplinary research and the development of sustainable solutions through connections with external partners such as OER.
Egendorf, who received her PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the CUNY Graduate Center, has studied issues related to urban soil since 2014 and previously collaborated with Kao-Kniffin. Her Atkinson funded project is entitled “Greening the Smart City: Developing an IoT Platform for Enhancing Urban Soil Ecosystem Services, Food Justice, and Climate Change Mitigation”. Working in the New York City area, she will be gathering data from urban farms and other urban soil stakeholders, establishing field trials that assess a variety of soil parameters, and developing a web-based mobile platform for sharing and accessing data. The ultimate goal of the two-year project is to provide data-driven metrics to enhance sustainable practices and urban greening.
Kao-Kniffin’s research program is generally focused on ecology of invasive plants and weeds and the microbial mediation of plant traits. Specific areas of research involve selection of root-zone microbes that modulate plant traits, identification of the microbial compounds responsible for alteration of plant growth, and assembly of plant-microbe communities that maximize desired ecological outcomes.
In the last five years, Cornell Atkinson has supported more than 20 postdoctoral fellows in translating research into real-world results, from biological control agents for small-scale farmers to renewable energy in China. By developing a cohort of postdoctoral scholars on campus working in sustainability and related fields, we are also building a core group of leaders capable of creating effective, workable solutions to the most serious sustainability questions. The other three 2020 postdoctoral fellowship awardees will be working with faculty in Natural Resources, Development Sociology, and the Dyson School.