Kevan Moffett, assistant professor of environmental hydrology in the WSU Vancouver School of Environment, has earned a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program award from the National Science Foundation. Moffett’s five-year, $690,534 grant provides long-term financial support for studying how the urban water cycle interacts with heat generated by urban areas.
The highly competitive CAREER awards are given annually to pre-tenure teacher–scholars to help cover graduate student support and tuition as well as materials, supplies, data management, communication, education development and overhead costs.
Moffett has found that most hydrological research takes place in “natural” areas, but most of the world’s people live in cities where humans have reconfigured the landscape into alternating patterns of pavement and vegetation. She will explore how lessons from natural science conducted in rural natural areas might apply to urban environments.
She also will consider whether understanding urban heat and water balances could have applications for making cities more livable in the face of global change.