Rob Turner advances sustainability in teaching and scholarship

IAS faculty member Rob Turner helped run an hour-long discussion session at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges & Universities in January. The session was titled Fostering Sustainability Out of a Pandemic: Pathways for Higher Education to Create a More Resilient Institution and Society.

In November, he received notice from the National Association of Geoscience Teachers that two of his online teaching modules have been awarded Exemplary Status following a review by the NAGT’s On the Cutting Edge program. The modules are titled What is Sustainability in the Context of Water? and Water Footprints and they were produced as part of the NSF-funded InTeGrate project.

In October, he published an article co-authored with Sen, K, Shepherd, V, Berglund, T, Quintana, A, Puim, S, Tadmori, R, Turner, R, Khalil, L and Soares, M (2020) on “American Crows as Carriers of Extra Intestinal Pathogenic E. coli and Avian Pathogenic-Like E. coli and Their Potential Impact on a Constructed Wetland” in Microorganisms, 8(10).

In July, his 2019 article, “Antibiotic Resistance of E. coli Isolated From a Constructed Wetland Dominated by a Crow Roost, With Emphasis on ESBL and AmpC Containing E. coli,” was included in the new Frontiers in Microbiology e-book titled Surveying Antimicrobial Resistance: The New Complexity of the Problem.

In May, Turner and Keya Sen were awarded WaterWorks program grant from King County to continue their research on the use of mushroom mycelium to reduce the amounts and virulence of pathogenic bacteria in campus runoff contaminated with crow feces. The $44,000 project which will extend to 2022 is titled Research on Mycoremediation of Contaminated Wetlands.