This project was funded through the “Social and Economic Impacts of PFAS in the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain Regions” opportunity. 

The main objective of our proposal is how to communicate risk to focus on factors that could increase compliance with PFAS recommendations (e.g., using water filtration systems) and avoid unintended consequences, such as dismissing a complex message due to lack of understanding or generating fear and threat perception without a means to alleviate the threat. We have three studies where we focus specifically on: 1.) What types of information people look for online about PFAS; 2.) what type of messaging is most effective for communicating about the health risk of PFAS in an experiment with a focus on the variables of efficacy to enact recommendations, level of fear and threat conveyed by the message, and complexity of the message, and, 3.) What PFAS-related messages are most engaging in a real-world paid message test conducted on social media to residents who rely on municipal water supplies, including tests targeting both English and Spanish-speakers.

Wisconsin Sea Grant will support outreach efforts for this project.

This project was funded through the “Social and Economic Impacts of PFAS in the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain Regions” opportunity. 

The National Sea Grant Law Center seeks to build a foundation for advancing regional consensus regarding PFAS regulation by fulfilling the following project objectives: (1) conducting a legal scan of each state in the regions related to PFAS contamination to identify and compile relevant provisions; (2) conducting a comparative analysis of legal approaches adopted in the Great Lakes, as well as in other regions in the country, to illustrate the range and differences in policy tools; and (3) developing 2-3 case studies of state actions addressing PFAS contamination to explore policy challenges and legal risks.

Minnesota Sea Grant and Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant will support outreach efforts for this project.

This project was funded through the “Social and Economic Impacts of PFAS in the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain Regions” opportunity. Key objectives are:

• To characterize fish consumption behavior among recreational fishers in two predominantly African American populations in the Lake Michigan area by holding a listening session and conducting surveys at fishing sites.
• To explore these two communities’ familiarity with contaminants in fish including PFAS, their understanding of fish advisories and the potential health risks of eating recreationally-caught fish, preferred sources of health information, and behavior change domains.

Michigan Sea Grant will support outreach efforts for this project. 

In this one-year research project, I propose a data-driven fragility curve to investigate the damage level of the levee system considering the structural conditions, flooding level and environmental conditions in the Southern Lake Michigan region and provide recommendations on the maintenance strategy suitable for the flooding area. The goal of the proposed research is to mitigate potential losses, improve the current levee system maintenance and therefore enhance the flood resilience of the levee system and coastal communities in the Great Lake region. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the levee system safety in the Great Lake region.

This research project proposes a computational model validated by experimental testing to improve various characteristics of sustainable cement and concrete by reusing waste materials from the Great Lakes as additives in sustainable building materials. The model will be paired with AI algorithms to efficiently determine the feasibility of recycling bottom sediment from the Great Lakes as a sustainable construction material and analyze the impact of the additive on concrete performance. The goal of the proposed research is to reduce environmental pollution and improve the current ecological system by recycling the bottom sediments in the Great Lakes region, thus improving the efficiency of concrete use in actual construction and the ecological sustainability of the Great Lakes region.

During the given one-year research period, I plan to develop a data-driven model integrating the physical model of infrastructure vulnerable to hazard and artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms to offer precautions and suggestions to resist natural hazards and enhance infrastructure flood resilience for the southern Lake Michigan communities. The proposed research targets to provide coastal communities with on-time and accessible suggestions to resist flooding attacks, support coastal industrial development without interference, give organizations reasonable, efficient recommendations to minimize the flooding impact on infrastructure, and offer the government customized design advice for infrastructure in the southern Lake Michigan region. Most importantly, this research will call public attention to the resilience of coastal communities and infrastructure.