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Field Sites 		Home > Education & Field Sites > Capstone

Capstone Research Project

The Capstone Research Project brings together the education, research and outreach/service missions of the Institute. They are conducted by teams of undergraduate environmental students in their junior or senior years, either on campus or at one of the Institute field sites in North Carolina and abroad. Topics for the projects are selected from recommendations by Community Advisory Boards and other clients, and focus on a significant environmental issue requiring broadly interdisciplinary research. The projects are a learning experience for our students, a chance for them to conduct team-based research typical of professional practice, and our way of bringing the expertise of Carolina to bear on the issues facing communities. We invite you to explore the results of this work through any of the materials provided below. Please contact the Institute for more information on any of these projects, or to recommend future projects.

Examples

  • Spring 2008
    • Wachovia employee education module - an online tool for Wachovia employees, explaining the environmental, health, and financial impacts of everyday activities at home, at work, and traveling in between. Team members conceptualized the structure and content of this learning module, then collected relevant information, and developed slides and voice-over narration. The team presentation describes the final product launched by Wachovia on Earth Day 2008, and discusses additional topics that exceeded the time/length limits for Wachovia's lonline courses. These materials, relating to food and health, waste, toxics, and transportation, may be used in future learning modules for Wachovia or other audiences. [Presentation | News Article | Online Course Sample Slides]
    • Preserving Focus the Nation - a collection of instructional materials from professors who participated in the January 2008 Focus the Nation national teach-in on climate change. They established a protocol for storing and disseminating such materials to interested faculty across campus, organizing the materials by academic department. The project is ongoing. [Presentation | Summary Report]
    • Evaluating student energy use at UNC - a suite of recommendations for UNC to help reduce student energy use [Presentation | Final Report]
    • UNC Air travel emissions - methodology and calculations for estimating the carbon emissions from UNC air travel [Presentation]
  • Fall 2007
    • Community sustainability self-assessment - demonstration of Analytical Hierarchy Process used with environmental, economic, and social indicators to perform a sustainability self-assessment. The final report documents the process used to select and weight indicators in accordance with community goals, in order to understand current conditions and map out progress toward more sustainable conditions. The data for Chapel Hill are used for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an authoritative review of town policies or practices. Additional work is anticipated on identifying, collecting, and applying reliable and meaningful data to support indicators. This project was funded, in part, by Wallace Genetic. [Presentation | Final Report]
  • Summer 2004
    • Sustainability in Cambridge: Planning the Development of a North West Site for the University of Cambridge [Final Report]