News

Hudson Valley Community Air Network, led by Bard College’s Community Sciences Lab at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities, was featured by Chronogram magazine in an article about the ongoing efforts to track and trace pollution in the air of the Hudson Valley region. The article notes that for decades, the area’s environmental consciousness has been organized around water, whereas air was not tracked closely until initiatives led by Bard’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. The establishment of the Kingston Air Quality Initiative, and the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition in 2021, paved the way for this year’s efforts by Bard and Ulster County to install 17 new street-level sensors across the county. These newest sensors are strategically placed in public areas where people gather and learn, like libraries, town halls, and community centers, to collect data that can be accessed freely by the surrounding communities. “We didn’t want community data to be controlled by private people or entities,” says Desiree Lyle, program director of Bard College’s Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. 

The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities puts Bard’s dedication to the environment, science, and social change into practice to support the fair management of our shared natural resources. The center conducts quantitative research in the natural and social sciences, crafts communication, participates in policy making, and bridges academic inquiry with community needs. The data and insights collected through CESH related projects are applied directly back to communities, with the end goal of addressing and solving environmental problems in real time.
 

Jacinta Creel Vallejo ’24, a Bard alumna who majored in physics and philosophy, has been accepted to the University of Edinburgh for an MSc in Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences. She has also received the Higgs Scholarship, awarded by the university’s School of Physics and Astronomy on the basis of academic merit. Creel Vallejo, who developed an interest in the field while working on her Bard SPROJ project with physicist Clara Sousa Silva, chose Edinburgh for its interdisciplinary approach. Creel Vallejo is particularly interested in how scientists can infer life on distant worlds from inherently incomplete data. “My ambition is to investigate the limits of biosignature detection by combining observational modelling with laboratory simulation of abiotic false positives, sharpening the criteria by which a detection claim can be trusted,” she said. 

The Bard Physics Program is dedicated to helping students at all levels gain a better understanding of the universe and how it works.