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Project Overview

How do relationships between scientists, farmers, water managers, and authorities influence the production, dissemination, and outcome of new scientific knowledge? This project establishes an international research and education partnership to promote a political-institutional model of science that links sociological and engineering methods in a people-centered approach to the human-climate-water-agriculture-energy nexus in the Blue Nile basin (BNB), Ethiopia.

The project is a multi-year collaborative endeavor that will run from 2016 to 2021. By the end of the project, the research team will have crafted state-of-the-art tools to help smallholder farmers make practical decisions about water, crops, and fertilizers and ultimately gain more secure access to food and water in the face of increasingly challenging climatic extremes.

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Project Goals

pire food and water securityThe UConn PIRE project brings people and resources together across disciplinary, cultural, and geographical boundaries to promote knowledge-driven and rights-based interventions that enhance food and water security in vulnerable settings. We promote a political-institutional model of science that links sociological and engineering methods for a people-centered approach. Our political-institutional approach integrates graduate and undergraduate education, professional training, and community outreach into the research program to develop the human capital and social connections between all stakeholders—scientists, farmers, policymakers and students in the United States and in Ethiopia. The project achieves its objectives through:

Provision of superior quality seasonal forecast information at a scale relevant to local farmers and water resource managers -- Learn More

Identifying political-institutional barriers that influence the uptake of new forecast information -- Learn More

Training a new generation of global expert that constitute competitive international workforce -- Learn More

Engineering News

Successful UConn researchers offer Insight on fruitful collaboration with private industry

Dr. Cato T. Laurencin, MD, Ph.D., K.C.S.L, was the keynote 2025 Wallace H. Coulter Lecturer at the world renowned Pittcon Conference in Boston.

Sir Cato T. Laurencin, Albert and Wilda Van Dusen Distinguished Endowed Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Connecticut, is the recipient of the 2025 Dickson Prize in Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh’s highest honor.

A total of 31 UConn students, who will study in 14 different countries, will receive a total of nearly $94,000 in scholarship funds through the Gilman program

Contact Us

Prof. Emmanouil Anagnostou

Principal Investigator, Water and Food Security PIRE
Director, Eversource Energy Center
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut
Email: manos@uconn.edu

 

Kristen Kirksey

Project Manager, Water and Food Security PIRE
Graduate Research Assistant
Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut
Email: kristen.kirksey@uconn.edu

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