Carie Green receives NSF CAREER award

May 21, 2018

University Relations

Carie Green, an associate professor of graduate education in the School of Education, has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.

Green will receive $591,600 from the NSF for a five-year project entitled, “A longitudinal study of the emotional and behavioral processes of environmental identity development among rural and non-rural Alaskan children.”

"I am very pleased to be able to launch this study,” said Green. “It’s the first of its kind to explore the formative emotional and behavioral processes that Alaskan children have in nature from a child’s point of view."

Green’s project will use parent surveys, children’s drawings and descriptions, child-led nature tours using wearable cameras, and educational approaches to investigate how exposure to the natural world shapes children’s values, perceptions and behaviors. The project will track two cohorts of children, one a group living in the primarily Alaska Native village of Unalakleet and the other a set of non-Native children in Fairbanks. Data will be collected from children at 4-5 years of age and again when they are 7-8 years old.

The project will address two research questions: What informs Alaska children's emotions and behaviors during outdoor wilderness experiences, and how do children's experiences in the Alaska wilderness affect development over time?

The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program recognizes early-career faculty who have a strong potential to show leadership in their field by integrating education and research. Green, who has been at UAF since 2014 and was recently granted tenure, is the second UAF faculty to receive the award this spring. The NSF announced in April that Srijan Aggarwal, assistant professor of engineering, would receive $508,000 for his proposal, "Fundamental investigation of biofilm mechanical properties in drinking water distribution systems."

Both Green and Aggarwal received significant prior support from the NSF through EPSCoR, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Aggarwal was hired at UAF through Alaska’s NSF EPSCoR program, while Alaska NSF EPSCoR provided support for research projects by Green in both Fairbanks and Unalakleet that helped lay the foundation for her CAREER proposal.