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Brooklyn, NY, February 22, 2016 - New York Sea Grant, in partnership with the Science and Resilience Institute @ Jamaica Bay (SRIJB), is happy to announce the arrival of Helen Cheng in her capacity as New York Sea Grant’s Jamaica Bay Coastal Resilience Specialist starting February 22. Helen will be designing outreach programs to support community engagement and research efforts to enhance resilience for the communities within the Jamaica Bay Watershed. Helen will work at the Science and Resilience Institute @ Jamaica Bay office on the Brooklyn College campus.
"New York Sea Grant welcomes the opportunity to partner with the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay in this critical effort," says Bill Wise, New York Sea Grant Director.
Helen comes to the Institute from a yearlong stint as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Sea Grant John D. Knauss 2015 Marine Policy Fellow, a highly competitive fellowship program among the nation’s highest qualified graduate students. As such, she was the Coastal Communities Specialist working in the National Sea Grant Office in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she synthesized Sea Grant Network research and extension activities surrounding coastal community sustainable development, hazard resilience, and climate change adaptation and was a member of NOAA‘s Coastal Hazards Resilience Workshop Planning and Support team.
"Increasing coastal urban resilience is a matter of applying general principles of coastal hazards and climate change preparedness to the unique environment of densely populated urban communities,” continues Director Wise. “Helen and her colleagues will tailor these principles to local conditions in the New York Metropolitan Area helping local government and stakeholder groups implement them in decision making."
“Learning about the Nation’s top issues makes this an exciting time to be working on Jamaica Bay resilience, especially since the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy,” says Helen, a Brooklyn native eager to get to work on her home turf—or surf as it were.
Helen earned her BS in Biology from Stony Brook University and MS in Zoology from University of New Hampshire with research experience on horseshoe crabs, lobsters and scallops. Her interests and capabilities in both the natural sciences and the applied, stretching from New England to the Mid-Atlantic, make Helen a natural for her new role. Welcome home, Helen.
SRIJB is a new research center focused on enhancing environmental, social, and economic resilience in communities of Jamaica Bay funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the City of New York.
More Info: New York Sea Grant and SRIatJB
The Science and Resilience Institute @ Jamaica Bay
(SRIJB) is a research center focused on enhancing environmental,
social, and economic resilience in communities of Jamaica Bay funded by
the Rockefeller Foundation and the City of New York.
New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University
and the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of 34 university-based
programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
National Sea Grant College Program.
Since 1971, NYSG has represented a statewide network of integrated
research, education and extension services promoting coastal community
economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness
and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.
Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists
and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based
information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries,
federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers,
educators, the media and the interested public.
The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY
Buffalo, SUNY Oswego and the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office
in Newark. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook
University in Long Island, Brooklyn College and Cornell Cooperative
Extension in NYC and Kingston in the Hudson Valley.
For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube links. NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published quarterly. Our program also produces an occasional e-newsletter,"NOAA Sea Grant's Social Media Review," via its blog, www.nyseagrant.org/blog.
