BU students lead in climate research
Written by Bryn Gregory | Published April 2025
For students interested in climate research, there are few things better than spending the summer digging into solutions that could improve climate resilience. What’s even better? Getting paid to do it. Thanks to the support of generous donors, Brian Sousa (SPH’25), Lucia Vilallonga (CAS’22, ’23), and Xiaofei Qin (GRS’25, ’27) were able to spend their summers doing what they do best: finding ways to make the world a better place through climate change mitigation.
Sousa, Vilallonga, and Qin are former Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) Summer Fellows. An interdisciplinary center, IGS supports researchers from diverse backgrounds as they explore urgent climate and sustainability challenges, including climate governance, sustainability systems, and planetary and environmental health. Through the IGS Graduate Student Summer Fellows program, BU graduate students enrolled in a master’s or doctoral program gain access to the financial support and resources they need to explore urgent climate challenges.
Climate solutions and public health
Brian Sousa’s (SPH’25) interests center around climate mitigation strategies and their impacts on public health, as well as shaping policy that encourages a transition away from fossil fuels.
During his fellowship, Sousa examined various climate mitigation technologies—such as wind, solar, carbon capture, and others—in different areas of the United States. “I was basically looking at these different climate mitigation technologies in terms of how much bang for your buck you would get—how much it costs to build it versus the carbon reductions that you’re getting and how we can incorporate the public health benefits into that comparison,” Sousa says.
The funding from the IGS Graduate Student Summer Fellows program was essential to supporting Sousa’s work. “It’s been huge, having the freedom to look at these questions that aren’t tied to a specific grant,” he says. “Research work can be a little bit slow sometimes, you’re not able to answer questions as fast as you want because you’re stuck trying to get funding. And so when we have opportunities like this, it’s super beneficial.”
After he graduates, Sousa plans to continue the work he’s started at BU by pursuing a PhD. “I feel like I got a good head start here in terms of kick-starting my PhD,” he reflects. When Sousa graduates, he hopes to build the case for climate justice through his research, and work in the government or in a nonprofit setting.
Predicting rainfall to help vulnerable communities
For Lucia Vilallonga (CAS’22, ’23), the IGS Graduate Student Summer Fellows program provided a space to explore statistical methods with applications to the wellbeing of vulnerable communities who rely on rainfall for their livelihood. “We depend so much on our atmosphere—you know, a stable climate. Rainfall is just a hard problem to predict,” she explains, “[With modeling], you can prepare. You can implement flooding mitigation. You could prepare your home, community, or neighborhood.”
A triple Terrier in the making, Lucia Vilallonga (CAS’22, ’23) is working toward her PhD in statistics. Her research focuses on statistics for environmental problems. In 2022, Vilallonga and Olivia Henning (CAS’22) were awarded the Janetos Climate Action Prize for their project that examined emissions from employee air travel at BU.
Receiving funding for her research through the IGS Graduate Student Summer Fellows program was critical to helping Vilallonga, who hopes to continue building on the research she’s conducting for her PhD in a postdoc position. “The biggest impact is that I was getting paid for my research,” she says.
Heat policies and cooling strategies
During her fellowship with IGS, Xiaofei Qin (GRS’25, ’27) analyzed heat policies from various urban areas in the United States to understand what heat action they used as a remedy—for example, planting trees.
She found that not all communities are created equal when it comes to heat mitigation strategies. Discriminatory housing practices like redlining and underinvestment in low-income neighborhoods mean some areas are ill-equipped to handle the effects of a warming planet. “When you go into a nice neighborhood with a lot of trees, it is cooler than the average temperatures in the neighborhoods which have less greening, or low-income neighborhoods. Cooling infrastructure in cities is not evenly distributed,” she says.
A third-year PhD student in the Department of Earth & Environment, Qin’s research focuses on collective action and equitable governing frameworks for climate change adaptation. Specifically, she examines heat governance systems in urban areas and heat policies.
Qin’s summer fellowship with IGS wouldn’t have been possible without funding from generous donors. “[Financial support] not only helped me survive the summer, but it also facilitated my collaboration with other people,” she reflects. During her fellowship, she worked with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and received support from faculty across departments, including public health.
Having personal experience with the impacts of inadequate heat infrastructure informs Qin’s interest in the subject. “I grew up in the southern part of China, so I definitely feel that climate change influences everybody’s life,” she says.
You can support students like Brian, Lucia, and Xiaofei by making a gift to the IGS Graduate Student Summer Fellows program today.