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The Honor the Future campaign, the largest in University history, concluded in 2025, thanks to thousands of loyal supporters. Its impact on students, faculty, facilities, and research reaches across Charlottesville, Wise County, and Northern Virginia as it continues to advance the school in its third century of service to the commonwealth, nation, and world.
We live on a water planet. Oceans, lakes, rivers, and wetlands cover 71% of the Earth’s surface. Water may appear to be everywhere, but it is unevenly distributed across continents, nations, ecosystems, and human populations. Access to clean, dependable water is essential to life.
The Environmental Institute at UVA focuses on interdisciplinary research and training that exists at the intersection of environmental change and human well-being. The institute connects faculty, students, and citizens to create solutions for a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable future.
In 2019, a gift from A. Cary Brown (Col ’84) through the Fiddlehead Fund launched the Water Futures Initiative, the first of its kind within the Environmental Institute. This two-year pan-University project brought together faculty, students, and post-doctoral fellows to address three themes related to water futures: resilient urban water systems; coastal water futures; and water security, justice, and politics. Brown’s gift was matched by the University, and the initiative has since attracted federal funding, serving as a model for other programs within the institute.
“It established the structure that we’re using now to fund other initiatives where we bring faculty, students, and post-docs together to work collectively on different aspects of an environmental challenge,” said Karen McGlathery, director of the Environmental Institute and Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Environmental Sciences at UVA. “It was a first, and it launched this model at the institute that’s been very effective.”
The Water Futures Initiative was designed to seek solutions to major socio-environmental challenges in water security and to achieve synthesis across disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives by linking people and programs at UVA with leading scholars at peer universities and practitioners in the field. The goal was to build strong, collaborative teams, centered at UVA and primed to respond to major water resilience challenges and opportunities. Each team was led by a pair of faculty fellows, one from a partner institution and one from UVA. The teams included a post-doctoral fellow or other research staff and student researchers.
A pan-University seminar series coinciding with a Water and Watershed Resilience Seminar in spring 2019 taught by Karen McGlathery and Larry Band, Ernest Ern Professor of Environmental Sciences and professor of civil and environmental engineering, brought more than 50 leading international water scholars to UVA. A Water Futures Research Summit that followed in summer 2020 highlighted transformative results from the research teams.
“A couple of exciting things came out of the initiative,” said McGlathery. “We had three post-docs who worked on the project launch their careers in high-profile positions at peer institutions. Elliott White is now an assistant professor at Stanford, Kazi Tamaddun is at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Alison Glassie is an assistant professor of environment at Northeastern University.”
The initiative’s outcomes also produced several articles by UVA faculty in high-ranking professional journals. External grants included $500,000 from the National Science Foundation to the UVA co-leader, Xi Yang, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, and a collaborator at Duke for a research coordination network to determine the risk of saltwater intrusion from sea level rise. Another $5 million grant came from the NSF, also for a project on coastal flooding and saltwater intrusion that works with communities to find adaptation solutions.
Perhaps one of the most unusual results from the Water Futures Initiative came in the form of an artistic endeavor. A 2020 collaboration with scientists working in the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research program and staff at UVA’s Coastal Research Center and a group of artists explored the science behind ghost forests along the Virginia coast from an artist’s perspective. Ghost forests occur when rising sea levels cause seawater to intrude into low-lying coastal forests. An exhibit of their work, which included paintings by Eastern Shore artists and a virtual tour of a ghost forest, was displayed at the Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, Virginia.
None of these varied outcomes would have been possible without Brown’s initial gift. “Cary’s been a strong advocate and enthusiastic supporter for the kind of work that we’re doing at the institute,” McGlathery said. “In the future, other donors can make a gift to the institute to focus on a topic that brings people together to generate research discoveries, to create real-world solutions, and to train the next generation of environmental leaders. It’s a tangible expression that signals this is a moment to invest in the environment at the University.”
