The research includes birds’ eye views of shoreline erosion and human efforts to replace lost sediments in berms and dunes, using pictures taken with highly precise unmanned aerial vehicles (also known as UAVs or drones) by a team in Montclair State’s Coastal UAV/Drone Research Lab.

The research is led by Jesse Kolodin ’11 MS, ’21 PhD, who successfully defended his dissertation on July 9 for his doctorate in Environmental Science and Management. He is studying the interplay between the coastal mitigation projects being installed in New Jersey since Superstorm Sandy, including beach nourishment and engineered dune construction, and the economic impacts on the local coastal communities.

The work has led to a one-year fellowship with the Rutgers University Eagleton Institute of Politics, where he will be working to educate and inform state officials on the science behind some of New Jersey’s major coastal challenges.

Kolodin is an adjunct professor of Earth and Environmental Studies. He earned his Master of Science in Geosciences from Montclair State and performed his doctoral research under the advisement of Associate Professor Jorge Lorenzo-Trueba. The research was partially funded through the National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program.

Kolodin recently began projects leveraging important new survey technologies to perform hedonic regression analysis for New Jersey beachfront communities and the impact these artificial dunes have on local property values.

“One goal moving forward is to establish a user-friendly tool that local, county and state managers can use to assess their future costs, thus, planning and budgeting for better resiliency in the long term. The tool incorporates a component of erosion monitoring, using drones or UAVs,” Kolodin says.

At a coastal test site in Long Branch, New Jersey, Kolodin pilots the Earth and Environmental Studies department’s drones that fly multispectral, thermal and light detection sensors. The flights demonstrate the methodology and potential advantages of using this high-precision equipment, especially when compared to lower-resolution/higher-cost alternatives, like satellites or planes, Kolodin explains.

The Coastal UAV/Drone Research Lab is led by Lorenzo-Trueba. In addition to Kolodin, student researchers include Shane Daiek, Environmental Science and Management PhD candidate; and Shane Nichols-O’Neill, Earth and Environmental Studies graduate student.

Summer undergrad collaborators from the Computer Science Department include Jakub Pecak and Britnie Gonzalez-Moodie, who are both co-advised by Lorenzo-Trueba and Associate Computer Science Professor Aparna Varde. Professor Danlin Yu, whose research interests include Geographic Information Science, and Professor Mark Chopping, remote sensing expert, also assist.

“Some coastal homeowners – specifically beachfront homeowners – are reluctant to have these large-engineered dunes installed because they may block their views, or that their access will become restricted, or that their once private beach is now public,” Kolodin says. “Given the aggregate trends in real estate, we can discretely measure the increase in property value that the ‘whole’ town receives, which ultimately may translate into certain towns identifying the needs for a more substantial future budget to offset increasing rates of erosion due to growing rates of storm activity, a by-product of anthropogenically-induced sea-level rise and global warming.”

Kolodin will begin the Eagleton Science and Politics Fellowship this summer, joining a small and select group of PhD scientists in pursuit of bringing their scientific expertise and knowledge to the forefront of New Jersey policy.

“I find this to be an opportunistic time for myself and my research, as New Jersey is currently embarking on their ambitious Climate Change Resilience Strategy, including additional coastal projects where my background may serve the state well,” Kolodin says.

The program begins with an intensive summer training seminar focused on New Jersey politics and government, covering topics such as effective communication strategies, power structures and political processes. Throughout the year, Science Fellows participate in professional development and networking sessions organized by the Institute.

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren

Janoff received the Jaia Syvitski Student Modeler Award for 2021 given by the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System to recognize outstanding achievement in surface modeling, with a focus on how modeling is used to address scientific and societal challenges.

Completing his doctoral program last January in Environmental Science and Management, Janoff is currently a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow, working with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation on projects that include decarbonization of the maritime transportation system (covering both domestic and transoceanic shipping), port and Coast Guard shoreside infrastructure resilience to sea level rise, Jones Act determinations on offshore wind farm construction, supply chain and maritime workforce safety issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and agency oversight of the Coast Guard, Maritime Administration, and Federal Maritime Commission. In this role, he has briefed members of Congress, drafted letters to relevant agencies, prepared hearing materials, drafted legislation, and participated in various subcommittee and committee meetings with environmental NGOs, industry groups, agency officials, member offices and House leadership.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) supported his previous research through its Dynamics of Coupled Natural-Human Systems program.

Janoff delivered a  during the annual meeting of the NSF’s scientific center Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, and received the award on May 17 judged on the basis of ingenuity, applicability and contribution toward the advancement of geoscience modeling.

You May Also Like:

• Marine Exploration

Arye will give a 15 minute keynote presentation at the CSDMS 2021 Annual Meeting at the end of May; this talk will be posted on YouTube. Additionally, the award will be formally presented to Arye on Monday, May 17th, 2021.

Last Year’s Awardee Presentation

Back in port at Wachapreague, Virginia after a day of muddy field work on Parramore Island.

Time is repetitive, the past constantly informing the future. The mantra, “If I dig down deep enough” (pun intended), is what inspired my research at ����vlog. As an environmental scientist with a focus in coastal geology/geomorphology, I’m sort of a historian at heart, searching for answers in the archives of the Earth. Using and developing models informed by real-world observations, my goal is to infer the sensitivity of coastal systems to changes: in the past, now – and in the future, for example, from the increasing rate of sea-level rise as the ocean warms and land ice melts. Today, I’m continuing this line of research at the , a development I owe to my experience in Montclair’s Environmental Science and Management (ENSM) PhD program.

Maybe it was no surprise that I gravitated to modeling, even though it was something I initially never thought I would do (new students take note: this might be true for you too!). By its nature, modeling is interdisciplinary, being applicable to not only a multitude of Earth systems, but also evaluating data and parameters generated by an endless array of techniques—it forces you to wear different hats, as some would say. In fact, in my research at MSU, I had hats for field geology, remote sensing, geography, and stratigraphy, and maybe a few other disciplines I’m forgetting in the moment. Some days I was tromping around the marshes of Parramore Island, Virginia, collecting hand auger samples, and other days I was making time-lapse movies of coastal change from sequences of satellite images. Together, these experiences gave me the skills to do cutting edge and stimulating science, and moreover, opened the door to a postdoc I can be passionate about.

Co-advised by applied mathematicians Dr. Eric Forgoston (Department of Mathematical Sciences) and Dr. Lora Billings (Dean, College of Science and Mathematics), Dr. Nieddu set out studying how stochastic, random interactions of individuals in a population can affect the outbreak, spread, and extinction of an infectious disease. Using analytical and numerical methods for stochastic dynamical systems, he studied a variety of problems that exhibit complex dynamics, related by each problem’s involvement with the exploration of the interplay between connected systems, without explicitly modeling the elements that are external to the system of interest. In particular, Dr. Nieddu studied:

• the contribution of non-zero steady-state cycling to the longevity of a population with multiple metastable states
• determined the optimal path to disease extinction in a stochastic Ebola virus disease (EVD) model and developed a method to indicate outbreak vulnerability when the EVD-population is weakly coupled to the disease reservoir
• generalized the concept of outbreak vulnerability beyond weakly coupled systems so that one can identify a practical barrier in parameter space that divides the region into ‘weak/strong coupling’ and a ‘fully connected zone’ for which the two populations in question cannot be said to be separate sub-populations.

Graduating with his doctorate in 2018, Dr. Nieddu has now moved to New Mexico where he is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the T-6 Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Division at studying the viral dynamics of infection and the role of the immune response for the influenza A virus and human immunodeficiency virus. The influenza A virus (IAV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are important human pathogens, responsible for millions of human deaths each year. Both pathogens pose significant challenges to the development of effective therapeutics. At Los Alamos National Lab, Dr. Nieddu uses stochastic modeling methods to help understand viral dynamics of infection, and the role of the immune response in persistent infections. The results will be used to guide the development of effective therapies for IAV and HIV. This will be accomplished through close work with experimentalists; the model results will be used to guide the experiments, and the experimental results will be used to inform (and improve) the models.

There exist enormous genetic and genomic diversity for IAV within a host. These diversities drive IAV’s incredible ability to adapt, evolve, and ultimately abate vaccine efficacy. Most viral particles, however, are not capable of reproducing alone. These semi-infectious particles (SIPS), need other SIPS –and the infrastructure of a viable cell– in order to reproduce. Fully infectious particles (FIPS) comprise less than 10% of the viral population. Alongside these infectious particles are the innocuous defective interfering particles (DIPS), which cannot reproduce, and actually compete with SIPS and FIPS for reproduction resources. An understanding of the interactions between these particles is key to developing effective therapies. However, very little is understood about the specific viral dynamics. Mixing experimentation with mathematical modeling can help us to better understand the biology, and therefore develop prevention and treatment strategies.

HIV poses very different challenges. Combination antiretroviral treatments (cARTs) effectively suppress viral load; however, it does not eradicate the virus due to the existence of the latent reservoir. Recently, clinical trials show that a small fraction of patients achieve post-treatment control (PTC) after cART, although all patients do eventually experience viral rebound. However, the factors determining PTC vs. viral rebound, such as the viral diversity in the reservoir and the heterogeneity in the immune response, are still not clear. There is quite a bit of variation in rebound times among patients, and it is believed that viral rebound is a stochastic process. To that end, Dr. Nieddu is building and analyzing an in-host model, capable of displaying viral rebound after long periods of post-treatment control.

Congratulations to Dr. Nieddu on his new position! We wish him well as he continues his career, and look forward to hearing about his wonderful accomplishments.