Message from the Director

Welcome to the Institute on the Environment. We hope to serve as your major point of entry to the environmental research, education and activities at the University of Minnesota.

What is the Institute on the Environment? And what makes the University of Minnesota a superlative choice to place such an Institute?

First, let me tell you who and what we are. The core of the Institute, informally known as “IonE,” consists of 15 world-class research fellows from colleges across our campuses who provide the intellectual leadership for our interdisciplinary research mission. Through research projects and related activities, we embrace the rest of our environmental community through our associate members and our affiliate units.

Our mission is two-fold: To conduct interdisciplinary research that addresses today’s—and tomorrow’s—complex environmental questions; and to provide solutions to those questions, therefore improving our society and our world. Our research addresses global environmental issues that have regional significance. Solutions to environmental problems of the 21st century require a new way of thinking. We believe these solutions require an interdisciplinary—in fact, a transdisciplinary—team approach that includes a wide range of perspectives and disciplines.

We are uniquely qualified to address our selected research themes of renewable energy, landscapes and watersheds, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and human and ecosystem health because we are a truly comprehensive research university. We are a land-grant and sea-grant university, with the entire array of natural resources, agricultural sciences, engineering, professional health sciences, natural sciences, humanities, law, journalism and policy needed to address such problems. We sit at the convergence of the Great Plains, the Great Northern Forests, the Great Rivers and the Great Lakes, and can study global-scale questions here in our own backyard.

The second part of our two-fold mission is to coordinate and facilitate “all things environmental” at the University, from our sustainable campus initiative, to the robust portfolio of environmental research and education, to keeping you informed of what is going on across the campuses. We have remarkable strength and breadth in our environmental enterprise, and with this Institute on the Environment we are making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

We all wish for clean air, safe drinking water, a healthy economy and a planet rich in biodiversity. We at the Institute are dedicated to moving toward this goal, and we thank you for joining us in that endeavor.


Warm regards,

Deborah Swackhamer, Ph.D.
Interim Director
Professor, Environmental Health Sciences