2024–2025 Bass Connections Projects Take on Environmental and Energy Challenges

Plastic-eating microbes. An energy crisis in South Africa. Heat stress in Sri Lankan farmers. Insurance and risk management modeling for climate-vulnerable communities. These are a handful of the energy and environment topics that 16 interdisciplinary teams took on during the 2024–2025 academic year as part of Bass Connections.

Launched in 2013, the program brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates from across Duke University to tackle complex societal problems. The Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability administers the Energy & Environment theme—one of six dedicated Bass Connections themes.

Hundreds of Duke community members packed Penn Pavilion on April 16 as more than 75 project teams presented their work at the annual Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase.

Closing Heat Data Gaps in Climate Disease Frontline Communities

In a partnership with Sri Lankan researchers and students, one project team set up a monitoring program to study the relationship between heat exposure and health conditions such as chronic kidney disease among outdoor workers.

Mireya Dorado, a second-year student in the Master of Science in Global Health program, explained that the team compared data from two weather stations with numerically calculated data. The goal was to determine whether the latter could be a viable substitute for on-the-ground data collection, which isn’t always feasible in developing countries. Looking back several decades at the calculated data, the team found the thermal comfort zone for outdoor workers in Sri Lanka is shrinking.

Dorado said she learned a lot through the project that went beyond her public health curriculum. She used Python and MATLAB for the first time to analyze environmental data that the team collected in Sri Lanka—skills that could help her if she decides to move beyond traditional epidemiology in her career. The project also gave her insight into the biological effects of extreme heat on the human body.

But her biggest takeaway from the project was how to adapt in situations where resources are scarce.

“Coming from a global health background, that’s something you deal with all the time—even my fieldwork in Kenya,” she said. “I think it’s important to understand other approaches you can use when you’re in other resource-limited settings.”

Energy Transition During Energy Crisis: Cape Town's Experience

Graduate student Veena Shirsath talks through a poster summarizing her team's work studying three different aspects of Cape Town's energy crisis. (Credit: Erin Scannell, HuthPhoto)

Another project team sought to better understand a power crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, and the potential of renewable energy to provide relief while supporting the national energy transition. A combination of supply-side factors coupled with increased demand has led to widespread “loadshedding”—power outages or redistribution to relieve stress on the system—that disproportionately impacts poorer, Black communities.

Led by experts at Duke’s James E. Rogers Energy Access Project and building on a 2024 Climate+ project, the students split into econometrics, energy modeling and machine learning sub-teams. The first two focused on understanding energy customers in Cape Town and the city’s energy challenges. Zeinab Mukhtar, a senior majoring in public policy studies at Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, was part of the third sub-team that built a model to detect the location and capacity of rooftop solar installations in the city.

Mukhtar came to Duke interested in the intersection of data, policymaking and environmental science, with a passion for addressing climate change and helping developing countries transition away from fossil fuels—all boxes this project checked. While initially hesitant to be part of the machine learning sub-team, she said the experience demonstrated how accurate data can lead to more targeted, efficient decisions.

“For me, as a public policy student, that’s been my most important takeaway—you can’t have policymaking without data,” Mukhtar said.

Bioremediation of Plastic Pollution to Conserve Biodiversity

Taking on a global challenge, science and engineering students—working with faculty and staff from the Nicholas School of the Environment and the School of Medicine—pursued a novel approach to reducing plastic waste and studied the harmful effects of microplastics on cellular health. Building on the work of previous Bass Connections teams, a sub-team studied how microbes could be used to degrade plastics, a process known as bioremediation.

Ashley Huang, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering, studied how well various bacteria break down different types of plastic. One species showed promise with polystyrene, which has not been studied as much as other plastics for bioremediation. Huang said a potential long-term result of this and similar research could be a bioreactor that offers an alternative to recycling.

The project initially caught Huang’s eye because of the interactions between the natural world and manmade creations. The experience showed her the lengthy timelines involved with research projects, as well as the “love and care” required from everyone involved.

“There are a lot of locked solutions that we haven’t unlocked yet,” she said. “We’re just working on a small subset of a handful of bacteria, but there are so many other bacteria in the world that who knows what could be out there.”

Risk Analytics and Innovation for Community Climate Adaptation

Closer to home, an interdisciplinary team explored new insurance and risk management models to help mostly rural North Carolina communities vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The project split into three workstreams. One modeled how flooding could impact buildings and roads in a Carteret County community. Another looked at the potential for community-based catastrophe insurance to close risk management and insurance gaps in communities facing extreme weather events.

Eric Newton, a second-year graduate student at the Nicholas School of the Environment, brought expertise in geographic information systems (GIS) to a third group that attempted to define the size of the insurance gap in North Carolina counties. Newton explained that the gap is currently defined with a narrow focus on the National Flood Insurance Program. The project team looked at a wider set of data from the federal government and private insurers to better quantify how much additional funding communities would need beyond insurance after a disaster.

As Newton prepares to move forward in his career, he learned from the project that flexibility and developing an array of skills are important in the shifting space of climate resilience and adaptation. More broadly, he took away the idea that insurance is going to be key to helping communities build resilience—an idea reinforced throughout the project by insurance executive Francis Bouchard, Duke’s inaugural Climate Leader in Residence and current senior fellow at the Nicholas Institute.

“There’s a lot of energy in the insurance space for climate change,” Newton said. “It was very cool to see across the country how many new solutions are being developed to find paths to building resilience within communities that need it.”

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