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Data Science Team Receives $70,000 Environmental Institute CoLab Grant
A research team led by Mona Sloane, assistant professor of data science and media studies, has been awarded a $70,000 CoLab grant from the UVA Environmental Institute to advance a new project exploring how artificial intelligence can better serve communities facing climate challenges. The award supports the project “Community Climate Knowledge and Multimodal Climate AI,” which will run from July 2026 through June 2028.
The interdisciplinary project asks whether community-generated knowledge can be integrated into AI-powered climate models to produce more accurate, locally relevant forecasts while advancing more equitable approaches to data governance. Collected data will include oral histories, images, audio, video, historical records, and citizen science data.
"Beyond the technical question, it's about community-driven data governance: who gets to shape the models that increasingly shape climate, risk, and resource-allocation decision-making?" Sloane posted on social media.
The project brings together expertise from across the University of Virginia, including data science faculty Antonios Mamalakis and Chirag Agarwal, along with postdoctoral researcher Aashka Dave, who led development of the successful proposal. The team also includes incoming Ph.D. student Sabine Segaloff, undergraduate research assistant Caroline Brewczak, and builds on previous work with Charity Nyelele.
The Environmental Institute recognized the project's potential to develop new methods for integrating community-generated climate knowledge with AI models, helping make climate forecasts more accurate, locally relevant, and ethically grounded.
