Dr. Maestre, Nov 26th 2025
The SouthEast Texas Urban Integrated Field Laboratory (SETx-UIFL) hosted its 2024 Annual Meeting in Beaumont, Texas, from November 17-19. The event brought together nearly 70 researchers, students, stakeholders, and community leaders to present the project advances and discuss solutions to the environmental issues in the Beaumont and Port Arthur area, including air pollution, flooding, and their intersection with equity. The meeting focused on the UIFL themes of climate, water, air, equity, and collaborative design. Sessions included theme updates, stakeholder discussions, workshops, and cross-pollination sessions designed to generate new collaborations among attendees.
Highlights of the Meeting:
On November 17, the event began at the Lamar University’s Science and Technology building with a welcome dinner hosted by Davon A. Chargois and Liz Haselbach, followed by a networking session where students showcased their work through poster presentations.
Poster session
On the second day, participants engaged in a diverse range of activities, including research update sessions, a Task Force panel, training sessions, and focused discussions.
In the research update sessions, each theme Lead investigator provided a summary of the advances of their teams, and received questions and feedback from other teams, and most importantly, from the community members in the audience.
After regaining energy from a coffee break with delicious cookies, the community engagement panel featured Task Force members including Christopher Bates, Charles X White, Robert Grimm, Ellen Buchanan, Mary Bernard, Butch Wilson, and Dr. Janice Milo. Key topics included:
- Community Engagement: Effective communication with local communities to raise awareness of climate risks and disaster preparedness.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Using scientific data for resilience planning and securing funding for infrastructure projects.
- Infrastructure Challenges: Addressing aging infrastructure and flood-prone development areas.
- Resilience Hubs: Plans for community hubs in Beaumont & Port Arthur to aid recovery after storms.
- Funding and Grants: Securing funding through favorable cost-benefit analyses for resilience projects.
- Citizen Participation: Making data accessible to empower residents in advocating for resilience policies.
Community engagement panel
In the afternoon, Will Mobley lead a training on creating reproducible computational “Cookbooks” which simplify the process of sharing and running complex research workflows using Docker containers and standardized repositories. If you want to know more about cookbooks, click here.
This year, the researchers’ ideas for collaborations among themes were condensed into eight cross-pollination sessions that took place across day 2 and day 3 of the event. In these sessions, the multidisciplinary teams laid the ground for planning activities for the upcoming year. Finally, on the last day, at the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur, the focus shifted to strategic planning for year 3 of the project. Team leads reported back on the major key points of their discussions and strategized about how to move forward in year 3. Some major challenges that will be addressed in year 3 include the need for science highlights to be accessible and the development of community messages, the integration of data from various themes, including air, water, and equity, to analyze compounding hazards, and the further advance of scenario-based strategies, and public health engagement.
Cross-pollination session
The 2024 SETx-UIFL Annual Meeting emphasized the importance of collaborative science in addressing environmental challenges affecting the SouthEast Texas area. As the project moves into and through its third year, the groundwork laid at this event will guide the team’s initiatives in Southeast Texas. We sincerely appreciate everyone who contributed to the success of the SETx-UIFL 2024 Annual Meeting, including our External Advisory Committee members, task force members, and SETx-UIFL scientists and students. Finally, we express our gratitude to the Center for Resilience at Lamar University, specifically to Liv Haselbach and Davon Chargois for their essential roles and dedication in hosting the event. We look forward to welcoming you to Beaumont and Port Arthur for the SETx-UIFL 2025 Annual Meeting that will take place next fall.