(By Melissa Toribio ‘25, staff writer)
With worries regarding climate change and its current state on the environment, many people are taking it upon themselves to speak out, including LVC’s latest visitor.
Dr. Jose Fuentes, professor of atmospheric science and meteorology at Penn State University, has taken it upon himself to voice his concerns regarding climate change and its impact on flowers and bees.
Studying sciences since college, Fuentes found an interest in environmental sciences and continued to pursue it.
“When I went to college, I really wanted to study something related to science or engineering that could have some applications to what we humans actually do,” Fuentes said. “I became interested in the field of atmospheric science because, as well all know, the atmosphere really impacts us all in so many ways.”
Fuentes began his scientific journey and research in El Salvador during his youth and found his way to Penn State University in University Park, PA to continue his studies. Since then, he’s shared his research with students wishing to pursue a similar path he followed.
“There are two key elements I almost always ask my students to learn,” Fuentes said. “One is to really learn the basic concepts related to the physics of the climate; the second element that I expect is to learn how to apply those concepts to some new developments they can see happen in the environment.”
Alongside his teaching at Penn State, Fuentes also had an opportunity to travel to Brazil through the Fulbright program as a senior scholar.
He was nominated to visit 14 universities to interact with students to follow through the Fulbright program’s initiative to forge collaborations between people in the U.S. and in other nations—in Fuentes’ case, the students in Brazil.
“I studied how the rainforests in the Amazonian region of South America are responding to climate change, because we now know, that during the last 100 or so years, the atmosphere has warmed by 1.5 degrees,” Fuentes said. “And that increase in the temperature is actually beginning to impact the rainforests in a very negative way.”
Fuentes visited LVC on Thursday, Oct. 31 to share his presentation on his research titled “Flowers, Bees and Climate Change.”
The presentation, given in Zimmerman Hall that evening at 6 p.m., was dedicated to sharing how the effects of climate change are influencing various pollinators and plants in the world, which, in turn, affects a large chunk of the world’s food supply.
“As part of my research, I have focused trying to understand how the environmental changes, that are largely caused by humans, are impacting various parts of the ecosystem,” he said.
Currently, Fuentes is continuing to further his research regarding meteorology, atmospheric sciences and environmental changes, as well as teaching his lessons and findings to students at Penn State.