Kristianna Bowles
Associate Director for Sustainability, Rice University
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Kristianna serves as the Associate Director for Sustainability at Rice and works to engage the campus in a wide variety of sustainability programs and initiatives. These include hosting campus-wide events such as Campus Sustainability Day and Earth Day, overseeing the office's marketing and communications, and coordinating initiatives like the "Give a Hoot, Donate Your Loot" move-out campaign. Her position also oversees the university's EcoRep peer educators program and the Office of Sustainability interns. She obtained a B.S. in Biology with a concentration in Ecology & Environmental Biology from James Madison University and a M.S. in Recreation, Park, & Tourism Sciences with an emphasis in Youth Development from Texas A&M University. Kristianna earned her PhD in Higher Education Administration, also from Texas A&M, where her research focused on the psychosocial drivers of engagement in pro-environmental behaviors among college students.
Living Labs That Deliver: Four Institutional Approaches to Developing Metrics and Evaluating Impact
Universities are increasingly leveraging their campuses as sustainability “living laboratories” where solutions to real-world challenges — often developed by students in partnership with faculty and staff — are piloted and scaled. Despite the growing popularity of these programs, relatively few institutions have developed robust metrics to assess their impact. Incorporating assessment is both beneficial for enhancing and refining program quality, while also supporting STARS 3.0 credit AC 4.1.C asking for “processes or tools in place to assess the success of the applied learning projects.” The very question of what constitutes success in a university living lab program invites a wide range of perspectives. Should success be measured by student learning outcomes, operational savings, greenhouse gas reductions, research outputs, community partnerships, policy influence, or broader cultural transformation?
This session brings together four universities with established living lab programs — each with distinct institutional priorities, governance structures, and definitions of success — to explore how institutions are measuring impact and evolving their evaluation frameworks. Panelists representing Columbia, Duke, Rice, and the University of Southern California will share the metrics they currently use, the challenges they have encountered, and the lessons learned from attempting to quantify outcomes that often span academics, operations, internships, and community engagement.
Following brief presentations, the session will include interactive round table discussions where attendees will compare their own definitions of success and identify practical metrics that could be adapted to their institutions. Participants will leave with templates and tools from the presenters as well as insights into developing a flexible framework for assessing living lab impact, ideas for potential metrics, and strategies for tailoring evaluation approaches to different institutional contexts.
Whether attendees are launching a new living lab initiative or refining an established “Campus as Lab” program, this session will provide practical tools and peer insights to help institutions better define, measure, and communicate the impact of campus-based sustainability innovation.
Resources from this session can be accessed at bit.ly/AASHE_LL
Kristianna Bowles
Associate Director for Sustainability, Rice University
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