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IN BRIEF
ENGINEERING CLEAN WATER
By Matthew Jensen ’08
In the hills of Central Mexico’s Guanajuato state,
cacti and rocky terrain dominate the arid landscape. It’s here in the tiny village of La Salitrera where a group of Utah State University students arrive with big green duffel bags stuffed with puzzles, games, and books—all in Spanish, of course. Parents are glad to see the visitors and the gifts they’ve brought for their young children. “Take that one,” a woman gestures to her daughter who reaches across the table for a colorful book about the solar system. A dozen smiling kids line up behind her. This makeshift book fair is one of the last opportunities students will have to interact with their Mexican hosts during an exhausting weeklong service project. The USU chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) has been traveling to this region since 2009 in an ongoing effort to improve the availability and quality of drinking water. Much of the water supply here comes from groundwater-fed wells that are susceptible to arsenic contamination. For years, EWB has worked with residents and government leaders to help address the problem by equipping local families with a simple but effective household tool: a biosand water filter. “Biosand filters are point-of-use water filters typically made of concrete or plastic,” says EWB student leader Dallin Wiberg. “The filters contain multiple layers of gravel and sand and a layer of biologically active material called the schmutzdecke, a German word that means dirt cover.” The layers function together to remove pathogens and suspended solids. When enough filtered water pools at the bottom, pressure forces it up and through a spout, ready for drinking and cooking. But there’s still one lingering infiltrator. By adding a layer of rusty nails at the top, the biosand filter does something remarkable: it reduces arsenic. “The oxidization of iron creates a product that binds to arsenic and prevents it from passing through the filter,” says Meg Licht, a second-year Ph.D. student in USU’s biology department, the only non-engineer on the trip.“Engineers Without Borders is a bit of a misnomer because this organization is for anyone who wants to make the world a better place. Even though it’s not my field of study, I continue to work with EWB because it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn engineering principles, teamwork, and how to work with government officials and humanitarian groups.” Licht studies evolutionary ecology. Her background in life sciences is useful when the team begins testing dozens of filters for bacteria. Filters constructed during previous EWB trips are still in use, though some function better than others. “Part of the mission was to evaluate our work from previous years,” says Wiberg. “We tested water filter samples from all over the community and got drastically different results in the quality of water that comes from a frequently used filter versus one that’s seldom used.” Biosand filters need to be replenished regularly to maintain the effectiveness of the schmutzdecke, the first line of defense containing living organisms that kill harmful pathogens. If a filter dries out, it can have an opposite effect on water quality. The team spent a portion of the trip educating residents about how to properly use their filters. The USU team didn’t invent the biosand filter, but team members have worked for years to improve its effectiveness and ensure the materials in the design can be sourced locally. Their work, led by USU professor Ryan Dupont, has led to a more efficient building system and training tools that are passed on to local leaders at the end of each trip. In addition to water filtration, the EWB team is addressing problems related to the community’s wells and supply lines. During the most recent trip, community leaders pointed out that low water pressure was leaving a part of the community at higher elevations with inadequate water supplies. Up until then, team members had been surveying locations for a proposed water tank. “When we presented our information to the Multi-Community Water Counsel, however, we found that their needs had changed,” Wiberg says. “We were so impressed by their concern for their friends and neighbors. We quickly realized that our project needed to change.” With the short time remaining, the team gathered the data to design a bypass pipeline to help ensure water reaches higher elevations. Now, they’re working on the solution in preparation for their next trip.
USU Football’s Touchstone Season
The Aggies closed out the regular season (10-2) before heading to their seventh bowl game in eight years against North Texas in the New Mexico Bowl. And for the fourth time in school history, Utah State was nationally-ranked by the Associated Press (AP) Poll.
AmeriCorps Members and Hurricane Relief
Over the Past
Year, 48 AmeriCorps members from the Utah Conservation Corps (UCC), part of USU’s Center for Civic Engagement and Service-Learning, have responded to disasters in North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.
USU Awarded $16.9 Million for College Readiness Program The university’s
Science Technology Arithmetic Reading Students program (STARS!) has been awarded $16.9 million over seven years to provide academic and mentoring support to middle and high school students in Salt Lake County. The initiative, Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), is part of the U.S. Department of Education. The grant will serve 3,052 students across eight schools in the Granite School District, starting in seventh grade and following them through their first year of college in 2025. “GEAR UP funds have served our students in poverty, helping them close the achievement gap and preparing them for college and careers,” says Danny Stirland, director over 15 junior high schools for the Granite School District. “GEAR UP has helped with bringing kids and families out of generational poverty, empowering them to lead successful lives.”
USU Scientists Identify Dozens of New Bee Species
One out of every four bee species
in the United States is found in Utah, and nearly half of those species dwell within the original boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Entomologists recently discovered 49 previously unknown species and 150 “morphospecies”—species that don’t match other known bees—in a four-year study funded by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The scientists published their findings in PeerJ in November. “We identified almost as many species as are known in the entire eastern United States,” says lead author Olivia Messinger Carril, MS ’06. “Many are surprised to learn 87 percent of Utah’s flowering plant species live within the monument’s boundaries, which likely contributes to the rich diversity of pollinators.” Carril, along with Joseph Wilson, an associate professor of biology at USU Tooele, USDA entomologist Terry Griswold, and USU emeritus professor James Haefner, reported 660 species now identified in the protected region. However, the monument’s boundaries were shrunk in 2017. “The monument is a hotspot of bee diversity,” says Wilson. “It’s an amazing natural laboratory of pollinators, of which we don’t know a lot. The large reduction of this protected areas could have implications for future biodiversity.”
Jeff Taylor, a first-year Ph.D. student in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, is one of five students nationwide to receive a threeyear $55,000 fellowship from NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. Taylor studies the relationships between fuel efficiency and morphing-wing aircraft to decrease drag and increase fuel efficiency. His research focuses on devising analytical relations that give insight into the efficient design of a wider variety of future aircraft, says his major professor Doug Hunsaker, adding that the award is a win for both Taylor and USU. “We hope this will develop into a coordinated effort between USU and NASA to significantly improve the efficiency of future commercial aircraft.”
New Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center Opens
The Jon M.
Huntsman School of Business opened its new Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center Nov. 2. Nearly a decade in the making, the Covey Leadership Center was the brainchild of the late Stephen R. Covey, world-renowned author, educator, and businessman, and the late Jon M. Huntsman, philanthropist, business titan, and the school’s namesake. In partnership with the Covey Family and FranklinCovey, the center’s focus is to develop students into principled, future business leaders. It will offer formal accreditation through a leadership minor open to USU students from any college, as well as a leadership certificate for executive education in the community.
Scientists Mimic Beaver Ingenuity The 2018 Goose Creek Fire
in northwestern Utah burned more than 132,000 acres near the border of Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will test stream restoration techniques there developed by wetland researchers at Utah State University, including associate professor Joe Wheaton. He studies low-tech, low-cost methods for healing degraded streams in the West. Wheaton recently teamed with collaborators such as ranchers, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the BLM, and hopefully, beavers, to use cost-effective strategies to restore wetlands affected by wildfires. Streams must be constantly fed a combination of water, dirt, rocks, and wood to create riparian habitat for plants and animals to thrive. This is where beavers come in. They boost stream health by feeding wood into waterways. Wheaton’s low-cost techniques like using branches to mimic beaver dams, placing clumps of wood debris to slow channel flows, and building stone features to reduce erosion may kickstart natural recovery processes and encourage beavers to return to damaged areas. “We can’t dump beaver into a watershed that has burnt to the ground and expect them to do the restoration of degraded streams on their own,” Wheaton says. “What we can do post-fire is accelerate recovery with low-tech structures, that make it easier to more quickly get beaver into an area and accelerate recovery. We’d like to help them do that.”
A $45 Million Upgrade The Life Sciences Building
will open in January, boosting the amount of lab rooms for students taking foundational biology courses. Thanks to prioritization by the Utah State Legislature, the 103,000 square-foot building will house 13 teaching laboratories, 11 research labs, and an active learning classroom.
Artist Mark Pomilio oversees installation of “Symbols and Symmetries” in the new Life Sciences Building.
Pando—widely considered the world’s largest single organism—covers 106 acres in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest. And it's in grave need of forest triage. Utah State University researchers Paul Rogers and Darren McAvoy conducted the first assessment of the Pando aspen clone, comprised of more than 47,000 genetically identical above-ground stems originating from a single underground parent, and found continuing deterioration of this “forest of one” tree. Although a portion of the grove is recovering, Pando is largely diminishing. Their findings were published in October in PLOS ONE. The study offers a 72-year historical aerial photo sequence that chronicles a steady thinning of the forest, past clear-cuts that remain deforested today, and continual intrusion of human development. “Aspen forests support great biodiversity,” says Rogers, director of the Western Aspen Alliance. “It would be shame to witness the significant reduction of this iconic forest when reversing this decline is realizable, should we demonstrate the will to do so.”
A Place for Insights Poet and MacArthur Genius, May
Swenson's childhood home was demolished 40 years ago. The bungalow built in 1922 by Swenson’s father Dan, an immigrant from Sweden, housed May ’34 and her nine siblings. In September, members of the Swenson family and Utah State University gathered on the now-vacant lot to break ground for a new incarnation of the Swenson family home, which will serve as a gathering place for community members and artists. “We hope that this is where our next May might feel the first flash of insight,” says Joe Ward, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Swenson House will offer event space, a conference room, reading nooks, and a Swedishthemed coffee shop. Future plans call for cabins for visiting writers. Construction will begin in spring, with completion of the 6,000-square-foot building expected in 2020. The future Swenson House will be funded largely by private funds.
Photo by Ryan Jensen, ’17.
Chocolate break,
anyone? The Aggie Chocolate Factory—a research lab and artisanal chocolate purveyor—opened its doors Nov. 16. All of the operation’s cocoa beans are sourced from sustainably farmed operations that receive fair trade prices. The factory’s signature Thistle and Rose dark chocolate bars taste good, too.
USU President Noelle Cockett says Ward once told her “Our faculty don’t need laboratories and equipment. They need space and time.” “That’s the goal with the Swenson House,” she says, a place that will enable USU humanities scholars to share their learnings with the community. “This is an important moment in the Cache Valley’s literary and cultural history.”
Last Lecture: The Debasing of Our Political Rhetoric Jeannie Johnson ’93,
MA ’95 pioneered a new path in security studies called strategic culture, which examines how national and organizational cultures affect security policy and decisionmaking. She witnessed the need for a new framework while serving as a CIA analyst and seeing how often decisions were made with incomplete information. The assistant professor of political science at Utah State University flipped the model she co-designed “to look at our adversaries,” and examined American culture for her doctoral studies. USU students nominated Johnson to deliver the annual Honors Last Lecture. She told the audience that the point of her research, like most scholars, is to point out missteps so decision makers can learn from past mistakes. “Like you,” she said, “I have been observing with great concern our current practices with each other. The way we speak to each other, the devaluing and debasing of our political rhetoric, and the way that we are tearing at the very fabric that holds us together as a nation. In so doing, we are doing more damage to ourselves than most any enemy could achieve.” Johnson argued that we must critically examine our virtues as well as our flaws. “We have to name them. We have to recognize them. We have to acknowledge that they are there if we have any hope of preserving and growing them.” Listen to her talk in full at utahstatemagazine.usu.edu/winter19/ johnsonlecture
