Summit: Spring 2015

Universit y of Ver mont

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

WATER REVOLUTION From the impact of climate change to creating recycling solutions, CEMS researchers are making strides in understanding the world’s most precious resource.

SPRING 2015

SUMMIT

THE DEAN’S VIEW Dear Alumni and Friends of CEMS,

What a fantastic time to be writing to you. In the fall edition of SUMMIT, I shared with you the exceptional opportunity presented by the proposed STEM building complex. I am happy to update you that on February 6 the UVM Board of Trustees gave the “go ahead” to the project. This is the largest capital project in the history of UVM, and it promises to be a transformational opportunity for UVM and CEMS. The new buildings and the renovated Votey Hall will upgrade the UVM STEM infrastructure and enable CEMS to improve on the remarkable academic experience that our students enjoy. The University is committed to raising $26 million of the $104 million project cost from non-debt sources, and there are many great naming opportunities.

In this issue we highlight some of our extraordinary people. It is always a pleasure to recognize the outstanding faculty and staff, and I am pleased that you will be able to read about those we have recognized this year.

As I had mentioned in the fall newsletter, our enrollments are at an all-time high.

Additionally, the applications for next year are up 12% from last year, and the plan is to have modest growth in the number of new students while continuing our goal of increasing the quality of those students. It is an incredible opportunity to enjoy moderate growth while simultaneously enhancing the rigor of the programs. This will continue the advancement of the quality of the CEMS learning community.

Also in this edition of SUMMIT, you will get glimpses of some of the work that we are doing related to water. This ranges from the research conducted by our faculty, the student-led senior capstone projects, service activities by student clubs, service-learning projects and work of our alumni.

I continue to take the opportunity to visit with a number of alumni, parents and friends, and I am very grateful for the generosity and support that you provide to the college and me. It is a great motivator to see that so many of you recognize the important opportunities ahead of us, and your generosity allows us to continue the vital mission of educating the next generation of engineers and scientists.

Some of our accomplishments since the fall SUMMIT are: • We named Dr. Paul Hines as the L. Richard Fisher Professor of Electrical Engineering • We awarded the Veinott Green and Gold Professorship to Computer Science Professor Josh Bongard.

• We created a new position of Research Support and hired Sylvie Butel.

• We have successfully completed tenure track searches for IGERT/Complex Systems and Mathematics.

• We are also conducting numerous searches for lecturers: Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Professors of Practice in both Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Mathematics (2) and Engineering Software.

The goal of this newsletter is to provide a means to keep you informed and connected to CEMS. You are the CEMS extended family, and it is always great when we share updates with each other. Please make sure to keep us apprised of your news and check our webpage and social media for more frequent updates. I hope you enjoy the material presented and I look forward to reporting on the official start of the STEM building project in the fall.

Sincerely,

Luis Garcia, PhD Dean and Barrett Foundation Professor College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences CEMS | College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences 2 2 | SUMMIT

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

SUMMIT EDITOR: Aimee Picchi PRODUCTION & ART DIRECTION: Jenn Karson

PHOTOGRAPHY/IMAGES: Josh Brown, Jeff Clarke, Curran Photography, Scott Hamshaw, Sally McCay, Dominick Reuter, UVM Engineers Without Borders.

SUMMIT IS PUBLISHED TWICE A YEAR BY THE DEAN’S OFFICE AT THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES SEND LETTERS AND ALUMNI NEWS TO: summit@uvm.edu WEBSITE: cems.uvm.edu

FEATURE STORY MAPPING THE MAPPING THE WATERSHED WATERSHED Donna Rizzo, a professor in the School of Engineering, is creating complex computer algorithms to map out how a changing climate will impact Vermont’s watersheds.

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FEATURES 16 THE PROBLEM OF SCOUR CEMS engineers are studying how the force of water – including floods and ice – impacts the state’s 4,000 bridges.

20 THE MONTHS OF THE SKINNY COWS The College’s Engineers Without Borders chapter is creating a greywater recycling solution with a Nicaraguan village.

22 HATCHING AN INVENTION CEMS students take on the delicate problem of creating a small-scale egg-washing machine.

24 TINY TURBINES How bamboo’s growth patterns inspired the design of a small-scale wind turbine – built of bamboo, of course.

28 FLUID DYNAMICS CEMS Board of Advisors Chair Jack Scambos talks about his vision for the college and how water resources can play a part.

DEPARTMENTS

Q&A

04 BY THE NUMBERS

05 CYNTHIA BARNHART

06 DISCOVER CEMS COVER IMAGE: Photo by Scott Hamshaw.

Pictured left to right: Jody Stryker (CEE PhD candidate), Sean Brennan (St. Mikes Undergrad Intern), Jaron Borg (UVM CEE MS grad ’10), Sarah Leidinger (undergrad intern - RSENR), Alex Morton (CEE Undergrad).

SPRING 2015

Photo by Sally MCcay

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Joshua Brown, Sujata Gupta, Kim MacQueen, Lynn Monty, Aimee Picchi, Research Media.

Special thanks to Univeristy Communiations.

CONTENTS

10 FACULTY AND STAFF AWARDS 26 STUDENT SPOTLIGHTS

Barnhart ’81 talks about becoming the first woman appointed as MIT’s chancellor.

30 THE HIDDEN DANGERS OF BIODIESEL

Professors Britt Holmén and Naomi Fukagawi discuss the human health impacts of using biodiesel.

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BY THE NUMBERS .00002 mph That’s how fast bamboo can grow. While it might be slow for a car or a pedestrian, bamboo is a world-record setter for its ability to grow 35 inches per day. The flexible yet strong grass helped inspire the development of tiny renewable wind turbines by professor of engineering Ting Tan and a group of students (page 24). The turbines are constructed from bamboo, naturally.

23rd out of 50 Among the U.S. states, that’s Vermont’s ranking for the percentage of structurally deficient bridges. Scour – or damage from moving water or ice – remains a danger to Vermont’s 4,000 bridges, adding urgency to understanding how the force impacts the state’s river and lake crossings. A team of engineers at CEMS is working with the Vermont Agency of Transportation on researching scour, and developing solutions for mitigation (page 16).

485 lbs The maximum weight that engineering student and CrossFit competitor Mat Fraser can lift in a back squat. Fraser started entering CrossFit competitions in 2013, after having trained as an Olympic weightlifting hopeful. In just two short years, he’s taken the sport by storm, placing second in the national CrossFit Games last year (page 27).

9:1

The ratio of positive words to negative within Spanish. The findings are part of a recent paper on the positivity bias of 10 languages from professor Peter Dodds, the recipient of the college’s 2014 Outstanding Overall Faculty Performance award, professor Chris Danforth, and other CEMS researchers (page 10).

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ALUMNI PROFILE Cynthia Barnhart ‘81

By Joshua Brown

CHANCELLOR

In February, Cynthia Barnhart was appointed chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first woman to fill this post. You wouldn’t be alone in asking: just what is a chancellor? “That’s always the first question!” she says with a laugh. “The chancellor at MIT is all things students,” she explains. Following her recent role as MIT’s associate dean of engineering, the new job is a big change for Barnhart and one she relishes. As chancellor, she’s focusing on several major issues in higher education— sexual assault; the pressures of academic life in our age of intense digital connectivity; and the student facilities of the future; among others.

ENGINEER

“That’s a large part of why we see an increasing number of students who are majoring in engineering,” she says. “They understand that it’s not just the pocket protector-wearing nerd who gets into it. It’s for people who want to make the world a better place.”

As a woman entering engineering in the late 1970s Barnhart didn’t feel like a pioneer, she says, but she did stand out. “UVM had a very supportive culture,” she says, “but I did my studying with men, because most of the class was men.” When she wasn’t studying, she enjoyed Friday happy hour at the fabled Chickenbone, sandwiches at Carbur’s, and she and her now-husband Mark Baribeau ’81 had season passes to Sugarbush.“I was studious and engineering isn’t easy, but I didn’t have a million activities, so I had time to relax,” she says, “and by the time I was a senior I’d figured out how to arrange my schedule so I could take days off to go skiing.” u

photo by Dominick Reuter

Barnhart studied civil engineering at UVM and then completed her master’s and doctorate at MIT. Across the past twenty years, she’s worked as professor of civil engineering and director of Transportation@MIT, a program involving hundreds of MIT faculty working on design solutions addressing the environmental impacts of transportation— like airplanes that could use seventy percent less fuel than current models.

Barnhart sees engineers at the center of societal advance from creating renewable energy to increasing the efficiency of the U.S. airline network to bringing clean water to developing countries. “That’s a large part of why we see an increasing number of students who are majoring in engineering,” she says. “They understand that it’s not just the pocket protector-wearing nerd who gets into it. It’s for people who want to make the world a better place.”

Recently appointed to UVM’s Board of Trustees, Barnhart is pleased to have a hand in helping her alma mater move forward on plans to construct a new worldclass science and technology building. “It’s so important, when pushing the frontiers, to provide people with the opportunity to do their research in a state-of-the-art facility—that allows them to work closely together, across disciplines, to think differently in addressing some of the world’s toughest challenges,” she says.

earned their degrees from the state university. “My parents valued education a lot,” she says. “UVM was a great launching pad for all three of us.”

STUDENT

Neither of Barnhart’s parents went to college, but they saw that all of the kids in their Barre, Vermont family— Cynthia, her sister Kathy ’80, and brother Richard ’82— SUMMIT |

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Power Poles Cross-country skiers of all stripes depend on double-poling to deliver a powerful burst of momentum. The only problem, notes associate professor Yves Dubief, is that skiers often favor their dominant side, lessening their potential speed. That inspired Dubief, whose childhood in the French Alps included training in Alpine and cross-country skiing, and a team of CEMS seniors to work on a training device that will alert skiers when one arm falls below the output of the other during double-poling.

“Can we correct the posture to be symmetric?”

Dubief says of the problem. “For us, the key is feedback as we practice the sport.” A measuring device will fit around the top of the poles, while another device in the skier’s backpack will transmit an audio signal into the skier’s right or left ear, depending on which side is underperforming, notes Jasen DeForge, a member of the team. With fellow team members Leight Johnson, Charles Kepler, Douglas Knox, Cody Leaf and Sam Chevalier, the group aims to have a prototype ready for roller-ski training in the spring.

Beyond skiing, the invention may be useful for a host of endeavors. Dubief notes, “The device is intended as a proof of concept for instant biofeedback with potential applications ranging from sports to health care.”

Team members at work on the project Force-feedback System for Cross-country Ski Training.

Photo by Sally McCay

Photo credit: Curran Photography

A Sugaring Solution Maple sugaring may be an old tradition in Vermont, but scientists continue to bring innovation to the state’s multi-million industry. Take a team of CEMS seniors who are working on a new method for small-scale syrup producers that relies on an ohmically controlled sap boiler that aims to more quickly boil down the sap than the traditional oil or wood-based method. “A part of the design is a control system that will do minor pour offs into a storage bin by itself, so you don’t have to physically have a person there,” making the process less labor intensive, says Asa Rogers. For Rogers and fellow team member Camden Houghton, maple sugaring runs in their families, which each have their own sugaring operations. All the team members, who include Dana Glubiak, Brendan Hackett and Benjamin Marshall, all share one common interest: they all say they’re fans of maple syrup.

Senior Design (SEED) team members working on the Ohmic Boiler for Low-Volume Maple Syrup Producers project. Photo courtesy of the team.

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Photo by Sally McCay

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SUMMIT |

CEMS AWARDS COMPLEXITY RULES

Peter Dodds, a professor in CEMS’ Mathematics and Statistics Department and Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center, says his research into complex systems was sparked by an early curiosity.

“I have always wanted to understand everything … which turns out to be somewhat hard,” he said. “This has led me through a foundational training in theoretical physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and out into work on all kinds of complex systems.”

Dodds, who was awarded the CEMS 2014 Outstanding Overall Faculty Performance Award by Dean Luis Garcia, has a research portfolio that includes publications across many fields such as theoretical physics, Earth sciences, biology, economics, psychology, and sociology.

He currently focuses on sociotechnical and psychological phenomena, such as population-scale health and emotional states, language, and stories.

The enormous amounts of data now available to researchers are fueling fresh ways of understanding phenomena such as influence and social contagion. This includes the ability to track the ebb and flow of sentiment in billions of tweets or the emotional bias of the world’s languages, two topics that are being tackled in UVM’s Computational Story Lab, which Dodds co-directs with fellow professor Chris Danforth. (The group’s research, by the way, found that natural language favors words with positive connotations.)

Dodds’s research is shedding light into what he calls “homo narrativus” —that we are fundamentally storytellers—and how humans consequently succeed or fail to contend with the world around them, both individually and collectively. He adds that he has a simple story for his students: “Work hard on things that both interest you and matter to the greater world, and work hard on figuring out what those things are.” u

“There are two things that motivate me,” says Professor Eric Hernandez, who teaches in CEMS’ School of Engineering. “The first one is the pleasure of figuring things out; the second, teaching and mentoring. Both are complementary to each other.”

Hernandez, who was awarded CEMS’ 2014 Outstanding Junior Faculty Award by Dean Luis Garcia, joined UVM in 2011 after earning a PhD from Northeastern University in 2007. He earned his BS in engineering in 1994 from Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Ureña in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship from the U.S. State Department in 2002 to pursue graduate studies.

In early 2014, he received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. Hernandez’ research currently focuses on solving large-scale inverse problems under uncertainty and their application to the assessment of safety and reliability of operational and instrumented structural systems.

STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY

When he’s not lecturing or working on research, Hernandez spends time with his wife, Karin, and their two boys, Eric Jr. and Jack. “We enjoy playing games together as well as outdoor activities. I also have a passion for music; I play classical Spanish guitar,” he says.

For his UVM students, Hernandez says he has a passion for helping them become innovative engineers capable of solving real-life problems and thinking of new ideas to make the world a better place to live.

“Interacting with the students, engaging with them to expand their horizon of knowledge and showing them how to think like engineers is my goal,” he says. “I feel great when I look back at what students knew when they first entered my classroom and what they know when they finish the semester.” u

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CEMS AWARDS THE SUPPORT TEAM

Meghan Kelly, an office support generalist in CEMS’ Mathematics and Statistics Department, says the college’s enthusiastic students and faculty create an inspiring workplace.

“The passion of my colleagues is infectious,” says Kelly, who was awarded the CEMS 2014 Staff of the Year Award

by Dean Luis Garcia.

Kelly’s strong organizational and technical skills help ensure the department’s faculty have the resources they need to do their jobs, notes Jeff Buzas, the chairman of CEMS’ Department of Mathematics and Statistics. She also recently took on the role of business support specialist for UVM’s Vermont Mathematics Initiative and serves on the UVM staff council committee for personal and professional development. On top of that, Kelly helps recruit and work with volunteers for UVM’s FIRST Robotics.

The CEMS Staff of the Year Award serves to recognize the contributions CEMS staff members make in the daily operations and advancement of the College’s programs, she adds. “Our college is full of staff members who are fantastic at their jobs.”

Working with CEMS students is a highlight of her day, she notes, adding, “We on the staff try to make our department as accessible as possible for all of those who walk through our door.”

With CEMS’ plans for growth, such as the new STEM building complex, Kelly says she’s looking forward to working with students, faculty and staff as those developments take shape. Outside of the college, Kelly stays active. “I just got my first pair of cross country skis, so I’m hoping to spend a lot of time outside learning how to use those this winter.” u

CEMS Senior Lecturer Joseph Kudrle has a mission: getting Vermont’s students engaged in mathematics.

Kudrle, who tells his students that his surname is an old Czech name pronounced “Cudderly,” wants to make math welcoming to everyone from middle-school students to University of Vermont’s undergraduates.

That’s earned him the CEMS 2014 Outstanding Service Award from Dean Luis Garcia.

To achieve his goal, Kudrle has worked with a number of groups, serving as Vermont MATHCOUNTS’ state coordinator and Northeast regional coordinator; FIRST FTC Tech Challenge facilities director for Vermont FTC FIRST Tournament; program director for UVM Actuarial Sequence/Certificate; UVM Great Move-In CEMS Volunteer Coordinator; and the Math Department Lecturer Liaison to the Department Chair.

Last but not least, he adds humorously, he’s served as the de-facto mover of heavy objects in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

MAKING MATH COUNT

Service is something that he’s always viewed in a positive light, Kudrle notes. He enjoys working with others to help untangle problems, whether that is a student’s misguided belief that he or she is not “good” at math or solving a knotty math problem. In his lectures, he often relies on his personal passions, from motorcycles to the long-running animated show “The Simpsons,” to engage students.

“To be recognized for my service is humbling,” he said.

“The work being done at UVM in regards to both internal and external service is amazing. The time and effort put forth by so many folks is what is truly inspiring.” u

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CEMS AWARDS William Louisos, a lecturer in CEMS’ School of

Engineering, points to a built-in advantage when teaching subjects such as thermodynamics.

“The stuff we do is cool,” says Louisos, who was awarded the CEMS 2014 Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award by Dean Luis Garcia. “Right now in Applied Thermodynamics, we’re talking about jet engines and aircraft engines, so we went to the VT Air National Guard and crawled on top of and inside turbo jet engines. To bring the classroom textbook material to life is what engineering is all about.”

A good teacher is like a coach, Louisos notes. “I tell the students, ‘We’re all on the same team, so it’s not me versus you. I’m here to help you be the best so you can go out and represent UVM engineering.”

Those words have added depth for Louisos, who earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from CEMS in 2009. During his graduate studies, he had the chance to teach a class on thermodynamics, which led to the opportunity to teach classes in almost every semester afterwards.

DYNAMIC EFFECTS

After earning his doctorate, he began as a lecturer at CEMS. With his doctoral advisor, professor Darren Hitt, Louisos continues to work on micro-electro-mechanicalsystems, or microthrusters, which have applications for small-scale satellites. Time management is an essential skill for engineers, he notes, which he puts into practice by juggling research and teaching. It’s also a skill he aims to impart to his students.

He adds, “I hear students say, ‘Thank you for pushing me to work hard in freshman and sophomore years, because now I have the time management skills and fundamental background to be successful in upper-level classes and beyond.” u

MAKING WAVES

Jianke Yang, a professor of applied mathematics in CEMS’ Department of Mathematics and Statistics, says his research has been driven by a desire to find solutions to scientific problems, ranging from rogue waves to applications for photonic crystals. “Especially when this pursuit is motivated by real-world physical problems, since my findings may have direct physical impact,” he says.

“Discoveries are addictive, and curiosity is enticing.”

Yang, who has served as a professor at CEMS for two decades and was awarded the CEMS 2014 Outstanding Researcher of the Year Award by Dean Luis Garcia, conducts research on nonlinear waves and physical mathematics. Physical examples of nonlinear waves include water waves, optical waves and Bose-Einstein condensates.

Research into nonlinear waves, such as internal waves in the ocean, can be applied to fields ranging from fiber telecommunications systems to oceanography. For Yang, his research efforts are now focusing on two projects, the study of rogue waves in physical systems and the study of dissipative physical systems with parity-time symmetry, which have received support from the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Yang also serves as the editor in chief of the premier journal Studies in Applied Mathematics published by Wiley.

In addition, he serves on the editorial board of Physical Review E, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society. He has held past roles with other journals such as Physical Review A as well.

He adds, “There is hardly anything more satisfying than finding a new phenomenon or a solution to a scientific problem.” u

Photos by Sally McCay

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Jordan Duffy. Photo by Scott D. Hamshaw

Photo credit: Mark D. Hamshaw

Scott D Hamshaw

MAPPING THE WATERSHED:

Donna Rizzo’s computer programs find patterns in a deluge of environmental data.

By Sujata Gupta

When Hurricane Irene hit Vermont in 2011, the storm sent massive amounts of debris and sediment into the state’s waterways – an extreme erosion event that is helping Donna Rizzo, an environmental engineer in the University of Vermont’s School of Engineering, model how a changing climate will impact the state’s watersheds in coming years.

Rizzo is a leader in developing complex computer algorithms that make sense of enormous datasets and applying them to watersheds. Such computer programs are designed to mimic activity inside the human brain and can

therefore learn to sort information into recognizable patterns or clusters (while the human brain gets confused after about seven clusters, computers have no such limitations).

Imagine, for instance, trying to teach a computer to recognize breeds of dogs. First, the computer would be given a huge dataset of dogs and then trained to sort those dogs by everything from size to temperament to fur color to indicate breed: golden retriever, German shepherd, Continued on next page

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Cover photo by Scott Hamshaw. For details see page 3

MAPPING THE WATERSHED collie, mutt. Such a program could then learn to identify a dog without a known breed and find the closest match in the database.

Professor Rizzo initially started off as an anthropology major at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. But she soon tired of debating issues (i.e.: “Can you put the environment to the market test? No!” thought Rizzo, even as a freshman) and began to look into how to initiate actual change. Engineering seemed the clear choice. Following her graduation in 1983, and a series of meandering career moves, including a brief stint studying studio art in Florence, Italy, Rizzo began studying artificial intelligence and working as a participating guest at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. There, she was tasked with creating computer programs that showed the most efficient way of cleaning up contaminated groundwater sites. She soon realized that drilling a well required collecting copious amounts of information, yet that information was seldom used for anything other than the project at hand. Rizzo hoped to take that unused drilling data and create “intelligent” algorithms capable of identifying patterns in underground water movement. That approach, she suspected, could overhaul how drilling

decisions are made, especially in a thirsty state like California.

Rizzo began studying that problem in graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, and soon followed her advisor, David Dougherty, to the University of Vermont.

There, she became the first student in the school’s new civil and environmental engineering PhD program where she sorted out how to “meld artificial intelligence and environmental engineering” – as applied to drought or water quality. She was soon joined by Maggie Eppstein, now the chair of UVM’s computer science department.

“Donna and I are PhD sisters,” Eppstein says. More recently, the two women have also become collaborators.

After completing her doctorate in 1994, Rizzo and Dougherty started an environmental research company. But she returned to UVM in 2002, this time as a professor in the School of Engineering. Her first graduate student, a woman named Paula Mouser, now an engineering professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, was intrigued by the possibility of checking and tracking leaks from landfills by using microbes found in groundwater. Mouser suspected that the mere presence of certain microbes, such as those that eat methane, could indicate a leak and where it had traveled.

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The Environmental Protection Agency already requires the collection and analysis of groundwater around landfill sites several times a year – a time-consuming and expensive process. Mouser reasoned that it might be simpler to test for the presence of certain microbes in the groundwater and see if they served as a valid proxy for a leak.

After settling on a landfill site in Schuyler Falls, NY (all the Vermont landfills were not leaking enough, Rizzo says), Mouser set to work collecting microbes. The two women also utilized a new algorithm, later modified by Eppstein and one of her grad students that made it easier to visualize clusters in datasets. The results were striking. The microbes were surprisingly good at indicating the border of a leak, where contamination levels are so low they may not be detectable in a lab, Rizzo says. Specifically, the researchers realized that microbial diversity increased as contamination decreased. That made sense. With no single contaminant bolstering the survival of a single species, multiple species could thrive along the border.

The beauty of her work, says Rizzo, is that it lets her dabble in myriad disciplines. She’s worked on everything from the market penetration potential for hybrid vehicles to the spread of Chagas disease. “I personally think I would get bored if I dedicated my entire career to one particular topic,” Rizzo says.

A case in point: In 2012, Rizzo collaborated with Mary Watzin, then an ecologist in UVM’s Rubenstein School and the current Dean of the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, to identify the culprit behind cyanobacterial blooms in Lake Champlain.

Traditional statistical methods, Watzin says, require some idea of that culprit or culprits and she was drawing a blank.

Watzin knew from previous work with Rizzo that the programs she was using enabled the same sort of data analysis but without any preconceptions. So, says Watzin, “I gave [Rizzo] all my data.”

Rizzo, with PhD student Andrea Pearce, plugged in several variables, such as wind speeds, temperature, nitrogen and phosphorous levels, but didn’t tell the program when a bloom had occurred. Then, Rizzo says, “We let the algorithm loose on her data.” As Watzin looked on, the swirling mass of information soon settled into distinct clusters: bloom and no bloom. Watzin was stunned.

As Watzin looked closer at the “bloom” category, she was struck by the fact that the samples were rich in dissolved manganese and iron, two elements found only inside soil.

Watzin knew that manganese tended to leech out of the soil when oxygen levels plummeted, as they would during periods of high stormwater runoff. Dissolved nitrogen and phosphorous, in the form of ammonium, also leech out of soil when oxygen dissipates but tend to be more transitory.

So Watzin fed cyanobacteria in the lab ammonium. They

(Left to right) John Hanley, Lucas Howard, Kristen Underwood, Professor Donna Rizzo, Scott Hamshaw, Andrea Pearce, Ian Anderson.

Photo by Sally McCay.

flourished. That made clear to Watzin that the cyanobacteria were munching on sediments present at the bottom of the water column to initiate a bloom. “We want to really make sure that in the springtime that we’re not sending a bunch of phosphorous and organic matter down into the bay. If a bloom never gets started, then it’s hard to keep it going,” Watzin says.

Researchers at UVM are still trying to sort out another, related cyanobacteria question – what triggers a toxic versus a non-toxic bloom. The clustering there has been less clear. Sometimes when no clear pattern emerges, it means we’re not collecting the right types of data, Rizzo says. Computer programs are great at sifting through existing data, in other words, but they can’t make up for data that doesn’t exist.

Filling in those sorts of gaps in the data is the cornerstone of Rizzo’s recent efforts to understand how climate change will affect Vermont’s watersheds. She is part of a $28 million grant, distributed to various researchers across the state, aimed at helping policymakers determine how climate change will affect the state and its ecosystem.

As part of that initiative, Rizzo and others have been scattering sensors throughout the Missisquoi and Winooski watersheds. Just as her work with Watzin made clear that we cannot understand what triggers a bloom by only sampling after such an event has occurred, Rizzo says, we cannot understand long-term changes along the watersheds without continuous monitoring. The new sensors will measure everything from water turbidity to phosphorous levels to erosion.

Soon, says Rizzo, she and her collaborators will be able to begin creating computer programs capable of identifying patterns in the chaos. This sort of analysis “is hard for the human brain,” she notes. “If it doesn’t fall out on a beautiful regression line, it’s hard for people to see a pattern.” u

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SCOUR MAKES ITS MARK CEMS takes a deeper look at flood-damaged bridges across the state.

By Lynn Monty

Photo courtesy of VTrans

Thanks to Vermont’s river-crossed terrain, the state is dotted with more than 4,000 bridges, from picturesque covered bridges to more prosaic overpasses that might not earn a second thought from motorists.

But the state’s bridges became a symbol of the sometimesdestructive power of water during Tropical Storm Irene, when an amateur video captured the Bartonsville covered bridge sliding into the Williams River, wiping away one of the state’s more than 100 iconic wooden-roofed bridges.

While that event was an extreme occurrence, it demonstrated a condensed version of a nonstop force that eats away at the state’s river crossings: water-wear.

Called scour by engineers, the force washes away sediment from the base of a bridge, and can scoop holes into abutments and weaken a bridge’s structural integrity.

Given enough scour, a bridge will become structurally unsound and could eventually collapse.

Investigating how scour impacts Vermont’s bridges is a line of research at UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, with the college’s faculty and students working on research for the Vermont Agency of Transportation (or VTrans) to develop an understanding of how bridge and stream interactions lead to structural problems, and how to reduce the risk of scour damage.

VTrans is beginning to appreciate that rivers are dynamic systems, said VTrans Project Manager Carolyn Carlson, who graduated from UVM in 1985 with a degree in civil engineering and later earned an MBA at the university. “We tend to design our bridges to span river crossings in one location, and that it will last for 80 to 90 years,” she says.

“However, we are observing that our rivers and streams want to go elsewhere during storm events.”

Tropical Storm Irene sparked the state’s interest in researching scour, with state officials and engineers realizing that bigger and more frequent storms may pose additional challenges for Vermont, says Glenn McRae, associate director of UVM’s Transportation Research SUMMIT | 17

Center, which is also working on the research for VTrans.

Research will integrate information about both bridges and streams, with the goal of improving the understanding of how stream geomorphology is affected by and affects bridges.

Successfully mitigating scour-related problems associated with bridges is dependent on the ability to estimate scour potential, design prevention and countermeasures, designing safe and economical foundation elements that account for scour potential, and designing reliable and economically feasible monitoring systems, says CEMS associate professor Mandar Dewoolkar, who is one of the college’s faculty investigating the issue, along with graduate students Ian Anderson and Daniel Hagan.

“With an understanding of stream stability, we can better site bridges to reduce risk, and design in a manner that respects the streams’ natural adjustments,” Dewoolkar says.

Before Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, there were four previous flood events in 1927, 1936, 1938, and 1973. The 1927 flood was a major disaster for Vermont, destroying more than 1,200 bridges and killing 84 people, including the state’s lieutenant governor. The other events were smaller in scale, but also destructive, Dewoolkar adds.

“The storm in 1927 was a lot like Irene,” he says. “Both storms were the last efforts of hurricanes, and came after a month of higher-than-normal rainfall, resulting in saturated conditions that lead to greater runoff.”

After the 1927 flood, Vermont replaced many damaged bridges with truss bridges that were higher and had longer

spans over rivers and streams, Carlson notes. Larger hydraulic openings were built into designs to prevent losing bridges to flooding and scour situations.

But some of these failed 84 years later during Tropical Storm Irene, when more than 200 bridges in Vermont were damaged or destroyed.

“Irene caused greater-than-anticipated damage,” Dewoolkar says. “I never thought it could happen. Of the damaged bridges we have record of, about 40 percent required major repairs or were completely replaced because of Irene.”

The nation is suffering from aging infrastructure, and Vermont is no different, Dewoolkar adds. “Irene was a good lesson. Moving forward we hope to develop more holistic bridge designs, and do it economically,” he says.

Rivers, streams, and their banks, as well as existing roads, flood plains, and many other variables come into play when conceptualizing a bridge design. Flood plain availability upstream and downstream and riparian vegetation that could add to floating debris or blockage are often hard to predict, while potential interactions are difficult to pinpoint.

Vermont’s 4,000 bridges are inspected regularly, with its 2,716 long structures – or those with spans of more than 20 feet – conducted every 24 months. The shorter bridges are inspected every 60 months, Carlson notes. Yet even with teams of inspectors traveling throughout the state to inspect the bridges, some still fail without warning.

Once such bridge was White River Junction’s Bridge

Previous page: Post Tropical Storm Irene flood photo Route 30 Dummerston, Vermont.

Below: Post Tropical Storm Irene flood photo of a bridge on Route 12A in Braintree, Vermont. Photo courtesy of VTrans.

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Above: Post Tropical Storm Irene flood photo Route 100 Jamaica, Vermont. Photo courtesy of VTrans.

Street bridge, a multi-span structure with piers built on timber piles that suddenly fell into the White River in 1990.

“There was a massive ice jam that destroyed the supports and several spans collapsed into the river,” Carlson says.

Engineers later found that progressive weakening due to scour was to blame.

Issues such as VTrans’ scour research are often brought to students at CEMS to take on in their senior year Capstone projects. The Capstone projects are required for all undergraduate engineering students, and the civil engineering students often work on projects for local municipalities.

“VTrans and UVM teaming up is important in a small state such as ours,” Carlson notes. “We both want answers to engineering problems and working together allows us to pool our resources and tools to come up with solutions to problems such as scour.”

For the past few semesters, CEMS students have been integrating information about streams and flood plains to help VTrans develop a Vermont-specific approach to bridge design and repair. “We hope to improve the existing ways of rating bridges for scour susceptibility, so the most vulnerable bridges could be more readily identified for immediate attention,” Dewoolkar says.

Because of their research, Vermont is actually one of the very few states where significant data on the health and conditions of streams are becoming available and are continuously being collected, Dewoolkar said.

“VTrans is also considering newer construction technologies such as rapid bridge construction and building longer spans that the new techniques allow,” Dewoolkar notes. “There is always more to learn.” u

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(Left to right) Hanna Anderson (UVM), Elkar Souvana Espinoza Selezneva, Rommel Rodriguez, Nora Varhue, and Edrulfo Rodriguez (of the Nicaraguan NGO, CIIASDENIC). Photos courtesy of UVM Engineers Without Borders.

SOLVING ‘MONTHS OF THE SKINNY COWS’ How CEMS students are working with Engineers Without Borders and a Nicaraguan agency to recycle a village’s greywater.

By Kim MacQueen They call it los meses de las vacas flacas – the months of the skinny cows. The phrase refers to the dry months in mountainous Nicaragua, where coffee is the principal crop.

During the four rainy months of the year, coffee growers can harvest their cash crop and buy enough food to feed their families. But in the dry months, that’s much more difficult, and people often go hungry. Los meses de las vacas flacas is a time of scarcity, hardship and poverty.

CEMS Dean Luis Garcia heard about the situation this year at a presentation by members of the Vermont Engineers Without Borders (VTEWB) professional chapter and Keurig Green Mountain. The two groups are working

together to provide water recycling and storage ideas for plantations in Venecia, a village in northwestern Nicaragua.

Garcia found the project compelling, and in May joined a group from the Vermont EWB professional chapter and five UVM students, members of the university’s student EWB chapter, to visit Venecia and develop a student-led aspect to the water supply project that the VTEWB chapter has been working on, one designed to help coffee growers’ families grow their own food year-round.

“The UVM students are looking at using greywater, generated from washing dishes and doing laundry, to water small home gardens that families could use to supplement

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their food supplies,” Garcia explains. “The idea is for these families to be able to grow enough food that they would have a source of income or food in the dry season – those vacas flacas months.” The student EWB team knew both problems added up to a lot of challenges, so they did a lot of research and prep work before any of them ever set foot in Nicaragua.

“We wanted to be prepared once we arrived. We did a lot of research on what was needed for water quality parameters for safe and effective reuse,” explains senior Hanna Anderson, an environmental engineering major who serves as project lead. “We took samples of the existing greywater and sent them back to UVM for testing, and we took soil samples from the home gardens to check the nutrient levels.”

She adds that “working with EWB has given me a great opportunity to be hands-on within my major. It’s helped with my project management, networking and leadership skills, and it’s given me a chance to travel. I want to go into a water-related field, so it is geared toward what I hope to be doing in the future.”

Anderson and fellow EWB chapter students are now in a research phase leading up to their second trip to Venecia, planned for May 2015, in an effort to recommend their cost-effective, easy-to-maintain greywater cleaning system.

“We want what is needed to be easy to obtain locally so they don’t have to rely on imports – if you had to send it from the U.S., that would be a problem long-term. Maybe we could bring some now, but what happens five years later?” Garcia says. “And it has to be economical for their standard of living.”

The EWB team is working now with Edrulfo Rodriguez, Nicaragua-based project coordinator for Asociacion para el Desarrollo Social de Nicaragua (ASDENIC), to find the most cost-effective means to implement their plans.

“The students have listened to the community needs first, before they came up with a proposal, they have shared with ASDENIC all their thoughts and ideas on how to solve the problem, and they have coordinated with us on every step

(Left to right) Nora Varhue (UVM); Rommel Rodriquez; Karen and Linda Jamaly Escoto Molina; boys from the local community, names unknown; Baxter Miatke (UVM); Hanna Anderson (UVM).

“...Our students are understanding they can make a difference in the world,” Garcia says.

“They’re realizing that some of the work that they’re doing literally could be the difference between somebody going hungry and somebody having enough food. That’s really powerful.” of the project, which makes us feel like we are building something together,” Rodriguez says.

With some international cooperation projects, experts arrive but fail to consult the partner organization or the people who live there, he notes. “But the work with UVM students has been very different, because they have considered every idea and comment from the people of Venecia,” Rodriguez says. “They have helped encourage this community that is possible to turn a problem into an opportunity.”

Student Ben Cares, a junior civil engineering major who serves as UVM’s EWB chapter president, adds to that idea.

“This project actually can change the way engineers are seen,” he says. “EWB is a glimpse into what engineering can be from a humanitarian view.”

Cares also encourages all students interested in EWB to email him at bcares@uvm.edu and get involved, whether they’re engineering majors or not. Help is needed organizing, building, planning and other areas.

Garcia, too, has noticed EWB’s numbers are increasing, although he adds that more help, as well as recognition of these dedicated students’ work, is always welcomed.

“I think the whole idea is that our students are understanding they can make a difference in the world,” Garcia says. “They’re realizing that some of the work that they’re doing literally could be the difference between somebody going hungry and somebody having enough food. That’s really powerful.” u SUMMIT | 21

Matthew Lane, Mike Kirk (Greylaine Farm), Henry Duncan and Christina Millar.

A CLEAN, GREEN EGG MACHINE How a team of CEMS students is washing away a problem for local farmers.

By Lynn Monty Pigs sometimes escape their fencing at Greylaine Farm in Shelburne, Vermont. When they do, farmer Michael Kirk is quick to herd them back in. “Those snouts can certainly find their share of trouble,” he says with a laugh.

Pasture-raising lamb, pork, and laying hens keep this 2009 UVM graduate busy, but he’s had some extra help this year from his alma mater in solving another problem facing small farmers: finding a small-scale egg-washing machine that will prepare his farm’s eggs for market.

Because eggs get dirty on the farm, Kirk was looking for a machine that could handle his hens’ daily production of 100 eggs, yet scale up to about 3,000 eggs per day as his farm expands. But current devices are designed for much larger productions, he notes.

“Most egg-washing machines need an entire barn to operate in because they are about 20 feet long. And they take two people to operate,” Kirk says.

Having two farmers running a machine when problems arise – for instance, when the pigs become ornery and need attention – isn’t convenient. The other option is the time-consuming practice of hand washing. “I wanted something better than what is out there, so I called UVM,” he says.

Kirk’s challenge was taken up by a team of engineering students at the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences as their senior Capstone project, which is a team-based design and engineering project required of the school’s engineering students.

For Matthew Lane, a CEMS senior mechanical engineering student who is working on the egg-washing device with fellow students Christina Millar and Henry Duncan, their goal was clear: to develop a prototype eggwashing device that would be compact, farmer-friendly and conserve water.

“Egg washers can be a water-intensive operation,” Kirk notes. “I didn’t want that. I would rather water be used for the essential soil and grass on my farm.”

Water is used as a universal solvent in most washing systems, notes extension assistant professor of Agricultural Engineering Chris Callahan, who serves as a student advisor on the project and whose work focuses on the application of engineering practices to food systems.

The project not only solves a design problem, but represents just one of the new challenges arising from the growth of the local food movement, which has spurred

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demand for locally produced foods such as eggs.

Delivering safe, clean food to consumers’ tables often relies on leveraging technology in clever ways, Callahan points out. “Food can be a dirty business, and we tend to be disconnected from that as consumers,” he says. “This is an example of where some mechanization will allow smallerscale egg producers to focus on increased volume and increased profitability without sacrificing cleanliness of the eggs and food safety.”

The students turned to scrap materials, motors and circuit boards for their materials. The machine is far from a traditional piece of farming equipment: the initial controls were made with an old Nintendo video game controller.

Designed to be portable, the machine is only 12 inches high and 25 inches long, and can sit on a countertop, similar to a kitchen appliance.

The students’ prototype design uses relatively little water and is similar to a low-flow showerhead, while brushes handle most of the work. The amount of water used can be adjusted for each batch of eggs.

The process helped Duncan and the other students learn about the aspects of working on a team. “It has also taught me what I think are going to be two very important skills, time management and communicating effectively,” he adds.

For instance, the students came up with several methods for moving the eggs through the machine and using the brushes for cleaning, but “a lot of unforeseen conflicts” arose when the time came to put it all together, Duncan notes. “Our biggest success has been creating a working prototype months ahead of schedule,” he says.

The students’ aim is that the final product will be replicable for other farmers.

“The biggest challenge we’ve had is selecting real world parts that are easily obtainable,” Lane says. “One of the goals of the machine is that it is easily replicable so we considered that in the part selections.”

As for Kirk, he says the machine could make a real difference beyond Greylaine Farms. He notes, “What this does is take learning beyond classroom walls. This is something that could create real impact for farms.” u

CEMS students discuss their egg washer prototype with farmers at Jericho Settlers Farm in Jericho, VT. The team built this very early rough prototype with materials on hand to better understand the design problem and to start to formulate their solution. A final prototype is being constructed for presentation and delivery in April 2015.

(L to R): Joe Emenheiser (UVM Extension Livestock Specialist), Christa Alexander and Mark Fasching (Jericho Settlers Farm), Henry Duncan, Matthew Lane, and Christina Millar (all Senior Engineering Students). Not shown: Mike Kirk (Greylaine Farm), project sponsor. Photo credit: Chris Callahan.

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UVM ENGINEERS BUILD TINY RENEW FOR DEVELOPING WORLD

By Joshua Brown .00002 miles per hour might remind you of a bad day on the interstate. But that’s how fast some bamboo can grow: up to 35 inches every day — a world record. It’s a grass that can, in a few months, grow as tall as a tree. And, as it grows on, say, a mountainside in China or Chile, it gets hammered by the wind. But it doesn’t break. It flexes and resists, using the power of the sun to grow up and the power of the wind to grow strong.

“The wind makes the bamboo grow in different directions,” says UVM professor of engineering Ting Tan, “which means that the plant’s microstructure is adapted to wind. “Inspired by the bamboo, we decided to adapt it,” Tan says. Using bamboo as their primary building material, Tan and his colleague, professor of electrical engineering, Tian Xia, and a group of students, have built a hybrid energy harvester: it combines a small-scale wind turbine — built out of bamboo — with a solar panel. The whole device is about the size of a trashcan. “We capture the wind and the sun at the same time, just like the bamboo does,” Tan says, “and put the energy into a battery.”

OFF GRID

Tan and his team see the device as a prototype — a first test — for a kind of energy collection that could be useful in parts of the developing world that have few resources and limited or no access to the traditional electrical grid.

“Most wind turbines now are huge,” says Tian Xia. “We want to make this convenient for a family or a small community that could not afford an industrial wind turbine. We wanted to design this as a standalone, smallscale system. In portions of Africa and the developing world there are places that have no infrastructure, but they want to use electricity.” With its blades and supports made from bamboo, key parts of the turbine should be able to be harvested from local land in many parts of the world, comparatively easy to repair, and renewable.

“You could use this turbine to charge a cell phone or run some lights,” says Ting Tan. “This distributed system is not as efficient as a large system. But the advantage is that it can be used everywhere.”

BAMBOO USES

Before joining the faculty at UVM, Tan, an expert on the mechanical properties of materials, studied bamboo as a graduate student at Princeton. There, he was part of a team that helped build a bicycle out of bamboo that led to a bamboo-bike manufacturing company. Famed architect Simón Vélez describes bamboo as “vegetable steel” and has built buildings, including a church in Colombia, out of bamboo. Bamboo has a tensile strength that rivals steel, and bamboo products, especially composites that are combined with strong polymers, are becoming increasingly popular.

But, “even though bamboo has been used in various applications,” Tan notes, “its role in renewable energy infrastructure has not been well defined.” He and his UVM team are on the leading edge of changing that.

Much of the work on the new turbine was completed last spring by a team of undergraduate students in the CEMS Senior Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) program: class of 2014 graduates Hunter O’Folan, Justin Dao, Karl Johanson and Zachary Basch.

The students and professors studied the few other bamboo wind turbine designs they could find, but nothing seemed highly refined, so they set out to make their own.

“We tested six or seven structures, but some didn’t rotate,” Tan says, “and this one gives the best RPMs,” he says, slowing spinning the model he and the students built. The three helical blades, for catching the wind, have a handsome curving shape — guided by National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics airfoil designs. They have “a pitch angle of 60 degrees and twist angle of 80 degrees,” Tan explains. The underlying polymer skeleton of the blades was produced in the UVM Fab Lab using a 3D printer.

As the vertical turbine spins, picking up speed, the bamboo blades undulate in a warm brown weave. At night, it makes a pleasing pattern with glowing LED lights that are embedded into the blades. Below the turbine, a group of additional LEDs shine down its mounting pole onto the ground, demonstrating how the team imagines this device could be deployed: as a standalone power source for a street light — whether in a sub-Saharan village or as arty installation on a Paris boulevard.

“Since it’s both wind and solar powered, this microcontroller determines what source will be charging the battery depending on how much power we’re getting from each source,” says Justin Dao, pointing to a black box full of wires and circuitboards. Dao, part of the SEED team,

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WABLE WIND TURBINE

graduated from UVM’s Honors College with a degree in electrical engineering and is now a graduate student in the engineering program. “This microcontroller also determines if it’s dark enough out to turns the lights on.”

TEST RUNS

With funding from UVM’s Clean Energy Fund, the team tested the turbine on the roof of the Votey Building earlier this year. “Yes, it spins beautifully,” Tan says. He also says they have applied for a preliminary patent. In 2015, the team will move into the next, more rigorous testing phase: running the new turbine through detailed tests in a worldclass wind tunnel in Williston, Vt., operated by SOH Wind Engineering.

In its habitats, bamboo works as a cantilevered beam, fixed to the earth. Responding to its swaying motion, bamboo’s internal structure also naturally develops into what engineers call a “functionally graded material.” This means that its fibers transition from inner to outer surfaces in a way that gives bamboo a remarkable combination of flexibility, resilience and strength. “Functionally graded materials are effective in reducing stress concentrations between different layers,” Tan notes, “which are critical to the performance of many devices.” For example, a bamboo wind turbine that would need to withstand the full onslaught of summer heat and winter freezing.

Tan credits his inspiration for the new device to

Under an arc of bamboo— a wind turbine blade made from not much more than grass and glue —professor of engineering Ting Tan and graduate student Brian Ribbans ’13 study the inner workings of an energy harvester they and a team of undergraduates built. The scientists would like to see turbines like theirs deployed to developing regions of the world. It’s a new chapter in “bambooinspired studies,” Tan says — part of the globally urgent hunt for affordable renewable energy. (Photo: Joshua Brown)

participation in the UVM Sustainability Fellows Program.

“I came up with this idea in those discussions with faculty from all over UVM. As I attended the program, I was thinking: because we’re engineers we want to help people, and we can help people in a beautiful way.”

And Tan’s time as a post-doctoral researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory — working on next-generation ideas in energy production — makes him acutely aware that one of the biggest sustainability challenge in his team’s new system is finding batteries that are longer lasting, more disposable and less toxic than the current generation. The protype they built uses a car battery. “Develop better future batteries,” Tan says, “and we can definitely increase the lifetime of these systems.”

“I see the need for a power system that is convenient, that is sustainable and that is beautiful,” he says. “We are not building wind turbines; we are planting wind turbines.” u

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FOURTH-GEN CEMS

For Caitlyn Bishop, a programming class sparked a new academic focus and career path.

By Aimee Picchi Caitlyn Bishop was on track for pre-med when she enrolled in an introductory programming class as, she notes, a “fluke.”

“It was my second semester of sophomore year, and I took my first computer science course,” she notes. “It was Introduction to Programming, and I took it as an elective. I fell in love with it.”

The class, taught by senior lecturer Jackie Horton, helped change Bishop’s educational and career path, taking her from a focus on biochemistry and into a concentration in math and computer science. She graduated in late 2014, a semester early, with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and dual minors in computer science and biology. Shortly afterward, she started working as an associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Intelligent Systems group.

“What grabbed me is you are writing all this code, and it looks like complete gibberish,” Bishop recalls of her first programming class. “But when you hit ‘compile,’ it creates something you wouldn’t necessarily expect.”

After taking her first programming class, Bishop recalls she wondered, “Maybe I just liked Matlab,” the language that was the focus of Horton’s instruction. “But I took a second class and my love continued.” She’s since learned several other programming languages, including Python, Java and C++.

For the South Burlington native, transitioning within UVM to the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences was, in a way, a family homecoming. She’s now the fourth generation of her family to graduate from CEMS, with her father, her grandfather and her greatgrandfather all studying engineering at the college.

Looking to learn more about computer science and integrate it with her interest in biology, Bishop took a class on evolutionary robotics taught by Josh Bongard, associate professor of computer science, whose research looks at how evolutionary algorithms can inform and shape robotic design.

“His class changed my life,” Bishop says. “The way he integrates biology, math and computer science into evolutionary robotics shaped me as a student and as an associate at Johns Hopkins.”

In the class, she studied how evolutionary algorithms could be implemented in a self-evolving virtual,

computer-based robot. “Ideally, we’re striving toward autonomy in robots. We evolved a robot to walk, and I got it to climb stairs,” she says.

The moment when her robot walked up stairs “was amazing,” she says. “I’d be doing homework, and I’d say to my roommates, ‘Come look at my robot!’ It was the best feeling in the world to see that tangible result.”

Bishop was one of “the most engaged and dynamic students I have had in my class,” notes Bongard. “Caitlyn also went out of her way to help fellow students, and participated in outreach activities off campus. For example, she volunteered for Xemory Software, a CEMS spin-off company developing educational games. She helped them alpha test their products with younger students at the Maker Faire at Shelburne Farms.”

With classmates, Bishop also developed American Sign Language recognition software for Leap Motion’s new hands-free mouse, Bongard adds.

A former track and field competitor at UVM, where she specialized in javelin, Bishop is training for a halfmarathon with her sister. While working at Johns Hopkins, she’s taking graduate-level classes in computational mathematics, with a goal toward working a PhD and, she hopes, one day returning to UVM to teach.

She adds, “I would love to impact someone like Jackie Horton impacted me, and really make a difference and show how great academics can be.” u

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THE CROSSFIT CONNECTION How CEMS student Mat Fraser is finding the balance between science and athletics.

Even though Mat Fraser was relatively new to CrossFit when he started competing in 2013, games and sports run in his blood.

The son of Canadian Olympic figure skaters, Fraser grew up testing his physical boundaries: waterskiing at 18 months, graduating to slalom water skiing at age six, and learning aerial skiing as a teenager. In high school, he channeled his competitive energies into weightlifting, and became an Olympic hopeful.

But when the funding for his Olympic training program took a hit, Fraser decided to take a break from weightlifting. After a summer working in oil fields in Alberta, he returned to UVM in 2012, where he’s double majoring in mechanical engineering and engineering management, with minors in math and business. At the same time, he started to look for a new sport that would offer him a break from facts and figures, he says.

CrossFit captured his attention. A relatively new athletic endeavor – it was started in 2000, when Fraser himself was still in elementary school – CrossFit bills itself as a combination of a fitness regime and competitive sport, training athletes in high-intensity workouts such as burpees and overhead squats. Underneath the hard work is a philosophical underpinning: athletes should be prepared “not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable as well,” as the CrossFit Journal puts it.

For Fraser, entering his first CrossFit competition in 2013 was a big unknown. As he told CrossFit in an interview last year, “I didn’t really have any idea of what regionals were.”

Fraser finished in fifth place, and vowed to return in 2014 and win. After finishing near the top in events ranging from a handstand walk to grueling combinations of squats, pushups, and other activities, Fraser achieved his goal of taking home the top prize.

Later in 2014, he surprised many in the CrossFit world by coming in second place in the sport’s CrossFit Games, its biggest competition. It was his first time competing in the championship.

Aside from keeping himself physically fit, CrossFit has provided Fraser with a way to support himself financially through college, thanks to winnings from competitions and a job teaching locally at Champlain Valley CrossFit in Williston. He’s also just signed a sponsorship deal with Nike.

“They both require a lot of time management,” he notes. “One requires you to sit and study for hours on end, the other requires you to expend every ounce of energy, so they go well together.”

“CrossFit has the potential to be lucrative if you do well at competitions and place in the top at the world championships,” he notes. First-place male and female finishers at the CrossFit Games win $275,000 each.

Until he graduates this fall, Fraser will be focusing his energy on maintaining that balance between his academics and his CrossFit career. Even though giving each their due can be tricky, the two areas complement each other, he adds. “They both require a lot of time management,” he notes. “One requires you to sit and study for hours on end, the other requires you to expend every ounce of energy, so they go well together.” u

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FLUID DYNAMICS: CEMS Board of Advisors Chair Jack Scambos ‘82 shares his vision for the college’s future.

By Aimee Picchi

As a prospective student visiting the University of Vermont in the late 1970s, Jack Scambos says one meeting stood out as a deciding factor in whether to attend the school.

That was when then CEMS Dean Elmer Gaden Jr. heard that Scambos was interested in studying chemical engineering. The problem, Scambos notes, was that UVM didn’t offer a degree in the subject at the time.

“He was this super confident, very approachable guy,” recalls Scambos. “He said, ‘We don’t have a program here, but that’s my field and I’ll be your advisor.’ My reaction: That was great. I was a freshman with the Dean as my advisor.”

From Dean Gaden’s mentoring to learning how teamwork would get him through a tough Physics 101 class with Professor David Juenker, Scambos says his University of Vermont education provided essential skills for succeeding in the STEM fields: not only technical expertise, but how to manage interpersonal relationships.

That’s served him well while managing his company, Aqueous Recovery Resources, which he founded in 1990 to provide solutions for industrial water recycling and reuse.

With CEMS starting on an ambitious project to build a new $104 million STEM complex, which will transform and reshape how math, engineering and the sciences are

taught at the “public ivy,” Scambos notes that the college has a “real opportunity for progress.” As chairman of CEMS’ Board of Advisors, he’s working with the college to cultivate its internship program by working closely with and engaging its network of alumni, and assisting Dean Luis Garcia in ways the board members’ private enterprise experience can help the college and its students.

Scambos shares a research interest with Dean Garcia: water use and its conservation. This natural resource, Scambos notes, will become even more critical during the coming decades as population growth and climate change create more demand for, and stresses on, clean water. The type of water-focused research that’s taking place at CEMS now, such as Professor Donna Rizzo’s investigations into how climate change is impacting Vermont’s watersheds through analysis of large-scale datasets, is a promising focus that could carve out a future for the college.

“The field is exploding,” Scambos says. “Water in India will be a critical issue in 10 years. There is a huge portion of society that doesn’t have access to clean water.

California? It’s happening now. Already there are real tradeoffs being negotiated between traditional agricultural demands and alternative water resource consumers like residential and industrial.” Private businesses that rely on water as a critical component of their product offering – think of corporations such as Pepsico or Keurig Green Mountain – also have a vested interest in understanding water, from reuse to conservation, he notes.

The path to Scambos’ focus on natural resources, whether that’s water or interpersonal relationships, evolved after graduating from UVM in 1982. That’s when he and his wife, Donna Burbank, whom he had met at Davis Hall during their freshman year, left Vermont so that Scambos could pursue a job with Texas Instruments. Next, Scambos earned an MBA in entrepreneurship from Columbia University.

While Scambos was working on a marketing study for a specialty product that holds oil on top of water, he was drawn to what he calls an “interesting problem”: in cleaning oil spills, the oil companies don’t want any water to contaminate the recovered oil. States and environmentalists, likewise, don’t want any oil remaining in the water. The product, called Elastol, helped fill that need, allowing for easier cleanup in oil spills and leaks by increasing the oil’s cohesiveness.

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Since then, Aqueous Recovery Resources has expanded into solutions for separating water from oil, with applications for businesses ranging from metal working and finishing to the food-service and pharmaceutical industries.

As for interpersonal relationships, Scambos points to a book his father gave him as a huge influence: Daniel Goleman’s “Working with Emotional Intelligence.” Scambos notes, “He gave it to me with an inscription, which said, ‘If I had read this book when I was beginning my career, I would have been a lot more successful than I am.’” Scambos laughs, “And my dad is incredibly successful.”

Learning how to work on a team is an important part of the CEMS experience, with engineering students finishing out their undergraduate degrees on a Capstone design project, which instills the type of group-focused work that Scambos notes was so useful for succeeding in Prof.

Juenker’s physics class.

Scambos, who skis every year with a group of former UVM classmates, says the university’s alumni “have all been successful in one form or another and have then branched out to seek a higher ‘return.’” He adds, “Business success is one thing. Family and community success another, both important. But to contribute, to truly make your mark – a lasting difference -- in the world that we have, that’s a life well lived.”

Scambos notes, “UVM seems to attract people with this outlook.” He says the university’s administration shares that attribute, adding, “I think with the help and enthusiastic response of key alums, UVM could take advantage of the confluence of the national emphasis on STEM research and education and our own CEMS expansion to create a new focus: Water. It’s a staggering opportunity for UVM to declare an area of expertise and impact the world.” u

IN MEMORIAM: DAN ARCHDEACON Dan Archdeacon, an intellectually engaging teacher, worldrenowned scholar and highly respected colleague who joined the University of Vermont’s Department of Mathematics in 1982, passed away on February 18, 2015. Archdeacon held a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Previously, he held an appointment at the University of Kansas. He received his doctorate from Ohio State University.

Dan Archdeacon

Archdeacon served the university in many leadership roles, including as director of the Mathematics Graduate Program and as a long time member and chair of the Professional Standards Committee of the Faculty Senate. Archdeacon was named a University Scholar for the academic year 2003-2004, was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the Riga’s Commerce School and held numerous visiting professorships at other universities, including the University of Auckland, Yokohama National University, Technical University of Denmark and the Open University.

A passionate and highly accomplished mathematician, Archdeacon’s research focus was on graph theory,

combinatorics, theoretical computer science and topographical graph theory, for which he had particular interest. He published over 70 articles and was an invited speaker at mathematics conferences around the world, including this past January in Slovenia. He served as a reviewer and referee for more than 30 journals and served on the boards of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory B and the Journal of Graph Theory.

“Professor Archdeacon was a gifted mathematician and researcher whose work was applauded around the world, a skilled teacher admired by undergraduate and graduate students alike and a beloved colleague,” said UVM president Tom Sullivan. “We deeply appreciate his contributions to the life of our university over so many years and will greatly miss him.”

“Dan was an amazing guy who I had the great fortune of knowing for 40 years,” said Jeff Dinitz, a professor in mathematics who chaired the department for many years. “He was a world-class mathematician with many important theorems to his name. He was an invited lecturer at conferences and universities around the world and was the editor-in-chief of a major journal in his research area of graph theory. Dan loved UVM and was a great teacher who motivated his students and showed them the beauty and magic in mathematics. He was witty and just plain fun to be with. He deeply loved his role as a father and was an exceptional husband. He will be missed by his friends and colleagues here at UVM, as well as by the worldwide mathematics community.”

Contributions honoring Dan’s legacy of inspirational teaching, which will support graduate student travel in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont, may be made to the Dan Archdeacon Memorial Fund c/o The UVM Foundation, 411 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05401 or online (if giving online, for the gift fund fill in “Dan Archdeacon Memorial Fund” under Other). u SUMMIT | 29

BIODIESEL – THE HIDDEN DANGERS Drs. Britt Holmén and Naomi Fukagawa are collaborating to investigate the particulate matter generated by biodiesel combustion and its human health impacts. In this shared interview, they describe their different roles within the project, and a surprising link found with inflammation. understand the impact of emissions from combustion of bio-based alternative fuels on health. Much research has been conducted in silos with little discourse between scientific disciplines. Those of us in healthcare focus on the diagnosis and treatment of disease often as a reaction to factors that were previously not recognized as being causal.

With the mandate to increase use of renewable fuels and reduce dependency on foreign petroleum, it is important to determine whether there are differences in the health effects of biodiesel combustion products compared to those of petrodiesel.

HOW DOES BIODIESEL DIFFER FROM CONVENTIONAL PETRODIESEL FUELS? FROM WHAT CONCERNS DID YOUR RESEARCH INTO THE IMPACTS OF BIODIESEL FUEL EMERGE? WHAT ARE YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVES? BH: My focus area is environmental engineering, especially emissions from the transportation and agriculture sectors, with an emphasis on airborne particles. US energy security legislation and high gasoline prices in the mid-2000s led to much discussion surrounding fuels, and I became interested in the use of alternative sources to reduce our dependency on imported petroleum. For diesel engines, the biodiesel alternative has a beneficial energy life cycle assessment, but little was known about the toxicity of biodiesel emissions. My objective is to understand the chemical composition of the exhaust particles and gases when running a light-duty diesel engine on biodiesel fuel blends and quantify how composition changes affect health outcomes.

NF: My research interests relate to nutrition and metabolism across the age span. Because of the known health effects of environmental factors, ranging from chemicals to food and air quality, I sought to better

BH: Biodiesel is a renewable fuel derived from animal fats and vegetable oils. These oils are subjected to a variety of chemical reactions to produce a mixture of fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs). Petrodiesel, on the other hand, is a far more complex mixture of alkanes, alkenes and aromatic compounds. Biodiesel has no sulphur whereas petroleum has significant amounts that need to be removed in order to meet 2006 regulations for ‘clean diesel’ highway fuel. A US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) literature review published in 2002 states that biodiesel emissions of all criteria pollutants, except NOx, are lower when operating on biodiesel blended with petrodiesel. However, that report was mostly based on older engines; petroleum fuel with much higher sulphur content was in use at the time as the comparison base fuel, and many of the studies were on heavy-duty engines and vehicles, not light-duty cars and trucks. Our team is focused on newer engines, light-duty vehicles, using real-world transient drive cycles and collecting data on particle number, air toxics and greenhouse gas emissions. These unregulated groups of compounds can have important effects on human health, but are understudied.

NF: Differences in fuels will likely lead to differences in

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the generated emissions. There is little information about exactly which components induce health effects, which is what we are trying to elucidate.

WHAT DISCOVERIES HAVE YOU MADE TO DATE REGARDING THE EFFECTS OF PETRODIESEL AND BIODIESEL EMISSIONS ON HUMAN HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT?

COMPUTER SCIENCE FAIR The CS Fair is a CEMS event open to Computer Science majors, minors or any student enrolled in a CS class. The event provides students a chance to present their work to their peers and professionals in an open and exciting environment. A panel of judges critique the student work and award cash prizes. Below are some of the winners for the 2014-2015 event that was held on December 1, 2014.

BH: We found that biodiesel particulate matter has a higher oxygen content. In other words, the particles are more oxidised than their petrodiesel counterparts. The lack of studies reporting the comprehensive chemical composition of biodiesel exhaust particles – and the complex chemistry of these particles – led us to develop methods to characterize the particles, but we still have a long way to go in order to link specific chemical components to health effects.

NF: We were surprised to find that particles generated from biodiesel combustion induced more inflammation in cells and in an animal model. The underlying mechanism appears to be related to the induction of oxidative stress.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN YOUR FINDING THAT INFL AMMATORY RESPONSE AND OXIDATIVE STRESS ARE GREATER IN CELLS AND ANIMALS TREATED WITH SOY-BASED BIODIESEL FUEL, AS A RESULT OF ITS LARGE POLAR COMPONENT? BH: We surmise that the higher polarity of biodiesel particles may explain the increase in inflammation and production of reactive oxygen species, but we cannot identify specific markers that quantitatively explain biological responses. To do that, we would need to test many more biodiesel fuel blends and employ multiple methods for particle characterization. We are currently developing a screening method to identify exhaust samples that may be most important for the costly health effects studies in Naomi’s lab.

This interview with Drs. Britt Holmén and Naomi Fukagawa first appeared in Research Media.

Research Media (www.researchmedia.com) is an international creative agency that offers a full suite of expert dissemination services to research projects across the globe. Research Media’s free-to-access flagship publication International Innovation (www. internationalinnovation.com) is a global resource providing insight and analysis on current scientific research trends, as well as funding and policy issues. u

1st Place Winner Leap Motion Sign Language Learning in the Browser Nicholas Strayer 2nd Place Winner Classify Eric Newbury 3rd Place Winner Speech Therapy Project Michelle Marin, Nicholas Agel ~ Best in Class Prizes ~ Advanced Projects Winner ASL Learning Software Caitlyn Bishop Intermediate Projects Winner Advanced Battery Management System Andrew Giroux Intermediate Web Design Winner Buildr Brandt Newton For more winners and a complete list of sponsors visit the CEMS CS Fair website uvm.edu/~csfair/2014/home.php

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