Month: February 2024

ACCESS: Sarah Lambart

February 21, 2024

'ACCESS'ing Geology & Geophysics

ACCESS Scholars faculty liaison, Sarah Lambart, initially got involved in the program because she wanted to host students in her lab. An Assistant Professor in Geology & Geophysics at the University of Utah, Lambart wanted to offer hands-on activity in small research projects that students could actually work on during the semester. "I really liked working with ACCESS students. [They are] very smart ... very enthusiastic, very curious about learning new things, and so when they created this faculty liaison position, it's something I knew I would be interested [in].”

As principal investigator (PI) of the MagMaX Lab, recent projects have included working on the cause of excess magmatism during the Northeast Atlantic breakup (IDOP Expedition 396), magma genesis and transport, quantifying the mantle heterogeneity and the implications for the Earth dynamics, and, more recently, to better understand the formation of critical minerals and ore deposits. If this sounds like an intense program focused on the chemistry of Earth and planetary interiors, it clearly is, especially with her emphasis on the role of magmatic processes during the differentiation and chemical evolution of terrestrial planets. "I use experimental devices such as piston-cylinders and one atmosphere furnaces to simulate high pressure-temperature conditions relevant for planetary interiors as well as various analytical techniques. Those highly-specialized techniques are designed to characterize synthesized and natural samples. "Because one limiting aspect of solid-media apparatus is that all experiments are performed in closed-systems," she writes in her research statement, "I also use innovative experimental strategies to investigate new topics." Those strategies include simulation of magma circulation and magma-rock interaction or melt segregation. The lab team also uses thermodynamic modeling to extrapolate the data they collect and/or as support for semi-empirical models.

It's exactly the kind of rigor that an ACCESS Scholar interested in earth sciences can sink their proverbial shovel into or their underwater collection implements from the bottom of the sea. (More on that later.)

But Lambart's mentoring and department-based liaisoning with ACCESS has a very human side as well. “So first, I am a woman," she says about a STEM discipline that historically has been male-centric. "But I was also a first-generation student.." Currently, most of the students in her team are also "first-gen." "I understand what challenges you might have when you don't necessarily know how the system works. I'm also from France, and so when I arrived in the US, I didn't know how the system worked. I think providing this opportunity very early on in ... [a student's] career, in their degree, can actually really make a difference at the end. So that's why I was very happy to contribute to this program.”

As a faculty liaison, Lambart coordinates the summer activities that take place in Geology & Geophysics, meets with a group of students on a monthly basis for mentorship, and serves on the selection committee. She has hosted three ACCESS scholars in her lab to date.

Expedition 396 women scientific team. From left: Sarah Lambart (Petrologist, University of Utah, USA), Weimu Xu (Sedimentologist, University College Dublin, Ireland), Stacy Yaeger (Micropaleontologist, Ball State University, USA), Sayantani Chatterjee (Inorganic Geochemist, Niigata University, Japan), Marialena Christopoulou (Sedimentologist, Northern Illinois University, USA), Natalia Varela (Paleomagnetist, Virginia Tech, USA), and Irina Filina (Physical Properties Specialist, University of Nebraska, USA). (Credit: Sandra Herrmann, IODP JRSO) [Photo ID: exp396_254]. ^^ banner photo above: courtesy of Sarah Lambart.

A native of Rennes, France, Lambart earned her doctorate from Clermont Auvergne University in 2010 followed by work as a postdoctoral research fellow at first Caltech (2010-2013) and Columbia University (2013-2015). She then took an appointment as a visiting assistant professor at UC Davis (2015-2016. In 2017, she became a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Cardiff University in Wales, before landing at the U in 2018. She first got interested in her current research as a child; she had a picture of a volcano in Costa Rica in her bedroom that she had cut out of a National Geographic magazine. In high school she decided she wanted to pursue her passion for volcanoes through research.

"From our observations of the beauty of the Hawaiian Islands," says Lambart, "to the discovery of submarine volcanic chains (i.e., mid-ocean ridges) by Marie Tharp more than seventy years ago, we know that our planet is shaped by plate tectonics and magmatism. Combining geochemistry, experimental petrology and thermodynamic modeling, my lab produces innovative tools to constrain the role of crustal recycling, one of the motor of plate tectonics, on the nature of the mantle source of magmas." She remarks that, because of familiar models, most people do not know that the interior of the Earth is actually the color green, not red. "Most representations of the interior of the Earth in textbooks show it red to express the high temperature environment. However, the mantle is dominated by a rock called peridotite that is mostly made of olivine and pyroxenes, two green minerals," she says. (Click here for a 3D picture of a peridotite, as part of the U's Geo 3D rock collection.)

Recent research from Lambart's MagMaX lab includes an article by former student Otto Lang MS'21 on a new approach to constrainthe mineralogy of the magma sources. "I was [also] lucky to be involved in a recent publication on recommendation for sharing F.A.I.R (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) geochemical data," she says. Her work has taken Lambart to, literally, the far ends of the planet. Insights from results obtained during IODP Expedition 396, on which Lambart has sailed on, were published in 2023. (IODP is an  international marine research collaboration that explores Earth's history and dynamics using ocean-going research platforms to recover data recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks and to monitor sub seafloor environments.) Finally, a highly anticipated paper is expected soon by Ashley Morris, a doctorate student in Lambart's group who worked on an early Eocene dacitic unit collected during the same expedition.

ACCESS Scholars is about the whole being greater than the some of its research parts. The program's signature is to meld academic work with networking, mentoring and work/life balance, a unique undergraduate amalgam in which creativity is paired with analytical inquiry and where experiential learning, in all its forms, is at a premium. As an ACCESS faculty liaison in Geology and Geophysics, Sarah Lambart is no exception. "I love hiking and visiting national parks," she says of her life outside the lab. "During my professional training, I had to cross the country twice. My husband and I used this opportunity to visit as many national parks we could. So far, we visited 32, many multiple times! And I’m sure we will continue to explore new parks in the future."

Sporting an adventurous ethic—from the Atlantic seafloor to 32 of the likes of Yosemite National Park—Sarah Lambart is poised to mentor future Earth scientists at the U.

By David Pace and Seth Harper

ACCESS: A Tale of Two Researchers

February 15, 2024

ACCESS: A Tale of Two REsearchers

 

The first thing Isabella Scalise noticed when she joined the 2022 ACCESS Scholars program was a feeling of empowerment. How could she not?

Surrounded by a cohort of ambitious scientists-in-training, and under the supervision of women ecstatic to help her find success in her passions, Isabella was taking a huge step in realizing her middle school dream of conducting cancer research.

Wide-eyed middle schooler

It all started with her grandpa’s colon cancer diagnosis. Isabella, a wide-eyed middle schooler at the time, was driven to learn as much as she could. She started taking a cancer and genetics class at Providence Cancer Institute during the summer and found a particular interest in precision medicine, which accounts for an individual’s genetics, environment and lifestyle when crafting a game plan to fight diseases — like cancer. This interest only grew after starting at the U when another family member started experiencing resistance to therapies targeted to treat her cancer.

When it came time to join a lab, an integral part of the ACCESS experience, the Kinsey lab at the Huntsman Cancer Institute made perfect sense.

“The scientific questions being pursued in the Kinsey lab deeply resonate with me,” says Isabella, now a sophomore studying honors biology with minors in mathematics and chemistry. “We work to overcome primary resistance mechanisms to targeted treatments.”

And who was waiting there with open arms, ready to mentor Isabella? A 2017 ACCESS alum.

A Life-Changing Lab

Sophia Schuman describes her ACCESS experience as “eye-opening.” She discovered the program while searching for scholarships and found herself spending the summer of 2017 with a cohort of 24 women, already passionate about Sophia’s interests.

Isabella (left) with Sophia, in the lab together. ^^ Banner photo above: Sophia (left) with Isabella.

"You got to go to college early, live on campus, get exposed to all the sciences. I applied immediately, and I was so excited to hear back,” Sophia explains. “It was the driving force, the reason that I came to the U. I didn't have issues finding my classes on the first day of school because I had already been here, and it felt like this was home a little bit.”

Sophia wasn’t placed in the Kinsey lab, but she says Conan Kinsey, MD, PhD, principal investigator of the lab, found her and “changed my life forever.”

Like Isabella, Sophia had a personal connection to cancer as she had watched someone close to her fight pancreatic cancer. Sophia was amazed by how well the patient’s body held up during the experience, which piqued her own interest in cancer research and drew her to the lab.

“The Kinsey lab brought me into so many different opportunities,” she continues, “but it also taught me so much about how to think, how to be a professional in the industry.”

Part of that professional experience included mentoring, which is where Isabella comes into the equation.

A holistic understanding

The pair combined their shared passion to perform research on autophagy, a primary resistance mechanism to targeted therapies for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). During this time, Isabella learned the details and mechanisms behind the procedures they performed, learned how to derive the right scientific questions from their work and even came to understand how the work they were doing fit into the big picture. Along the way, Sophia would send Isabella educational materials that helped her develop a holistic understanding of the science.

“I always felt comfortable asking Sophia questions. She’d always take the time to answer them very thoroughly and when I made mistakes, making sure I learned from them. I've never felt ashamed for making a mistake.”

Isabella said that working under Sophia’s guidance created a comfort in the lab, and Sophia seemed to enjoy it just as much.

“Isabella came in very interested, very teachable and obviously passionate about the work behind it. As well, it was fun having another woman in the lab. I saw a lot in her that I saw in myself. She's willing to stay until the work is done. She asked a lot of really good, intuitive questions, even from the get-go with having very basic concepts and understanding of science.”

The duo no longer works together, but they’ll always be connected by the Kinsey lab, a shared love for research, and ACCESS Scholars.

By Seth Harper

SRI Stories

February 15, 2024

SRI Stories: 'Freeskier' & Aspiring Oncologist

 

Hello, or as Lorelei Sole might say, Servus!

Sole served a volunteer church mission in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland before pursuing a biochemistry degree in the College of Science. Her path at the University of Utah has been shaped largely by her experience with the Science Research Initiative. 

Sole was personally motivated to join the SRI upon returning to the states and starting her degree at the U. “I’ve always been interested in health and science, and after losing my grandfather to cancer, I decided I wanted to learn more about the mechanisms of cancer and contribute to the field of oncology research.” says Sole. She found her home in Dr. Sheri Holmen’s oncology stream. 

After a semester as an SRI student, Sole was hired to work as a researcher in Holmen’s lab at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. “I’m studying the role of concurrent NF1, BRAF, and NRAS mutations in melanoma and how they drive tumorigenesis.” Sole says. “The NF1 gene was successfully cloned first by the University of Utah back in 1990. It’s really cool to now continue the research initially made possible by the University of Utah.” 

Her two years of research that began with the SRI stream (and a discovery at the U almost 4 decades ago) culminated in Sole being accepted to present at a handful of undergraduate research conferences. The most recent was Research on Capitol Hill where students are selected to showcase their posters to Utah State legislators. Sole is also slated to present at UCUR and NCUR later this semester. 

Sole’s experience with the SRI didn’t end after becoming a researcher. She has worked as a TA in Dr. Gennie Parkman’s SRI stream for the past year. Sole says that Parkman is one of her biggest role models. “I admire her for many reasons, one of which is how successful she is as a woman in STEM. She has one of the busiest schedules of anyone I know, yet still puts her family first and makes time for others.” 

Outside of the lab, Sole is a member of the Freeskier society and enjoys running, hiking, and yoga. After graduating from the U this spring, Sole aspires to attend medical school and continue her work in the field of oncology, in the spirit of her grandfather. 

 

By Lauren Wigod

SRI Stories is a series by the College of Science, intended to share transformative experiences from students, alums, postdocs and faculty of the Science Research Initiative. To read more stories, visit the SRI Stories page.

Creating effective organic semiconductors

February 15, 2024

Creating Effective organic semiconductors

 

California’s Silicon Valley and Utah’s Silicon Slopes are named for the element most associated with semiconductors, the backbone of the computer revolution. Anything computerized or electronic depends on semiconductors, a substance with properties that conduct electrical current under certain conditions. Traditional semiconductors are made from inorganic materials—like silicon—that require vast amounts of water and energy to produce.

^ Zlatan Aksamija. ^^ Banner photo above: Muhamed Duhandžić holds two pieces of the organic semiconductor—the blue polymer has been doped with an iodine dopant. PHOTO CREDIT: HARRIET RICHARDSON/UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

For years, scientists have tried to make environmentally friendly alternatives using organic materials, such as polymers. Polymers are formed by linking small molecules together to make long chains. The polymerization process avoids many of the energy-intensive steps required in traditional semiconductor manufacturing and uses far less water and fewer gasses and chemicals. They’re also cheap to make and would enable flexible electronics, wearable sensors and biocompatible devices that could be introduced inside the body. The problem is that their conductivity, while good, is not as high as their inorganic counterparts.

All electronic materials require doping, a method of infusing molecules into semiconductors to boost conductivity. Scientists use molecules, called dopants, to define the conductive parts of electrical circuits. Doping in organic materials has vexed scientists because of a lack of consistency—sometimes dopants improve conductivity while other times they make it worse.  In a new study, researchers from the University of Utah and University of Massachusetts Amherst have uncovered the physics that drive dopant and polymer interactions that explain the inconsistent conductivity issue.

Positively charged carriers are pulled back by negatively charged dopants from the polymer chains, preventing the flow of electrical current and tanking the material’s conductivity. The team discovered that, when enough dopants were injected into the system, the electrons’ behavior changed to act as a collective screen against the attractive forces, allowing the rest of the electrons to flow unimpeded.

“The ideal case would be to dump a bunch of free electrons into the material to do the work of conducting. Of course, we can’t—we have to use molecules to supply the electrons,” said Zlatan Akšamija, associate professor of materials science and engineering at the U and lead author of the study. “Our next step is to find the dopant/organic material combinations that can weaken that interaction and make the conductivity even higher. But we didn’t understand that interaction well enough to be able to tackle it until now.”

The study was published on Dec. 13, 2023, in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Read the full story by Lisa Potter in @theU.

 

A Moonshot for Our Age

February 15, 2024

A MoonShot for OUr age

 

Reconciling mining with the effort to make the 21st century more sustainable is necessary yet difficult, but mining faculty member Pratt Rogers is focused on the challenge.

“The magnitude is equivalent to going to the moon,” Rogers says of this reconciliation. “We’re going to have to find ways to come together and compromise.”

The main difficulties lie in the societal challenges: onboarding new mines, determining the number of mines and the safety of mining, and securing locations with the smallest environmental footprint. These are the logistical issues with being able to ethically and sustainably extract the critical minerals needed to maintain our modern-day lifestyle.

“We have to overcome the ‘not in my backyard’ mentality with the ‘I want to have electric cars.’ It’s a balance we have to strike,” says Rogers. “We need to pull people from different disciplines to address this and we need to be willing to come to the table and find solutions.”

A substantial number of mines are needed in order to meet technological and economic demands. Getting permits for large, industrial projects is difficult—for wind and solar farms, or even mines.

“In the United States, we have strong institutions with great environmental and human protections,” Rogers says. “And that’s phenomenal; it’s a mark of progress. But with institutions that strong, when trying to create industrial projects, the easy path to a “no” is usually taken and the much more difficult path to a conditional “yes” is passed over in litigation.”

This creates a significant problem, according to Rogers. When we’re always saying no to mines in the US, this forces mining to be relocated to areas without the strong institutions that the US has. This means we get our resources from places without environmental protections or human right protections such as workers’ rights.

The Role of Higher Ed

“That’s the role of higher education,” Rogers states. “Addressing the complicated challenges and working through them. We need to be better at hosting debates and not losing focus on the importance of higher education in transforming people’s lives, as well as the directions of nations.” The challenges are clearly daunting, but Rogers is optimistic.

Rogers grew up in a small town in Eastern Arizona. In college, he became interested in a mining engineering program, excited about a career path that meant he’d be spending a lot of time outdoors and which offered a lot of scholarship opportunities. He got his bachelor’s in mining engineering at the University of Arizona and worked in east Texas as a mining engineer for two years.

In graduate school Rogers helped his advisor start a technology company which developed technology platforms for mining companies. Rogers got his PhD in mining engineering from the University of Arizona in 2015 then took a job at the University of Utah in 2016, working on various projects with the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Energy, and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

One of these projects included working with mining companies on managing operator fatigue. Mines have large mining equipment and twelve-hour shifts, so operator fatigue is a risk that must be mitigated.

“We created a FitBit app that helps track reaction time,” Rogers says. “As well as some other modeling to predict fatigue and manage it to create better shift scheduling that’s responsive to the needs of the operator.”

Rogers’ work also focuses on critical minerals necessary for civilization, especially for technology. There’s a large effort to find, geologically, where these minerals occur and then find out how to process them.

“The middle part, between those two steps,” Rogers says, “is the mining part, which tends to be skipped over from funding agencies. Politically, it’s easier to focus on geology and processing rather than the actual mining.”

Rogers states that we need to update our mining approaches in order to reduce environmental impacts but also to focus on the actual process of mining which includes locating sites, extracting the ore, refining the ore and sending it to market. One of the challenges when mines are outsourced overseas is that certain regions or countries have a large market share of a commodity.

“Dictating the price of critical minerals can price people out of the market,” says Rogers. “It’s geopolitics, and we need to be aware of it in mineral economics and be able to respond accordingly.”

“Conflict minerals” is the name given to critical minerals sourced from areas with conflicts, either politically or that don’t follow similar ethical guidelines as the US. Sourcing minerals from these areas could finance terrorism or other crimes such as human trafficking. One of the more well-known examples of this are “blood diamonds” which are mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency, an invading army's war efforts, terrorism, or a warlord's activity.

“The problem is you can track individual pieces of diamonds,” Rogers explains, “but with metals like copper and cobalt, they get blended in smelters and manufacturing pieces.”

Rogers and a student of his, Ishaan Kapoor, looked into the idea of using web technologies like blockchains. Database tracking systems can be used to better trace minerals through the supply chain, thus giving insight as to where minerals are sourced from. This way, consumers can be smarter about where we’re sourcing our materials. (A link to this paper is here.)

Faculty Award

Pratt Rogers received the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award from the College of Mines and Earth Sciences in 2023. He teaches many classes, including Introduction to Mining.

“With that, I try to get students excited about mining engineering,” Rogers says of the class. “I try to make it interactive, taking the students on field trips.” He also teaches an underground mining methods class, as well as a health and safety class, where he talks about mining hazards as well as engineering controls and approaches to manage risks. His favorite class to teach is an internship class where he mentors students.

“It’s the most rewarding thing to be able to help students navigate and build a network industry,” he states, “getting jobs and helping them decide what path they should take, because there’s a lot of paths to take in the mining industry.”

Within mining engineering, however, there’s a crisis in recruitment. Rogers chalks that up to people not knowing the many different types of jobs within the mining industry.

“You can do traditional coding,” says Rogers. “Along with cutting edge computer science. You can take your degree internationally or locally, you can do anything with technology as well as mechanical engineering. There are so many options, and there’s a lot of opportunities to be able to do something really important for society.”

And if the challenges of sustainable mining and securing critical minerals, especially for the needs of technology, is a moon shot, we’ll need all the help we can get.

by CJ Siebeneck

Dr. Rogers is the featured speaker in the upcoming Science at Breakfast hosted by the College of Science in March. He will be addressing the topic "Material World, Material People: Navigating Human Needs and Mineral Realities."

How Career Services Put This Grad on the Right Data Path

February 9, 2024

How Career Services Put This Grad on the Right Data Path

Riley Murray, double-major in physics and linguistics and a minor in mathematics, knew she wanted to pursue a master’s degree after graduation. What she didn't expect was landing a research job in her “gap year” that aligned seamlessly with her interests in data science and natural language processing.

Riley credits customized guidance from the College of Science Career Coaches, particularly Laura Cleave, for equipping her to identify and excel in her current role.

by Bianca Lyon

 

 

Nash Ward Receives 2024 PME Speaker Award

February 8, 2024

Nash Ward Receives 2024 PME Speaker Award

Nash Ward has always wanted to visit all seven continents.  So, in high school when he saw that Professor Ken Golden made trips to Antarctica as part of his research on sea ice, he reached out to see if he could be a part of the team.

 

Nash’s undergraduate research on sea ice began his first semester as a freshman at the University of Utah.  Under Golden’s mentorship he has been working in mathematical geophysics, looking at the fractal dimension of the sea ice pack, with a primary focus on the brine microstructure.  He also looks at how these brine pathways are formed and what the fractal properties have to do with that.  On a larger scale, he looks at ice floes in the sea ice pack and how that geometry is formed.  The brine microstructure is responsible for a lot of the physical properties of sea ice, including electromagnetic, thermal, and fluid transport properties.  On a larger scale, the orientation of ice floes helps to protect the ice pack from surface waves that would break up the pack.  Understanding these structures is an important component in modeling the role sea ice plays in the bigger picture of climate change.

Nash had the opportunity to present his research at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) held in San Francisco, CA in January 2024.  There were over 5,500 participants registered, making this the world’s largest mathematics gathering.  Nash received a JMM 2024 Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) Speaker Award for his presentation there.  This award recognizes outstanding student speakers in the PME Paper Sessions.

Nash plans to become a professor one day.  He is excited to continue researching and is also interested in mentoring the next generation of scientists and researchers.  He’ll take the first step toward becoming a professor this fall when he begins a graduate program in Applied Mathematics.

Nash would advise any undergraduate who wants to get involved in research to start by sending emails.  He suggests finding a professor who is doing cool work, reading a few of their papers, and then emailing them to ask about it.  From there, he says, see if you can meet up to talk about what they’ve been working on.

It’s worked for him, and it should work for you!  You might even end up checking something off your bucket list . . . like traveling to the Arctic ice cap.

by Angie Gardiner

Originally appeared at math.utah.edu

 

 

Central Wasatch’s extreme snowfall

February 6, 2024

Where does the central Wasatch’s extreme snowfall Come From?

 

Utah’s famous mountains can wring a lot of snow from even low-moisture storm systems, according to new U research.

February 6, 2024

 

Jim Steenburgh displays a device for measuring snowfall. Credit: Brian Maffly ^^ Banner photo above: Little Cottonwood Canyon. Credit: UDOT.

Major snowstorms in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains are both a blessing and a curse. They deliver much-needed moisture that supplies water to the state’s biggest metropolitan area and fluffy light snow to support the world’s finest powder skiing.

But heavy snowfall also wreaks havoc on canyon roads and creates extreme avalanche hazards that can sometimes shut down busy winter recreation sites.  Alta at the head of Little Cottonwood Canyon, for instance, can be reached by vehicle only via a winding road that rises 3,000 feet in 8 miles, crossing about 50 avalanche paths.

University of Utah atmospheric scientists have set out to better understand extreme snowfall, defined as events in the top 5% in terms of snow accumulations, by analyzing hundreds of events over a 23-year period at Alta, the famed ski destination in the central Wasatch outside Salt Lake City. The resulting study, published this week in Monthly Weather Review, illustrates the remarkable diversity of storm characteristics producing orographic snowfall extremes in the ranges of the Intermountain West.

The orographic effect occurs when air is forced to flow up and over mountains, which cools the air and condenses its water vapor.

Some of the new findings surprised researchers. For example, they looked for an association between heavy snow and a weather factor called “integrated vapor transport,” or IVT, but found a complicated relationship.

“IVT is essentially a measure of the amount of water vapor that is being transported horizontally through the atmosphere, said lead author Michael Wasserstein, a graduate student in atmospheric sciences.  “In certain regions high IVT can produce extremely heavy precipitation. That can be the case for the Wasatch, but not always.”

In the West Coast’s Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range, by contrast, there is a stronger relationship between high-IVT storms blowing in from the Pacific and extreme precipitation and snowfall.

Spanning the years 2000 to 2022, the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, analyzed a total of 2,707 snow events, each covering a 12-hour period. The average amount of snow deposited during each event was 11.2 centimeters (4.4 inches), while the median amount was just 7.6 (3 inches). Alta ski patrollers did much of the data collection at the monitoring station located near the ski area’s Wildcat Lift.

The researchers homed in on “extreme” events above the 95th percentile, or 138 storms in which 30.5 centimeters (12 inches) or more snow fell. “Those would be snowfall rates of about an average of an inch an hour,” said Jim Steenburgh, the study’s senior author. The biggest 12-hour accumulation was 65 centimeters (26 inches), recorded on March 30, 2005.  They also examined “extreme” water-equivalent snowfall events above the 95th percentile, or 116 storms with at least 27.9 mm (1.11 inches) of water equivalent precipitation. The water equivalent of precipitation measures the amount of water in the snowfall and is important for water resources and avalanches.

Read the full story by Brian Maffly in @TheU. 

Chemist Jessica Swanson Named 2024 Cottrell Scholar

February 6, 2024

U Chemist Jessica Swanson Named 2024 Cottrell Scholar

 

Jessica Swanson, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Utah, has been named a 2024 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

February 6, 2024

 

This prestigious award recognizes early-career faculty who are advancing innovation in both research and education. As part of her award, Professor Swanson will receive $120,000 over three years to advance her bioenergy research and educational program development.

Swanson is working to improve efficiency of systems called methanotrophic bioreactors that utilize bacteria to convert methane gas from waste streams like abandoned oil wells and coal mines into useful products before it escapes into the atmosphere. However, scaling this solution faces some challenges. The unique methane-munching bacteria, known as methanotrophs, struggle to access and break down enough of the methane in the low concentration waste streams they need to target. Swanson uses computer simulations to study what limits these bacteria’s growth and activity in bioreactors. Her goal is to uncover solutions that can increase the efficiency of methane mass transfer and oxidation, such that methanotrophic bioreactors become profitable and can scale in the free market to mitigate methane emissions and their impact on climate change. 

In addition to her methane mitigation work, Professor Swanson is developing an interactive general education course called Chemistry for a Better Future. This course will expose students to the science behind developing climate solutions while inspiring them to propose their own approaches. Teams of students will explore climate impacts on communities while learning about cutting-edge companies and technologies targeting sustainability.

"I am honored to receive this recognition, which will support critical investigations into scaling a biological solution to help mitigate methane emissions and climate change,” said Swanson. “The Cottrell Scholar network is invaluable for connecting with like-minded researchers that are pushing scientific boundaries.”

Congratulations to Professor Swanson on this prestigious honor,” said Peter Trapa, dean of the College of Science. “As a leader pursuing innovative solutions to address our changing climate, her work embodies the transformational impact at the heart of the college’s mission.”

Swanson joins a legacy of U Cottrell Scholars, including assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy Gail Zasowski (2021), associate professor of Chemistry Luisa Whittaker-Brooks (2018) and professor of Physics and Astronomy Jordan Gerton (2007). 

The official announcement from the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement can be found here.

By Bianca Lyon