Tim Colling (CEE/MTTI) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $234,534 contract from the Michigan Department of Transportation.
Peter Torola (CEE) and Chris Gilbertson (CEE) are Co-PIs on the project “2018 Transportation Asset Management Council Education Program.” This is a one-year project.
By Sponsored Programs.
Michigan Technological University, a leading public research university and key educational leader in Michigan, will soon begin implementing a 2-year project titled, Creating Great Lakes Stewards to Promote Clean Drinking Water & Healthy Urban Watersheds in Detroit, under the leadership of Joan Chadde, Director of the MTU Center for Science & Environmental Outreach. The project is funded with a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Education grant of $91,000. Grant recipients are required to award $4550 to each of five non-profits who will participate in the project. The following sub-grantees will assist with the project: Belle Isle Nature Center/Detroit Zoological Society (DZS), Detroit Math & Science Center/Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD), Wayne State University’s Healthy Urban Waters, Detroit Audubon, and Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision. These collaborating agencies will contribute staff time and or cost share: U.S. Forest Service Urban Connections Program, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and DPSCD.
The overall project goal is to build student and teacher capacity to steward the urban water resources of Detroit now and in the future. The project will engage 32 teachers at 16 schools, reaching 960 middle school students over 2 years, in becoming stewards of their community’s drinking water. Teachers will participate in five workshops during the school year to enhance their environmental education teaching skills and knowledge of their local water resources. Students will participate in 3 field trips during the school year which includes: visiting the Detroit drinking water treatment plant, conducting stream health or ecosystem monitoring, and completing a stewardship project. The 2013-14 student body demographics of Detroit schools are: 80% qualify for free / reduced lunch, 83.9% are African American, 12% Hispanic, 2.36% White and <2% other, with a 71% graduation rate in 2014. (2013-14 Data from NCES).
The following Michigan Tech faculty and staff are contributing their time as cost share on the project: Dr. Audra Morse, CEE chair; Dr. Daisuke Minakata , CEE; Dr. Hugh Gorman, Chair, Dept. of Social Sciences; Gerald Jondreau, School of Forest Resources & Environmental Science; and Dr. Kathryn Perrine, Dept. of Chemistry.
Detroit Water Stewardship Teacher Recruitment Flyer 2017-2018 School Year
Interlochen Public Radio and Michigan Public Radio aired a story about toxic chemicals in fish in the Great Lakes, particularly their impact on indigenous peoples, quoting Noel Urban (CEE) and Jerry Jondreau (SFRES).
If you eat wild caught fish from Michigan, you might know about fish consumption advisories. They’re recommended limits on safe amounts of fish to eat, and they’re necessary because toxic chemicals build up in fish in the Great Lakes and inland lakes and streams.
Around this same time, an invisible problem emerged: toxic contamination of fish by chemicals like methylmercury and poly-chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Noel Urban is a professor at Michigan Technological University who studies pollutants cycling through the environment. He tells me the chemicals that build up in fish are still being emitted around the world.
“So mercury’s primary sources are coal-fired power plants, mining, metal processing. PCBs are emitted from landfills, from wastewater treatment plants, from transformers that are still in use that have PCBs, agricultural chemicals are also in this so there’s a wide variety of sources,” he explains.
Read more and listen to the audio interview at Interlochen Public Radio and Michigan Public Radio, by Kaye LaFond.
“When can we eat the fish?”
That’s what the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wants to know.
In 2008, Valoree Gagnon was still an undergraduate student at Michigan Technological University. She learned that toxic chemicals like mercury and PCBs build up in fish in the region. And she learned that not everyone limits their fish intake, especially tribal communities.
“They were consuming fish at rates that were above human health criteria, and that was a really big concern for me,” she says.
Read more and listen to the audio interview at Michigan Public Radio, by Kaye LaFond.
Joan Schumaker-Chadde (CEE/GLRC) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $91,000 grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Amy Schrank (SFRES/GLRC) is the Co-PI on the project, “Creating Great Lakes Stewards to Promote Clean Water and Healthy Urban Watershed in Detroit.”
This is a two-year project.
By Sponsored Programs.
BARAGA COUNTY, Mich. (WLUC) – A group of students are getting real-world experience as part of their senior design project through a collaborative effort between Upper Peninsula Power Company (UPPCO) and Michigan Technological University.
For their project, students are investigating the possibility of adding a new generator at UPPCO’s Prickett hydroelectric generation facility to take advantage of bypass flows that are required under the company’s existing operating license.
Houghton Middle School has done it again for the third time. Their team of eight students has won the 2017 Lexus Eco Challenge. Their project titled “Backyard Backlash” investigates how to prevent nitrate-laden water from reaching Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes by surface area.
Much of the surface and groundwater contamination comes from nitrate-rich fertilizers and topsoils (due to lawn and garden care, roadside grass seeding projects, and agricultural practices) and will eventually reach Lake Superior.
In the Lexus Eco Challenge, student teams tackle environmental issues related to land, water, air, and climate, and create practical solutions while competing for amazing prizes. The Lexus Eco Challenge gets students involved in project-based learning, teamwork, and skill building as they identify an environmental issue that affects their community, use their critical-thinking and research skills to come up with a solution, and report on the results by way of an Action Plan. Teams of 5-10 students are led by one or two Teacher Advisors—who are full-time teachers employed at the school.
Houghton Middle School won in 2014 with their invasive species education project, and again in 2015 with their project to identify a grass species that could grow on copper-laden stamp sands.
Teacher Advisor Sarah Geborkoff has participated in the Lake Superior Stewardship Initiative (LSSI) since 2014. She receives biannual grants to support projects that incorporate environmental monitoring and stewardship in the Huron River watershed. “LSSI has been critical to helping me prepare my students to compete in the Lexus Eco Challenge.”
Joan Chadde, Geborkoff’s mentor for the LSSI project, is equally elated at HMS’ success. “Sarah Geborkoff is a phenomenal teacher who continually goes above and beyond for her students. They start these projects during the summer. These are truly student-led projects. Sarah is an excellent teacher and student mentor.”
Learn more about their project here.
Magann Dykema, (CEE) a fourth-year civil engineering student and a University Innovation Fellow, has been chosen by the University Innovation Fellows program as one of 23 student leaders for the program’s Silicon Valley Meetup Nov. 16-20, 2017. This is the third time that Dykema has served in this role.
The student leaders were hand-selected out of an international community of more than 1,200 Fellows for the impact they have had at their schools and for their contributions to the movement.
University Innovation Fellows has also asked Mary Raber (PHC) to serve as one of two mentors to the 30 faculty members who will also attend the event. This is the second time Raber has served in this role.
At the Silicon Valley Meetup, Dykema and Raber will represent their schools in front of 300 student and faculty attendees from 82 universities and colleges around the world. They will share their UIF work, modeling for the new Fellows and faculty the kind of impact they can have at their own schools.
University Innovation Fellows (UIF) is a global program run by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. UIF empowers student leaders to increase campus engagement with innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity and design thinking.
By Jenn Donovan.
The Center for Technology & Training (CTT) hosted its second annual Roadsoft User Conference of the United States (RUCUS) Nov. 1, 2017, in Lansing. RUCUS was attended by 80 individuals representing 50 Michigan and Indiana road agencies.
Conference attendees looked at a variety of topics including roadway asset inventory, inspection, maintenance and traffic counts; using the Roadsoft Culvert Module, safety, pavement management strategies and project planning. The event also provided attendees with networking opportunities with other agencies and with the CTT staff.
CTT staff attending the conference were Research Engineers John Kiefer, PE and Dale Lighthizer, PhD, PE; Training & Operations Senior Project Manager Christine Codere, CRM Administrator & Software Support Analyst Carole Reynolds, Customer Service & Data Support Specialist Allison Berryman, Principal Programmers Nick Koszykowski and Luke Peterson; Software Engineers Mary Crane, Byrel Mitchell, Mike Pionke, and Sean Thorpe.
A one-day “Introduction to Roadsoft” training was conducted at the conference venue on Oct. 31, 2017.
Also that day, CTT staff provided on-site Roadsoft training and technical assistance for the Van Buren County Road Commission in Lawrence, Michigan; and in Bristol, Indiana for several Indiana road agencies, including the cities of Elkhart, LaPorte, Mishawaka, Goshen and Middlebury; as well as Lake, Laporte, and Elkhart Counties and the Lochmueller Group, Inc..
On Nov. 2, training and technical sessions were held at the Kalkaska County Road Commission and with engineers at Anderson, Eckstein and Westrick, Inc. in Shelby Township, Michigan.
Roadsoft is a roadway asset management system for collecting, storing and analyzing data associated with transportation infrastructure. Roadsoft is developed and supported by the CTT with principal funding from the Michigan Department of Transportation.
By the Center for Technology & Training.
Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T) published the 2017 Reviewer Awards on November 7. Among the recipients is Assistant Professor Daisuke Minakata, who received an Excellence in Review Award recognizing his contributions during a single year.
Dr. Minakata’s research interests include development of computational tools for various water and wastewater treatment technologies, innovative water treatment technologies, and sustainable energy harvesting technologies. He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers in ES&T, Water Research, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Applied Catalysis, and others.
The peer review process is inherently anonymous, and it is valued because this is how journals ensure that papers published meet their high standard for quality. The purpose of this international award is to celebrate and recognize the reviewers who went the extra distance to write reviews that were truly exceptions.
ES&T is an authoritative source of information for professionals in a wide range of environmental disciplines. The journal combines magazine and research sections and is published both in print and online.
In preparing ballast treatment standards, which a federal court ruled inadequate in 2015, the EPA turned to some of the country’s best scientists in the field to help establish a safe number of organisms that could be discharged per cubic meter of water while still protecting the Great Lakes and other U.S. waters from new invasions.
The only thing the panel could agree on is that the fewer organisms allowed to survive in a ballast tank, the better. Beyond that, they were at a loss because, they said, you can’t just pick a magic number and call it safe.
Unless the number you pick is zero.
That is the number Isle Royale National Park Superintendent Phyllis Green aimed for when she learned in 2007 that an invasive virus deadly to dozens of freshwater fish species was creeping toward her rugged, forested island in the middle of Lake Superior.
Green went straight to the captain of the Ranger III, the 165-foot-long ship that ferries park passengers to the island, 73 miles from its home port on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Worried that the ferry might suck the rapidly spreading virus into its ballast tanks while docked at the mainland, she asked if there were any way to disinfect that ballast before it was released into park waters. The captain said no. “What happens,” Green replied, “if I tell you that you can’t move this ship unless you kill everything in your ballast tanks?”
That’s when the brainstorming started. Green’s goal was to try to figure out how to make the Ranger III safe to sail — not in years or even months, but in a matter of days. She sat down with the captain, the ship’s engineer and David Hand, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Michigan Technological University. Hand had worked on water purification systems for the International Space Station that can turn sweat and urine into tap water.
“This,” Hand told the group of the ballast problem, “is not rocket science.”
Two weeks later, Isle Royale’s passenger ship had a crude ballast treatment system that used chlorine to fry viruses and other life lurking in its 37,000-gallon ballast tanks, and then vitamin C to neutralize the poison so the water could be harmlessly discharged into the lake.