Tag: herbology

Rebecca Ong, assistant professor, chemical engineering

Rebecca Ong preps a switchgrass sample in the lab.

I’m a born Yooper who grew up in a small town in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan and came back to the UP for school. I love the Copper Country and MTU students so much, I managed to persuade my husband to come back to Houghton five years ago. Now I live near campus with my husband, daughter, our Torbie cat and our curly-haired dog. We read science fiction and fantasy stories; play board games; kayak on the canals and lakes while watching for signs of wildlife; make new things out of yarn, fabric, wood, and plastic (though not all at the same time) and practice herbology and potions in the garden and kitchen.
I first became interested in engineering in high school when I learned it was a way to combine math and science to solve problems. I loved math and science and thought that sounded brilliant. However, I didn’t understand at the time what that really meant. I thought “problems” meant the types of problems you solve in math class. Since then I’ve learned these problems are major issues that are faced by all of humanity, such as: How do we enable widespread access to clean energy? How do we produce sufficient amounts of safe vaccines and medicine, particularly in a crisis? How do we process food products, while maintaining safety and nutritional quality? As a chemical engineer I am able to combine my love of biology, chemistry, physics, and math to create novel solutions to society’s problems.

One thing I love about MTU is that the university gives students tons of hands-on opportunities to solve real problems, not just problems out of a textbook (though we still do a fair number of those!). These are the types of problems our students will be solving when they go on to their future careers. –Rebecca Ong, assistant professor, chemical engineering

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