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Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, has received a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Summer Faculty Fellowship to conduct research at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
Among 734 applicants across the nation, only about 150 recipients received the NASA fellowship.
Jones will be based in the agency’s Capital Investment Planning Office, where she will develop and use web-based and state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) technologies for infrastructure management. The Langley facility will serve as a test site for management systems across all NASA facilities.
Jones was selected because of her experience with the two leading GIS tools, ArcGIS and Autodesk Map. Last year, she developed GIS-based infrastructure management systems for the Tohono O’odham Nation in southwestern Arizona as part of her work on a variety of projects related to providing sanitary facilities at the reservation.
Jones, who continues to consult on the project, is using GIS in a collaboration with EXCEL Scholar Nicole Joy ’04, a double major in A.B. engineering and mathematics-economics from Windham, Maine, to bring the reservation’s drinking-water system into compliance with Environmental Protection Agency standards in the most cost-effective way possible. In Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program, students assist faculty with research while earning a stipend. More than 160 students participate each year, many going on to present their research through academic journals and/or conferences.
The researchers are locating groundwater areas at high risk of contamination from arsenic. They also teamed up with two Lafayette professors and seven students to develop an inexpensive method of removing arsenic from drinking water in New Mexico. Joy and two of the students presented their findings April 6-10 at the 13th annual International Environmental Design Contest (IEDC) at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces (see related story).
This semester, Jones also has included GIS in her Applied Systems Analysis for Engineering Policy and Management course, for which she received an Information Literacy Grant from Lafayette.
“The grant allowed me to incorporate issues about the quality of spatial data from primary and secondary sources,” she says. “Next academic year, I expect to have several GIS infrastructure research projects for interested students.”
Jones joined the Lafayette faculty last fall, and in her first semester, she mentored Marquis Scholar Catriona Mhairi Duncanson ’03, an A.B. engineering major from Basking Ridge, N.J., in her study of the impact of World Bank water regulation policies in South Africa. In an article submitted for publication this year in the journal Water Policy, they concluded that the World Bank may be limiting the nation’s sovereignty in deciding its own water treatment policies.
“Professor Jones is able to offer new courses that increase the breadth of the A.B. engineering program,” Duncanson said last semester. “Although we just met, she has already shown herself to be qualified, enthusiastic, and caring. She is always available and approachable.”
Jones also guides Lafayette students as an adviser for A.B. engineering majors and the Leonardo Society for A.B. engineers, and will be helping with the Minority Scientists and Engineers Association.
She has shared her research in a number of scientific journals, including articles published last year in ASEE Journal of Engineering Education and Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, and accepted for publication this year in ASCE Journal of Professional Issues, AWWA Journal, and Public Works Management and Policy.
Since January last year, Jones has been a speaker at the 3rd Richard A. Havrill Conference on Higher Education/Developing a Sense of Place for Distance Education, the Third International Conference on Remediation of Chlorinated and Recalcitrant Compounds, the Berlin in America Symposium, the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors/American Academy of Environmental Engineers 2002 Conference, the American Water Resources Association Annual Conference, and the Clare Boothe Luce Professors Meeting and Centennial Celebration. She also is scheduled to present her research at the United States Public Health Service Annual Professional Conference next month.
She has been the recipient or principal investigator of many grants and awards: an American Water Works Association grant to develop a utility-student internship forum; Carnegie Mellon University Women in Science and Engineering Speaker of Honor recognition; a Fulbright Commission German Studies Seminar Award to interact with senior environmental and energy professionals in East and West Germany regarding environmental protection and alternative energy sources; a Lilly Applied Health Sciences funded project to evaluate the effectiveness of porous media versus peat gravel in vertical constructed wetland design; a National Science Foundation funded joint project with Carnegie Mellon University to develop a curriculum for teaching environmental issues at the undergraduate level; an Indiana Department of Natural Resources grant to monitor water quality in a creek; a Summer Faculty Fellowship with Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change to study forest cover in Indiana as an example of environmental change; and a Clare Booth Luce Junior Faculty Fellowship.
In 2001, Jones conducted training courses on strategic environmental management for practitioners in Cartagena, Colombia, and Georgetown, Guyana. As a project engineer for CH2M Hill Inc., she worked with the California EPA and City of Anaheim on a project for reduction of municipal hazardous waste that earned the Orange County Engineering Council’s 1991 President’s Award. She also has been an engineer for the City of Los Angeles and Bryan A. Stirrat Consulting Engineers. Prior to Lafayette, she was associate professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Jones is a book review associate editor and reviewer for the journal Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, and a reviewer for Environmental Science and Technology Journal, Environmental Engineering Science Journal, and ASCE Journal of Environmental Engineering.
She received a Ph.D. in engineering and public policy with an emphasis on environmental engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996, earning a Clare Booth Luce Doctoral Fellowship and EPA National Network for Environmental Management Studies Fellowship. She received an M.P.A. in public works policy from California State University at Long Beach in 1991, earning a Joint Fellowship of the American Public Works Association and City and County Engineers of Los Angeles. She received an M.E. in civil/geotechnical engineering from University of Florida in 1991 and a B.S. in civil engineering from Columbia University in 1986.