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Lafayette is among three institutions sharing a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant for introducing undergraduate students to state-of-the-art methods to detect estrogen in surface water, an emerging national and global environmental problem.
The three-year grant is funding research to develop a two-week learning unit for students in biology, engineering, and environmental science courses at Lafayette, DeSales University, and Lehigh Carbon Community College. The collaborative study will establish learning communities comprised of students at each school, who will collect, analyze, and interpret data and use online courseware to communicate with their peers, faculty, and professional researchers.
Faculty will mentor the students in analyzing the problem, gathering data, evaluating their findings, and developing recommendations. Students will present their conclusions at a scientific conference funded by the grant. A coordinating faculty member at each institution will present the concept and structure of the project through presentations to the National Science Foundation and professional workshops, as well as in publications so it can be adopted at other institutions.
Lafayette’s engineering students will focus on the ways that water treatment systems can eliminate estrogen. Introduced by agricultural, industrial, and pharmaceutical sources, the presence of estrogen in water has a negative effect on human and animal reproduction and the environment.
The two-week learning unit developed through the NSF grant will include interdisciplinary lectures, case study discussions, expert speakers, a hands-on laboratory exercise, and work among students from different disciplines and institutions. Its goals for students include:
Lafayette’s students will be led by Art Kney, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Kney and his faculty counterparts from DeSales and LCCC will spend a week at Xavier University this month to familiarize themselves with the genetically modified yeast strain that will be used to detect and measure estrogen in wastewater.
“It is particularly exciting to see ‘state-of-the-art’ molecular biology technology techniques applied to the development of this project’s laboratory exercise for undergraduate students,” note Thomas Wiese and Charles Miller, the Tulane University researchers providing the yeast strain and training the three professors. “Furthermore, the involvement of faculty and students from three institutions and academic backgrounds in a course that introduces endocrine disruption concepts as well as the applied skills to evaluate the hormone activity of environmental samples is visionary. We know of no other undergraduate lab experience that covers this range of experiments”
The grant is the third in less than two years that Kney has played a leading role in obtaining from the National Science Foundation. The grants, which total more than $650,000, include one to equip Lafayette’s new environmental engineering research laboratories in Acopian Engineering Center, which are shared by the civil and environmental engineering and chemical engineering departments.
Kney has worked closely with many Lafayette students, involving them in his research and mentoring them in their own research projects. He has studied local water pollution with several civil engineering students, including Nathan Tregger ’03 (Niantic, Conn.) and Jaeyoung Jang ’04 (Cochabamba, Bolivia), who shared their findings at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. Tregger also presented further research with Kney this year at the Pennsylvania Water Environment Association’s 75th Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition June 22-25 in State College after graduating cum laude with honors in civil engineering and a second degree in mathematics.
They used data from several sources, including a volunteer monitoring program established three years ago by Kney and David Brandes, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, to determine the impact of changing local conditions such as population increases. Each month during the school year, students collect samples from eight locations along the main branch of the Bushkill Creek, spanning most of the watershed.
“I learned much about water quality and wetlands, which are an important part of the civil engineering field,” says Tregger, who will pursue a Ph.D. in civil engineering with a concentration in structural engineering at Northwestern University, which along with Johns Hopkins and Princeton offered him a graduate fellowship. He was honored as one of the nation’s top undergraduate civil engineering students in the December 2002 issue of the national magazine CE News.
The students’ participation in the research project was funded by Lafayette’s distinctive EXCEL Scholars program, in which students work closely with faculty on research while earning a stipend. Many of the more than 160 students who participate each year go on to publish papers in scholarly journals and/or present their research at conferences.
Kney also has collaborated with students in research on magnetic water treatment, an environmentally friendly technology for processing industrial wastewater. “This exploratory research could provide important information for the removal of heavy metals by using a process which combines ion-exchange chromatography and a magnet field,” according to the National Science Foundation, which awarded a grant to Lafayette for further investigation.
“I have dreamed of what it would be like to work for a research and development department of a large company, and this particular experience was quite similar to that,” says chemical engineering major and Trustee Scholarship recipient Katie Barillas ’04 (Bethlehem, Pa.), who conducted research on the method with Kney, Javad Tavakoli, associate professor and head of chemical engineering, and Andrew Dougherty, associate professor of physics. Her presentation of the research earned third place at the 2001 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Student Conference’s National Student Poster Paper Competition in Reno, Nev.
Kney also worked on the chemical-free water treatment project with Marquis Scholar Jessica Molek ’03, who graduated summa cum laude with honors in chemical engineering and received a three-year Graduate Fellowship from the National Science Foundation in April. Molek presented her work to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research during her sophomore and junior years. She also coauthored a paper with Kney, Tavakoli, and Dougherty that was presented and published in the proceedings of the Industrial Water Conference last December and the 2001 World Water and Environmental Resources Congress, both held in Orlando, Fla.
“I found it very motivating that the experiments I performed and the data I obtained influenced our future planning,” she says. “My problem-solving skills improved as I compared, contrasted, and looked for patterns in my results. I learned to think in new ways as I worked backward from a hypothesis to methodically prove or disprove an idea. My self-confidence was greatly improved as I was given the chance to come up with my own hypothesis and allowed to proceed in the direction I thought best.”
Kney, Tavakoli, and Dougherty coauthored a paper with two other chemical engineering majors involved in the research, Shawna Showalter ’04 (Waynesboro, Pa.) and Fernando Molina-Polo ’04 (Bethlehem, Pa.), that Kney presented March 25-27 at the International Water Association Conference at Cranfield University in England.
This past school year, Kney advised a group of students that developed an inexpensive method of removing arsenic from drinking water in New Mexico. They presented their findings April 6-10 at the 13th annual International Environmental Design Contest at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. He also supervised a student team that took first place for its design paper and earned an overall honorable mention in April in the 2003 Pennsylvania-Delaware Region of the National Concrete Canoe Competition.
Last year, along with Roger Ruggles, associate professor and head of civil and environmental engineering, Kney mentored 15 civil engineering seniors who developed proposals that helped the borough of Alpha, N.J., decide what to do with its aging John Dolak Memorial Pool.
He advises the Lafayette Environmental Awareness and Protection student group and the student chapter of American Society of Civil Engineers, winning the ASCE Advisor Award last year.
He also serves on Lafayette’s Landis Community Outreach Committee and the Environmental Science Minor Committee. As a graduate student, he won the Lehigh University Service Award, the Graduate Student Leadership Award, and the Pennsylvania Water Environment Association Student Research Award.
Kney regularly shares his research through scientific publications and presentations at conferences in his field. He is a member of American Society of Civil Engineers, American Chemical Society, American Water Work Association (AWWA), Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, Eastern Pennsylvania Water Pollution Control Operators Association, Pennsylvania Water Environment Association, and Water Environment Federation.
He belongs to the Bushkill Stream Conservancy Board of Directors, the Pennsylvania Watershed Science Conference Steering Committee, the AWWA/ASCE Water Treatment Plant Design 4th Edition Steering Committee, the ASCE/Environmental and Water Resources Institute Water Supply Engineering Committee, and Lucent Technology’s Local Environmental Advisory Group. He served as vice president of the Lehigh Valley Section of ASCE in 2000-2001.
He has given talks to the Green Valley Coalition Water Symposium in Bethlehem, Pa.; Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and The Polytechnic School of the Army, Quito, Ecuador.
Before joining the Lafayette faculty in 1999, Kney served as environmental site investigator for Merritt/Osborn Environmental Consulting, Inc. in Newtown, Pa. He earned a Ph.D. in environmental engineering and master’s in civil engineering from Lehigh University in 1999 and 1995, respectively; a bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) in civil engineering from University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth in 1993; and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Saint Francis College in 1977.