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Nicole Joy ’04 (Windham, Maine) is helping a low-income Native American community improve the quality of its drinking water for a yearlong independent research project that she will present at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research next month.
Under the guidance of Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Joy is conducting an in-depth cost-benefit analysis that includes an evaluation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the revised Arsenic Rule, which calls for all water wells to meet higher quality standards.
Beginning in January 2006, all wells must have no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic in the water. Joy has identified 18 wells that do not yet meet this standard in a low-income community in Southwest Arizona, the Tonono O’odham Native American Nation.
Joy, a double major in A.B. engineering and mathematics & economics, is analyzing treatment and non-treatment alternatives for the Tonono community to potentially use to comply with the new standard. She has identified choices such as drilling new wells that would meet the standard, abandoning the old wells and tying into wells that comply, or even using bottled water. Her report will include information on the cost of each option.
Because Jones works as a consultant to the Tohono Nation, Joy is privy to a lot of first-hand information about the condition of the wells and other data about the community.
Previously, the pair conducted research on the issue through Lafayette’s distinctive EXCEL Scholars program, in which students assist faculty with research while earning a stipend. Lafayette is a national leader in undergraduate research. Many of the more than 160 students who participate in EXCEL each year go on to publish papers in scholarly journals and/or present their research at conferences.
“Nicole has shown much initiative and resourcefulness and is very organized,” Jones says. “Nicole readily brings questions to me and we sit together and work through them, so I have learned more about the topic.”
“Professor Jones is very helpful,” Joy says. “We spend a lot of time together and she’s a great mentor.”
A recipient of many grants and awards, Jones received a NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship last year to conduct research at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. She has been chosen to serve as Faculty-Member-in-Residence for this summer’s Washington Internships for Students of Engineering in the nation’s capital, a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation and several engineering organizations.
Joy, who plans to attend graduate school to study environmental policy, says the project has prepared her for a career.
“This has given me real world experience,” she says. “It’s given me experience in the environmental field, which I am very interested in.”
“Lafayette provides a lot of research opportunities that you might not get at a university,” she adds. “There are a lot of hands-on, one-on-one opportunities here.”
Last spring, Joy was part of a Lafayette student team that developed an inexpensive method of removing arsenic from drinking water in New Mexico and presented its findings April 6-10 at the 13th annual International Environmental Design Contest at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She is the secretary of the Leonardo Society for A.B. engineers and has been a resident adviser for two years.
She is a graduate of Windham High School.
Honors thesis projects are among several major opportunities at Lafayette that make the College a national leader in undergraduate research. Lafayette sends one of the largest contingents to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research each year. Forty-two students are scheduled to present their work at April’s conference.
Lafayette has gained national recognition for its success in attracting and retaining outstanding women engineering students like Joy. Last year, women earned about 31% of the bachelor’s degrees the College awarded in engineering. Nationally women make up approximately 19% of engineering B.S. graduates, according to a 2002 National Science Foundation report.
The American Society for Engineering Education has cited Lafayette among nine engineering schools nationwide that have “excelled in upping the ranks of women in their midst.” In addition, Lafayette received a grant of $151,875 from the National Science Foundation to build on this success and further strengthen recruitment and retention of both women and minority engineering students.
Lafayette ranks No. 1 among all U.S. colleges that grant only bachelor’s degrees in the number of graduates who went on to earn doctorates in engineering between 1920-1995, according to the Franklin and Marshall College study “Baccalaureate Origins of Doctoral Recipients.”