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Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been named 2004 Faculty-Member-in-Residence by the Washington Internships for Students of Engineering (WISE) program.
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and other groups, WISE is ranked among the 100 best internship opportunities in the United States by Princeton Review. For ten weeks, a group of outstanding engineering students learn how government officials make decisions on complex technological issues and how engineers can contribute to legislative and regulatory public policy decisions. This year, a dozen students from schools such as MIT, Georgia Tech, Cal-Berkeley, and Virginia Tech will participate.
Jones will help the students discover non-traditional career paths and alternative ways of using their engineering education. According to WISE, they will be prepared to play a leadership role in advancing the engineering profession and promoting more effective science and technology policy, laws, and regulations at the national, state and/or local level.
Jones performs a similar role for Lafayette students as head of the Engineering and Public Policy track of the A.B. engineering major, which allows students to build on engineering fundamentals with focused courses in engineering management and public policy. She teaches two core courses in the curriculum: the sophomore-level Introduction to Engineering and Public Policy class and the senior capstone seminar on Engineering and Policy.
“The primary reason I applied to Lafayette was because of the unique opportunity in the College’s A.B. engineering program,” says Jones, who joined the Lafayette faculty last school year. “By moving to Lafayette, I have been able to combine my interests in engineering, developing economies, and teaching in a complementary way that I hope continues for a very long time.”
Jones used a NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship to conduct research last summer at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., where she developed and used web-based, state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) technologies for infrastructure management. Among 734 applicants across the nation, only about 150 received the NASA fellowship.
Previously, she developed GIS structures for the Tohono O’odham Nation in southwestern Arizona, which she continues to serve as a consultant. Her work was recognized with the Indian Health Service’s Tribal/Urban Recognition Award. She has included GIS in her Applied Systems Analysis for Engineering Policy and Management course.
Jones frequently publishes her research in scientific journals and gives talks at academic conferences. She incorporates her NASA and Tohono O’odham Nation work as she mentors Lafayette students conducting research, such as Nicole Joy ’04, a double major in A.B. engineering and mathematics-economics. Jones collaborated with Joy in research last year through Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program and is guiding the student as she conducts yearlong honors research this year.
“She’s very easygoing, but she’s brilliant in her field,” Joy says. “I really enjoy working with her.”
The EXCEL project focused on bringing the Tohono O’odham Nation’s drinking-water system into compliance with Environmental Protection Agency standards in the most cost-effective way possible. The researchers located groundwater areas at high risk of contamination from arsenic. In addition, Jones, Art Kney, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Chip Nataro, assistant professor of chemistry, supervised Joy and seven other students as they developed an inexpensive method of removing arsenic from drinking water in New Mexico. Joy and two of the students presented their findings last year at the 13th annual International Environmental Design Contest (IEDC) at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
In Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program, students assist faculty with research while earning a stipend. The program has helped make Lafayette a leader in undergraduate research. Many of the more than 160 students who participate in EXCEL each year go on to present their research in academic journal articles or conference presentations.
Joy continues to help the low-income Native American community improve the quality of its drinking water through her honors research, which she will present at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research this month.
Jones also is guiding A.B. engineering major Nathan DeLong ’04 (Lebanon, Pa.) in honors research involving environmental engineering policy making. DeLong is evaluating cost-effective options for reducing the environmental impact of wooden pallets and will present his findings to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research this month.
”I am very glad to be working with her,” he says. “She is more than qualified [and] has helped me out a lot with this project.”
In Jones’ Engineering Policy and Design Course, some students are acquiring expertise in preparation for a trip to Honduras, where they will help bring quality drinking water to four communities of the Municipality of Yoro. The project is being coordinated with the student chapter of Engineering Without Borders and its adviser, David Brandes, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Another group in the class is developing a cost-effective treatment technology to remove perchlorate from drinking water in small water delivery and domestic water systems. Kney and David Veshosky, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, are helping guide the team. One student will present the group’s work this month at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research and another will continue the research this summer.
Janille Smith ’03, now a master’s degree candidate in city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says she decided to conduct an honors thesis after taking a class with Jones for only a few weeks.
“I had thought about doing a thesis, but I was not sure with whom I could pursue such research,” Smith says. “I found that her interests were very much aligned with my own I admire her because she is a great teacher and a highly motivational and positive individual. She has a warmth that is very encouraging. I am definitely better able to develop my ideas, and have matured as a student, because of my experience with her.”
In her first semester, Jones 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 accepted for publication by 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 in fall of her senior year. “Although we just met, she has already shown herself to be qualified, enthusiastic, and caring. She is always available and approachable.”
Jones advises both the Leonardo Society for A.B. engineers and the Minority Scientists and Engineers Association. She accompanied Lafayette students to New Mexico as faculty mentor for an Alternative School Break service project in May 2003.
“Lafayette has been a pleasant surprise in terms of the diversity of the students, politically, culturally, and racially,” she says. “I’ve been impressed with the quality of the students as well. They’re interested in the impact of what they’re doing.”
Jones 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 curriculum for teaching environmental issues at the undergraduate level; an Indiana Department of Natural Resources grant to monitor water quality in a creek; and 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.
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. She is a registered Professional Engineer in California and Oregon.
Professors such as Jones have helped Lafayette gain national recognition for its success in attracting and retaining outstanding women engineering students. 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.”
The 350 WISE alumni come from 133 colleges and universities. In addition to the National Science Foundation, WISE sponsors are the American Association of Engineering Societies, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Nuclear Society, American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, National Society of Professional Engineers, and Society of Automotive Engineers.