Inaugural Dolese Teaching Fellows Named

The Gallogly College of Engineering is very grateful to Dolese for the opportunity to pilot a new program for the academic year 2017 that supports teaching excellence by providing $250,000 to support graduate teaching fellowships.  The GCoE has granted ten Dolese Teaching Fellows awards at $25,000 each to support the teaching mission of the college.  Two of the fellowships were granted to CEES and were awarded to doctoral students Tommy Bounds and Trevor Looney.

A native of Oklahoma, Tommy Bounds attended the University of Oklahoma where he completed both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering.  His master’s thesis research, with advisor CEES professor Gerald Miller, investigated soil stabilization with non-lime based stabilizers on clayey soils with and without sulfates.

After completing his master’s degree, Bounds worked for Red Rock Consulting in Edmond, Oklahoma as a project specialist and then a project engineer after completing his professional engineering licensing exam.  While at Red Rock Consulting, he worked on numerous foundation investigations for projects ranging from bridges and embankments to multilevel building and parking garages.  After three and a half years in practice, Bounds will return to CEES to begin work on a doctoral degree in civil engineering under the guidance of CEES professors Miller and K.K. “Muralee” Muraleetharan.  Bounds will co-teach CEES 4903/4993, Civil Engineering and Architectural Engineering Capstone classes with CEES associate professor Jeffery Volz in spring 2017.

Trevor Looney received his bachelor’s of science degree with Summa Cum Laude honors and his master’s degree both in civil engineering and from the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2010 and 2012 respectively. The Delaware native is currently working towards his doctoral degree in civil engineering from OU under the guidance of CEES associate professor Jeffery Volz.  Looney’s master’s research was also guided by Volz and focused on the effects on bond strength of high-volume fly ash and self-consolidating concrete for infrastructure applications.

Upon completion of his master’s degree, Looney worked for ENERCON Services in Kansas City, Kansas until moving to Wallace Engineering in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  He has worked on projects related to modifications to nuclear facilities, the design of steel, reinforced concrete, and wood structural systems for buildings, and conducted special inspections on steel, reinforced concrete, and masonry structures.  Looney will co-teach CEES 3403, Materials, with Volz in spring 2017.

WaTER Center Travels to Ghana

WaTER Center doctoral student Philip Deal and center director and CEES professor David Sabatini travelled to Ghana in July.  The purpose of the trip was twofold – to evaluate a private company’s abilities to manufacture drilling equipment, train professional drilling teams and provide a full water delivery service to rural communities in Ghana and attend the 39^th Water Engineering and Development Centre International Conference in Kumasi, Ghana, to share details of their collaboration model with the academic community.

The WaTER Center, the Water4 Foundation and IDEA are collaborating with Access Development Ltd., a privately held Ghanaian company located in the western region of the country.  In addition to providing a full water delivery service to rural communities in Ghana, ADL will manufacture drilling equipment and train professional drilling teams who will dig and maintain boreholes so that contracted villages will have clean water year round. Finally, ADL will charge a miniscule tariff for these services upfront in order to recover the costs for service and prevent the breakdown of the ADL infrastructure. All of these actions combine to form a service delivery model, a concept under research at the University of the University of Oxford and IRC.

The rural water delivery service began last fall, and its initial implementation is expected to last four years. Phase 1, which included preliminary planning, mobilization, and baseline studies, was recently finished in April. Phases 2 and 3, which include training and the start of drilling, will proceed this year.

The WaTER Center will evaluate the company from technological, financial, and behavioral perspectives.  Baseline studies are well along to completion. Deal and Sabatini will address the efficacy of the project to date as well as hopes for the future at the WEDC conference.  Over the next few years, metrics such as well performance, maintenance periods, operational costs, water purchasing rates, and how the socioeconomic framework affects the company’s success will be tracked to evaluate the sustainability of the project. The WaTER Center is excited to play a role in helping to determine if this is the next step in public-private partnerships in emerging regions.  Stay tuned!

CEES Professor Mark Nanny Leads BioAnalysis Education Effort

Six science and mathematics teachers from rural high schools in Oklahoma engaged in a National Science Foundation-supported summer program at the University of Oklahoma’s Center for BioAnalysis in an effort to improve STEM teaching in rural classrooms and increase the number of rural students who select and successfully graduate from a higher education STEM field.    

 

“Combining the teaching expertise of the high school teachers with the research expertise of the faculty creates a powerful synergism for producing innovative and dynamic science curricula that directly impact current issues pertinent to rural Oklahoman communities,” said Mark Nanny, director of the Rural Educators Program and professor of environmental science in the Gallogly College of Engineering.

 

Oklahoma rural educators selected for the 2016 summer program include: Arnold and Niccole Rech, Fort Towson High School; Ashley Rodriguez, Clinton High School; Sue Flaming, Foyil Junior/High School; Joe Albrecht, Liberty High School; and Shawn Cusak, Northwest Technology Center.  The program includes laboratory work, seminars on real-world applications of bioanalytical engineering, curricula development and design, and evaluation and assessment activities.

Each educator is paired with a faculty mentor over seven weeks doing cutting-edge research in OU laboratories.  Besides learning research skills, the program also focuses on developing classroom curricula and transferring research experiences into the classroom.  A workshop on writing successful proposals focuses on rural educators preparing proposals for their classroom curricula.  In the final week, educators present research activities, classroom curricula and prepare a research poster for display in the classroom and OU laboratory.

While much of the current research in bioanalytical engineering focuses on medical problems, bioanalytical engineering is a powerful tool for all areas involving biology, such as the improved production of biofuels, the impact of biofilms on the biocorrosion of steel infrastructure in the petroleum industry and the environmental bioremediation of groundwater.

Bioanalytical engineering presents rural educators with a dynamic and vibrant field rooted in fundamental concepts of molecular biology, biochemistry, cellular biology, chemistry and physics.  Combined with engineering design methodology and application, it provides opportunities for educators to enrich their teaching of these fundamental concepts, showing their students how knowledge in these fields can directly impact critical issues related to medicine, human health, energy resources and the environment.

Among the research opportunities available to educators through this program were the design of personal anti-cancer drugs, environmental engineering, biocorrosion engineering, biofuel processing, fabrication of bioanalytical devices and advancement of computational methods.   For more information about the rural educators program, contact Mark Nanny at nanny@ou.edu.

CEES Professor Yang Hong Publishes New Book

Motivated by innovative technologies, such as satellite remote sensing and data assimilation which can advance the water sciences and applications, CEES professor Yang Hong, together with his former doctoral students, has published a book that presents a collection of recent innovative hydrology-relevant capacity building research conducted over emerging regions with inadequate observations. The book particularly addresses the challenges and opportunities of global water security. It also reviews the multiple satellite remote sensing observations for water cycles in emerging regions and over the globe, the application of satellite remote sensing in hydrological modeling and data assimilation, and the hydrological capacity building from the NASA Applied Science Program and the HyDROS group at OU over the past decade. Hong compiled the text from his years of lecture material and his group’s cumulative scientific research results. The book aims to provide a hydrological research brochure for governmental officials, researchers, students, and practitioners in the fields of hydrology, remote sensing, meteorology and climate science. The book can be purchased through this link.