Changcheng Pu, a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering and EMPOWER trainee, spent many days away from Syracuse during the month of June. First, he traveled to Buffalo to participate in the 13th Annual LC-MS/MS Workshop on Environmental and Food Safety. With faculty advisor Teng Zeng, Changcheng presented a poster entitled “Characterization of N-nitrosamines in wastewater combining Orbitrap high resolution spectrometry and chemiluminescence detection.” Judged by a committee of professors and researchers, the poster earned the Best Student Poster Award!

Then, Changcheng traveled to Ann Arbor, MI, to attend the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Research and Education Conference. At that conference, he received the Stantec Student Travel Award! This is a big honor, given the tight competition for awards like this.

Congratulations, Changcheng!

EMPOWER is a group of over 40 faculty, staff, and graduate students who are interested in research at the Water-Energy Nexus. Despite this shared interest, everyone comes to the program with their unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. In our new “Spotlight” series, we will learn more about the individuals who make EMPOWER a great community.

Emily Baker has been with EMPOWER since the our first kick-off event in January 2016. And, she is the first to contribute to our new “Spotlight” series!

Emily, what inspired you to become a geoscientist?

I have always enjoyed spending time outside, exploring new places, and learning how things work. These interests were what attracted me to taking my first geology class, Environmental Geology. During this course, I distinctly remember my awe as we learned that earth’s magnetic field has experienced numerous reversals throughout time. Though I did not become a geology major until my junior year, I never forgot the interesting things I learned during that course, and my desire to learn about additional intriguing processes eventually drew me into the department.

What skills and knowledge have been of key importance to your success in graduate school?

Prior to starting graduate school, I used R in some of my math/statistics courses. My familiarity with R made it much easier to learn to write code in MATLAB. Additionally, many of my undergraduate classes made us write up full-length lab reports and give presentations on various topics, and this helped me have better scientific writing and presentation skills upon entering graduate school. Furthermore, the ability to find answers on the internet, in either scientific publications or MATLAB forums, has been crucial to making research progress.

Do you have any mentors who have helped guide you? What was some of the best advice that they gave you?

Two of my geology professors at Mount Holyoke, Steven Dunn and Michelle Markley, were very supportive in helping me gain research experience and allowing me to work for them in the field and in the lab, giving me the confidence to apply to graduate programs. They always had open door policies, where I could ask them for advice on any topic including what courses to choose, internship applications, and the graduate school search. They both encouraged me to go to graduate school, but also told me not to be afraid of not attending immediately; I would end up in graduate school regardless of which path I took to get there, if that ended up being what I really wanted. While I did end up going straight into graduate school, the idea that there is not a right and a wrong path to whatever career I desire really helped me relax and make the decision I felt was best for me.

What advice would you give new graduate students?

• Read as many papers as you can, if you don’t know what to read, ask your adviser for some they would recommend and then read through those and the papers cited within.
• Be productive when you are in the office/lab.
• Sleep a healthy amount, not sleeping will only make it more difficult.
• Maintain hobbies and interests that you have other than your research, otherwise you will burn out really quickly.
• Continue hanging out with friends.

About Emily:

Emily Baker graduated from Mount Holyoke College in the spring of 2015 with a major in geology and a minor in statistics. During her undergraduate studies, she participated in a variety of research experiences: she examined mosquito larvae populations in ephemeral pools, the role of iron redox chemistry in isotopic fractionation, and calcite-graphite thermometry in marbles.

Emily enrolled at Syracuse University in Fall 2015 as a Master’s student in the Department of Earth Sciences. She switched into the PhD program after her first year of studies and recently passed her PhD candidacy exam. This past spring, she organized the department’s annual Central NY Earth Science Student Symposium. She has received the EMPOWER Fellowship and the Water Fellowship.

Her current research is on groundwater-surface water interactions in the Peruvian Andes. This work combines heat tracing and hydrochemical techniques to try to assess the relative contribution of glacial meltwater and groundwater to the stream during the dry season to estimate how water resources will be affected as the glaciers continue to retreat.

The development of oral and written communication skills is an integral part of EMPOWER. In Spring 2017, nine NRT trainees sat alongside journalism and other STEM graduate students in the class entitled “Multimedia Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainability.” This class explored the principles, practices, and processes of science storytelling, including documentary and journalism, in the context of public understanding. The goal of the course was to create a better understanding of how science and the media work, to teach pertinent skills, and to create a template for better relations between the two professions.

The course was taught by two faculty members in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Prof. Don Torrance, a member of EMPOWER’s Leadership Team, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and producer. Prof. Erica Goode is a science writer for the New York Times.

The final project for the class was to create a multimedia website that featured stories, written and produced by students, about New York State’s ecological and environmental innovations. Check out all of the interesting stories! http://www.scicom2017.org/

EMPOWER trainees Alex Johnson, Yige Yang, and David Zheng, were recently awarded $14,000 for their project “Evaluating the Water and Energy Performance of the Center of Excellence (CoE) Green Roof” through the “Campus as a Laboratory for Sustainability” (CALS) grant program. This grant program, funded through the Syracuse University Climate Action Plan, is designed to support research that promotes reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and/or increase awareness about climate disruption and environmental sustainability (http://sustainability.syr.edu/vision/campus-as-laboratory-for-sustainability/cals-funding-2017-18/).

Through their research, the EMPOWER team aims to increase awareness of how green roofs can help the university reduce energy and water consumption. Each contributor will draw on their own expertise in this project: Johnson studies dry deposition on green roofs; Yang is interested in how green roofs reduce stormwater runoff and affect heat flux; and Zheng has extensive experience with computational fluid dynamics. Johnson says this was an “opportunity to do interdisciplinary work with three core research ideas.”

The CALS proposals must also have a campus communications component, so the research team assembled an advisory committee to help formulate an outreach and communication plan. This committee is comprised of 8 professionals from across Syracuse University’s campus. The research advisors include Cliff Davidson and Ben Akih, from the College of Engineering and Computer Science, Tarek Rakha, from the School of Architecture, and Ed Bogucz, from the CoE. The communication advisors are Deanna McCay, from EMPOWER, Don Torrance, from the Newhouse School, Sharon Dotger, from the School of Education, and Todd Moss, from the Whitman School of Management.

According to Johnson, “It was actually pretty easy to get people involved. We joke that we have a large “squad” of advisors.” Zheng agrees: “All in all, we made some efforts in communicating with them, and they showed us great examples of how to do research and public communication.” The team plans to create a website, a informational brochure, and present their findings at a national conference.

Zheng says “I am very thankful for the EMPOWER program, it builds a powerful bond between professionals and students. We have the same vision – to mitigate the water and energy issue, and our missions might be different due to our backgrounds. However, it is the various backgrounds that bring us together.”

This is the second EMPOWER-related proposal funded through CALS. Kristy Gutchess received an award earlier this year. For more information about Kristy’s award, please see read our news story here.

For more information about CALS, please go to their website.

Laura DeMott, PhD student in Earth Sciences and EMPOWER trainee, shares her experiences:

This week, I returned from spending two weeks conducting research at my field area in western Nevada (the Pyramid Lake and Winnemucca Dry Lake basins). I mapped, described, sampled, and photographed (sometimes with a drone!) large outcrops of rock called “tufa towers,” to investigate the formation processes of these unique lake deposits. My field assistant and I saw many amazing rock formations, and even got to see some baby desert animals!

The seating arrangement at EMPOWER’s end-of-the-year event said it all: EMPOWER trainees enjoy spending time together. Almost all of the graduate students sat together at a single long table for the reception.

“This is the end of EMPOWER’s first full year with trainees,” EMPOWER Program Director Laura Lautz told the group of about 40 people who filled the Member’s Lounge at Drumlin’s. The current EMPOWER graduate students, the leadership team, affiliated faculty, and PDSA faculty, were all on hand to celebrate the end of the semester. A slideshow cycling through the highlights of the year was projected in the front of the room.

While the reception was informal and only a few words were spoken by Lautz, she did take the opportunity to present the program’s first ever “Director’s Citation for Excellence” to two students: Kristy Gutchess and Sara Alesi. This award is given in recognition of exceptional academic performance and professional growth in the EMPOWER program.

“Kristy wants to be an academic – a professor. She has taken every opportunity to pursue this career with a passion, which is a key reason she received this citation,” said Lautz. “She has used her PDSA coursework to improve her writing for scientific publication, and her preparation for teaching at the college level.”

Like Kristy, “Sara stands out in her commitment to the EMPOWER program – she participated in virtually every professional development program we had to offer,” says Lautz.  “Sara was one of our first students to make a connection with Dan Olson-Bang, in Graduate Career Services, and use that connection to secure an internship with Plumley Engineering, a local environmental consulting firm, for her career pathways experience.”

According to Lautz, “both students represent what we hope students will achieve in EMPOWER – capitalizing on opportunities to enhance their professional growth to pursue the career of their dreams.”

In a fitting close to the year, the trainees lingered at the reception long after the awards were presented, the slideshow was turned off, and the faculty departed.

EMPOWER trainees continue to earn recognition for their outstanding work. Here are some examples:

1. Kristina Gutchess, who is a PhD student in Earth Sciences, received a Geological Society of America (GSA) Graduate Student Research Grant for work on her project entitled “Evaluating Hydrogeologic Controls on the Transport of Iodine in Headwater Catchments.”
2. Amanda Schulz, a PhD student in Earth Sciences, earned a GSA Graduate Student Research Grant to support  research investigating temporal variability of methane in the Marcellus Shale Region of New York. 
3. JR Slosson, an MS student in Earth Sciences, received the John T. and Carol G. McGill grant through the GSA. His proposal is entitled “Calculating Andean Reservoir Infill Rates in Argentina using Cosmogenic Radionuclides and Stream Gauge Data.”
4. Yige Yang, a PhD student in Civil & Environmental Engineering, won the Student Poster Competition in the Non-Architecture Graduate Research Category at the New York State Green Buildings Conference.

Congratulations Kristy, Amanda, JR, and Yige!

Story written by Alex Johnson, Yaskira Mota, Maggie Tadaro, and Yige Yang

With increasing urbanization, we are removing natural vegetation and replacing it with impervious surfaces such as streets, building roofs, parking lots, etc. This disrupts the natural hydrologic cycle by increasing stormwater runoff and decreasing the amount of water reentering aquifers.  In addition, this causes pollution of natural water bodies.  Furthermore, urban areas are built on materials that absorb energy instead of dissipating it into the atmosphere.  This increases temperatures in these areas.  According to the EPA, temperatures in urban areas are on average 12 degrees C warmer than surrounding rural areas.

Green roofs are one potential technology to help with these issues and many researchers are dedicated to understanding how these systems function. One researcher is Dr. Joel Burken from Missouri Science & Technology.  He conducts small-scale experiments of green roofs to further elucidate our understanding of green roof hydrologic and thermal performance.

It was a pleasure to invite Dr. Burken to Syracuse University on April 10th to present his findings.  In addition, he stressed the importance for engineers to be heavily involved in the design process as there is further room for improvement.  Most designers only consider if the green roof will be cost-effective, if the plants will grow, and if it looks pretty.  However, there are additional considerations that are not considered.  One example is whether the runoff from a green roof will potentially contaminate natural water bodies.  There are also no standards for green roof design.  Dr. Burken encouraged engineers to be involved with a wide variety of people including building managers to consider these factors and to bridge the divide between urban infrastructure and natural processes.

Four environmental consultants, from four different companies, fielded questions from EMPOWER trainees for about 2 hours earlier this month. In addition to better understanding the types of projects that consultants might work on, students learned about billable hours, the technical skills they would need to work in consulting, work-life balance as a consultant, and opportunities for advancement within a company. As one trainee noted, “the panelists were great…[they] would make great contacts for people interested in the field.”

EMPOWER thanks the consultants for so generously spending their time with us!

Emily Bernzott, PE – Design Engineer, NTM Engineering
Timothy Daniluk, Project Scientist, ERM
Kenneth Hubbard, Buckeye Partners, LP (corporate environmental department)
Brian Solomon, Senior Scientist, Anchor QEA, LLC

Story written by Sara Alesi, Megan Daley, Caitlin Eger, Geoff Millard, and David Zheng

For scientists and engineers interested in pursuing a career in industry or the private sector, Dr. Josh Henkin, founder of STEM Career Services, has a simple prescription. “Learn about yourself,” Henkin said during his visit at Syracuse University. “Figure out what company you might join, and then find opportunities to gain the skills to get there.”

On March 29th, Dr. Henkin spoke to STEM graduate students about strategic career planning and how it is never too early to start the process. He discussed strategies that are different from the traditional job seeking methods – like the importance of networking, preparing elevator pitches, and tailoring your resume to each job you apply for. He emphasized the importance of developing a good relationship with a career mentor who can offer advice, expand your network, and provide encouragement.

Dr. Henkin hosted a series of strategic career workshops and one-on-one counseling sessions during his time in Syracuse. In several of his workshops, Dr. Henkin stressed the importance of networking. “Over 70% of jobs are found through networking,” Dr. Henkin said. “LinkedIn is one of the most useful networking tools. I probably get job offers once a month just based on the strength of my LinkedIn profile.” In addition, Dr. Henkin suggests preparing an elevator pitch before you introduce yourself to potential employers during networking events.

When giving advice on resumes, Dr. Henkin highlighted the significance of presenting your technical skills – such as computer programming – and transferable skills – such as communication expertise – first on your resume. He noted that education is no longer the most important item on your resume, and should be moved to the lower half. “You need to impress me with the top half of your resume,” Dr. Henkin said. “If you don’t impress me as a recruiter, I won’t bother looking at the rest of your material, because I have 300 more resumes to evaluate.”

Dr. Henkin advises graduate students to avoid talking about salary right away.  “Do your research to make sure you are getting paid the fair market value for your skills,” Dr. Henkin said. “Graduate student pay is very low, but the money does not equal the total value.  Flexible hours, free classes, access to fitness centers – these could all be part of your current total pay, and talking about salary does not reflect these other benefits.”

All in all, Dr. Henkin encourages graduate students to remain positive. “Career development is an ongoing process,” Henkin said. “Don’t feel limited by your career options. Figure out what you’re passionate about, gain some skills, and build your resume. ”

The campus visit was supported by EMPOWER, SU Graduate Career Services, The Graduate School, and the College of Arts & Sciences.