Clarkson University undergraduate Maria Lang has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Maria C. Lang, a senior mechanical engineering major from El Paso, Texas, received the fellowship. She is a member of Clarkson’s Honors Program and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships are the most prestigious awards available to students beginning their graduate studies in engineering and the sciences. The ranks of NSF Fellows include individuals who have made transformative breakthroughs in research and have become leaders in their chosen careers, including several Nobel Laureates.

Lang entered Clarkson as one of the first cohort of the S-STEM program funded by NSF in 2007. She was admitted into the Honors Program after her freshman year due to her outstanding performance.

Lang was inspired by late astronaut McNair and a former McNair scholar to dream of becoming an astronaut. She participated in the NASA Academy in 2010, working in the propulsion branch at Goddard Space Flight Center with Rich Luquette and Paul Mason.

Her honors thesis is on the computational fluid dynamics of nano-aerosols, supervised by Prof. Suresh Dhaniyala. After graduation, Lang will pursue her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she will investigate electric propulsion/plasma dynamics with Prof. Iain Boyd. She is also a recipient of the Rackham Merit Fellowship there at the Rackham Graduate School.

“Maria has been an outstanding scholar and role model for her fellow McNair Scholars,” said Tammy McGregor-Twiss, assistant director of Clarkson’s McNair Program. “Her strong work ethic, drive and passion have led her to aspire, advance and achieve at every step of her undergraduate career. From obtaining two McNair research opportunities at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, to participation in numerous professional conferences, tutoring and honors research, Maria is very deserving of this fellowship.”

“Maria exemplifies the all-around excellence of an Honors student,” said Jon D. Goss, director of Clarkson’s Honors Program. “Not only is she a brilliant student doing cutting-edge research, but she also tutors math and physics at Clarkson, and is extensively involved in outreach to promote sciences and engineering in K-12 education in the region. On top of that, she is an accomplished pianist and she imagines the prospect of playing in the first piano quartet in space when she succeeds in becoming an astronaut.”

The National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program is intended to help ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States. It provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master’s or doctoral degrees.

Clarkson’s Honors Program is an intensive four-year curriculum for exceptionally talented students. The University admits only 30 new students to the Honors Program each year.

As one of the eight federally funded TRIO programs of the U.S. Department of Education, the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program prepares first generation & low-income and/or underrepresented students for doctoral studies. The McNair program hosted at Clarkson University is one of 200 across the United States.

– Original unedited article posted by Clarkson University News and Digital Content Services on April 7, 2011.

More than a dozen NJIT civil and mechanical engineering students, faculty and interested staff members have spent the past three years working with villagers in a poor Haitian village to remove bacteria from their drinking water and halt water-borne illnesses.  Working under the auspices of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), the NJIT group has made four visits, to date, and are planning one last visit in October.

“The idea is to make the people self-sufficient,” said EWB President Paul Rodriguez, who will be a senior at NJIT.  “When we finish this project, 25 bio-sand filters will have been installed in 21 homes, two churches and two schools.  We will have set up a filter production center and worked side-by-side with a dozen students now capable of building and installing more units.”   Some 30,000 people live in the town and ideally there eventually will be 3,500 units, which the group hopes the people will be able to build themselves.  Rodriguez, of Harrison, is a McNair Scholar.

The idea for this project germinated several years back, when a physician working with Doctors Without Borders in Milot kept seeing people getting ill from the water.  He explained the problem to his friend, NJIT civil engineering professor Jay Meegoda, of Millburn, a water expert.  The comment inspired Meegoda to start an NJIT chapter of Engineers Without Borders.   Students and others flocked to the first meeting.

“I’ve always had a great ambition to help others and work for a cause,” said Rodriguez. “I am very proud of my work with EWB and the positive impact our project can have on Milot. The work has brought meaning to my life. But it was thanks to NJIT that I found the environmentalist and humanitarian within me. If it wasn’t for these experiences, I would have never uncovered and pursued this newfound passion.”

Among the most active participants:  past EWB President Bryce Anzelmo, of Lincoln Park, who will graduate from NJIT next month to start a graduate engineering program at Columbia University; Kate Boardman, of New Providence, a senior, working this summer as a co-operative student at General Electric, Schenectady, NY; NJIT University Registrar Joseph Thompson, of Summit; and Allyn Luke, manager of the concrete laboratory for NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering.

“I didn’t go on that first trip,” said Rodriguez, “but the most surprising news was that no one in Milot could understand that they had a water problem.”  To convince the villagers otherwise, the students took water samples from homes and wells throughout the town.  “The results showed, that the water was full of bacteria,” Rodriguez said.

Explaining this to the locals was a problem. This is a town in which women still carry water back to their families from a nearby river. Most people speak only Creole and few are educated.  Communicating simple information, let alone an engineering report, seemed impossible. Luckily, a local physician at a nearby hospital (not the professor’s friend) and a local priest stepped in. Together the two presented the data in a manner that made sense to the people.  The project was born.

The students returned to Newark to research the best filter. They settled on a design for a four-foot high square, hollow concrete box that local people could eventually build for themselves.  The NJIT students built the first few units, and then taught the process to a group of young men from Milot who were technology students. Through a series of fund-raising events, the villagers raised $125,500 to subsidize, in part, the cost of the first 25 units.

A bio-sand filter works by arranging a combination of gravel and sand in a vertical cylinder so that as water is poured into it, more than 95 percent of the pathogens are eliminated.  One cycle produces five gallons of water which can be accessed through a spout in the concrete filter.

“This effort is not the first one to bring clean water to this tiny, poor village,” said Rodriguez.  But he and the others at NJIT hope it will be successful enough to be the last.  “We designed this project to enable the people to build the filters themselves and monitor their own water supply.  We will leave them with a talented pool of local workers and a better understanding of what it means to have clean water and why clean water matters.”

The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program prepares participants for doctoral studies through involvement in research and other scholarly activities. Participants are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have demonstrated strong academic potential. Institutions work closely with participants as they complete their undergraduate requirements. Institutions encourage participants to enroll in graduate programs and then track their progress through to the successful completion of advanced degrees. The goal is to increase the attainment of PhD degrees by students from underrepresented segments of society.

Four Clarkson University students recently had the opportunity to perform research across the eastern United States through the McNair Scholars Research Program. Left to right: Maria Lang, Stephen Carter, Jasmine Stephens, and Nancy Sloat.

Four Clarkson University McNair scholars recently had the opportunity to expand their boundaries beyond Clarkson’s campus and enrich their research experiences through The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program The students were able to widen their networking experiences and enhance their graduate school preparation by working at a variety of research institutions across the eastern United States.

Jasmine Stephens, a senior from Pearland, Texas, explored medical research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s (AECOM) anatomy and structural biology department in Bronx, N.Y. Under Professor Sherry Downie, Stephens studied arteriovenous fistula in end stage renal disease and hemodialysis. She was given the opportunity through the Minority Student Summer Research Opportunity Program. “This experience has not only allowed me to learn more about medical research, but also more about the medical school application process, highlights of what AECOM has to offer, and current research topics in the medical field,” said Stephens. “In addition, I had the chance to observe a surgery at Bronx-Lebanon.”

Nancy Sloat, a senior from El Paso, Texas, performed research at Frito-Lay’s quality and research development program in Massachusetts. Her project focused on breakage mapping. Sloat analyzed the breakage that occurred throughout the Frito-Lay plant. Through engineering and scientific solutions, she was able to figure out what caused breakage in different chips.

Stephen Carter, a senior from Fort Ann, N.Y., performed research through a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research for Undergraduates (REU) program at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Carter conducted his research, titled “Differential Inequalities and Maximum Principles,” under the supervision of Professors Robert Martin and Karen Bobinyec, both faculty members in the mathematics department at NCSU. Carter says that he has become more confident to expand his graduate school list to larger and more prestigious schools after his summer REU experience.

To bring her dream of becoming an astronaut closer to reality, Maria Lang, a junior from El Paso, Texas, performed research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Working under NASA Engineer Nick Shur in the electromechanical engineering department, Lang furthered her project titled “The Thermospheric Temperature Imager (TTI) Development.” “This experience strengthened my desires to study aerospace engineering at graduate school, work for NASA and become an astronaut,” said Lang.

Academically strong students possessing a strong interest in pursuing a doctoral degree are accepted into the McNair Scholars Program. The program was established to prepare students from first-generation and low-income backgrounds, or to students who are underrepresented in graduate education, for doctoral studies

Each year, Clarkson selects only 24 students to participate in the program. They are matched with a faculty member with similar research interests and are invited to participate in a summer-long research project to help them prepare for graduate school. Only 190 colleges across the country are chosen by Congress to host McNair scholars.

McNair is a Trio program through the Federal Department of Education, hosted by Clarkson University.