REALITY SHOW
Barrett Scholars dig into real-world problems
In a small lab in Votey Hall, behind a door emblazoned with a biohazard warning, Caroline McManus ’09 preps Petri dishes to grow Legionella pneumophila, the bacterium that causes Legionnaire’s disease. Downstairs, in Votey’s large, brightly lit materials lab, Nate Dagesse ’09 mixes up a batch of cob, a clay-and-sand mixture that, when shaped into bricks and dried, is a building material similar to adobe. In a small office over in Farrell Hall, in UVM’s new Transportation Research Center, Nathan Robinson ’09 hunches over his computer, studying a plethora of consumer and energy-market data as he ponders ways to encourage Vermont commuters to ditch their trucks and SUVs in favor of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
All three are undergraduate civil engineering majors, and they’re spending this sunny midsummer day at work on research projects. They’re among the seven 2008 winners of Richard Barrett Scholarships, a program, now in its fourth year, that gives undergraduates in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences a chance to conduct applied research in a wide range of environmental or interdisciplinary areas. The $8,000 scholarships provide attractive nuggets for students to add to their resumes, as well as the experience of pursuing funded research: articulating a problem to be studied, putting together a proposal for funding, and executing the work in an academically rigorous manner. Students work on projects led by CEMS faculty, often as part of teams that involve graduate students and faculty from other departments around the University.
“This is a fantastic opportunity for students,” says Donna Rizzo, an assistant professor in civil & environmental engineering who oversees the Barrett Scholarship program at UVM. “There aren’t many chances out there for undergraduates to do paid research, and the mentoring experience they receive with faculty is incredibly valuable in helping students apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to all kinds of real-world problems.”
The scholarships are administered by the Barrett Foundation, a family-run philanthropic organization founded by Richard Barrett ’66, a native of Saratoga Springs, New York, who studied mechanical engineering at UVM. Barrett credits a summer undergraduate internship of his own with pointing him toward a remarkably successful career, and it was that experience that prompted him to create the scholarships in 2004. His hope was that the scholarships would act as a magnet, attracting additional support that would help the program grow. So far, he says, it’s working. The money, mentoring, and real-world focus of the Barrett Scholarships are attracting more students, more interest among outside donors, and more faculty-directed grant money from organizations like the National Science Foundation that are putting an increased premium on the value of undergraduate research.
In the biohazard lab, McManus, clad in a white lab coat, checks the progress of the bacteria she’s growing. The project is led by Jane Hill, an assistant professor of civil & environmental engineering. Hill is trying to develop a technique that could identify the presence of Legionella pneumophila by sampling an infected person’s breath, and the project appeals to McManus on a number of levels. “Microbiology is pretty far from what I’ve been studying in civil engineering, but I saw her project as this really interesting mix of medicine and engineering,” says McManus, a senior from Hopkinton, Massachusetts. “I talked to her about the work, and she got me really excited about it. She said, ‘It doesn’t matter what your major is—learn everything you can.’”
McManus has bounced from one interest to the next at UVM—architecture, structural engineering, interior design, nursing—and she’s still not sure what field she wants to pursue beyond college. The Barrett internship gives her a chance to try on yet another hat. “I’ve never been the kind of person to jump into a project like this, but I wanted to be able to tell myself that I could do it,” she says, holding a Petri dish to the light, the bacteria inside growing in streaks resembling tiny ice crystals. “I’ve spent a huge amount of time this summer reading, asking questions, and learning basic lab techniques. I’ve already gained a lot of confidence.”
POWER OF AN INTERNSHIP
In the summer of 1965, shortly after he finished his junior year as a mechanical engineering major at UVM, Richard Barrett began an internship at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but a couple of his Sigma Phi Epsilon frat brothers were also Kodak interns, so Barrett figured he’d at least have a bit of fun. Four decades later, he has a slightly different take on it. “They gave us real problems to solve,” he says of his Kodak mentors. “That summer was one of the best experiences of my career.”
From the start, Kodak gave Barrett and his SigEp brothers real work to do in plant engineering. They started by working on a new ventilation system for a women’s restroom, and moved on to a variety of projects throughout the facility. “It gave me the opportunity to see what engineering was all about,” Barrett says. “I got to see all aspects of the operation, and that meant I could better relate things I learned in class to the real needs of a company.” He ended up interning at Kodak for three summers, and spent his final summer in the company’s computing division—a foretaste of his career to come.
After completing an MBA at Stanford University, Barrett worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts, then for the just-launched Storage Technology Corporation (now known as Sun StorageTek, a division of Sun Microsystems) in Boulder, Colorado. He went to work for STC in 1970 as an assistant to the VP for finance, when the company’s revenues were practically nil; nine years later, STC was a $700 million concern, and Barrett was director of European marketing operations, living in London with his wife, Elaine, and their two young daughters. He left STC in 1979 to found Leasetec Corporation, which ran vendor lease programs for computer and telecom companies. Leasetec outstripped even the phenomenal growth of STC; by the time Barrett and his partners sold the company to KeyCorp, in 1997, Leasetec was a $1.3 billion firm doing business in twenty countries. “In my career, everything has remained related—my early work had a lot to do with what I did later,” says Barrett, now sixty-three and living in Boulder. “That’s why I tell students that what they do early in their careers will likely be what they do for their entire careers. I tell them, ‘If you like it, stick with it. If not, change, but do it early.’”
In 1987, Barrett and his family started The Barrett Foundation, which funds an array of environmental, educational, and animal welfare programs. He never forgot his first Kodak internship, and in 2004 he created the Barrett Scholarship program; the foundation now supports five Barrett Scholarships. “I wanted students to have the experience of working on real-life problems, which meant so much to me,” Barrett says. Instead of pairing students with corporate sponsors outside the University, the scholarship program teams students with faculty-led research projects, the better to create lasting mentor relationships. “So far the model is working—I think the students are producing very high quality work,” Barrett says of the first four classes of Barrett scholars. “Students are excited by the opportunity to do independent undergraduate research, and faculty are excited by the possibility for more departments in the University to get involved. It seems that there are a lot of ways for this program to grow.”
The presence of the Barrett program has helped Rizzo and other CEMS faculty win nearly $1.5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation since 2005, money that will be used primarily for developing UVM’s undergraduate engineering curriculum. Rizzo has also recruited additional CEMS faculty to participate in the Barrett program, and their research grants fund one additional Barrett scholar. Another Barrett Scholarship is supported by an anonymous private donor.
STUDENT TO STUDENT
On a weekday evening in early July, dozens of high school students file into Votey’s materials lab, a teenage parade of flip-flops, cargo shorts, and giant t-shirts. The students are participants in the science and technology segment of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont, a summer educational enrichment program held on college campuses around the state. The students are shuffling between three Votey classrooms tonight to hear the Barrett Scholars give short presentations on their research projects. The materials lab stop is to hear Nate Dagesse talk about cob.
“OK, listen up,” booms Dagesse, like a camp counselor rounding up his charges. “I’m Nate, I’m a civil engineering major, and I’m studying something called cob. Anybody know what cob is?” The room quiets, and several of the high school students flip their cell phones closed.
Dagesse tells the students that cob has great potential for use as a sustainable building material, especially in developing countries where more sophisticated construction materials are either scarce or prohibitively expensive. His project, part of the research being conducted by civil engineering faculty members Mandar Dewoolkar and Nancy Hayden, is to determine how much water, and which mixed-in fibers, make the strongest cob blocks. Dagesse is using a mix of clay and sand that he excavated from a site in Derby, Vermont, near his hometown of Newport. In the materials lab, he runs the raw materials through an industrial tumbler, which produces a fine, silt-like powder that he mixes with water and forms into blocks.
He invites the students to come forward and stick their hands into a large white bucket of grey-brown cob powder. “That feels so weird—it’s like water,” says a girl with large hoop earrings and white sunglasses perched atop her head. Dagesse demonstrates cob’s compression strength on the lab’s stress machine; the block withstands nearly two-thousand pounds of force before cracking, which elicits some appreciative nods from the students. He describes the trip he made to Honduras three weeks earlier, where he tested local cob that used pine needles to give the blocks tensile strength. “I didn’t even know what cob was when I started on this project—I thought I wanted to work on skyscrapers or something,” he tells them. “Not everyone gets to do research like this, but the opportunity is here if you want it.”
A couple hours later, after hearing all the Barrett presenters, the high school students head back to their rooms in the Living/Learning Complex. “I’m really motivated to do research, so it was definitely cool to hear the Barrett presentations,” says Matt Desmarais, a senior at Spaulding High School in Barre. Desmarais is considering becoming a mechanical engineer, “but not for my whole life,” he says. He’s interested in alternative energy research, but he also wants to study ways to limit obesity. “Flexibility is sweet,” he adds. He came to the GIV event wanting to study robotics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and hadn’t really considered applying to UVM. After a couple of days on campus, though, he’s reconsidering. “There’s some cool stuff going on here, and the funding that engineering gets is pretty impressive,” he concedes. “The chance to do research is definitely cool. So, yeah, I’ve put UVM on my list.”
BARRETT SCHOLARS
2005
Brendan Kennedy ’06 measured soil moisture through image processing, using multiple data types and advanced environmental sensor technologies.
Jennifer Gagnon ’06 used artificial intelligence techniques to study physical stream characteristics and how they impact biological conditions.
Alaina Dickason ’07 tested the usefulness of LIDAR, a new high-resolution laser mapping technique, for use in river research.
Tracy Owen ’06 used an experimental flume to study the impact of downed trees on stream channel size and shape.
2006
Chris Palombini ’07 developed a wireless sensor platform for environmental monitoring projects.
Nathan Schaffer ’06 ran an experimental study to classify the erodibility of soils in dams, embankments, and levees.
Danielle Eastman ’07 investigated sulfur-utilizing microbes in the Frasassi cave system of Italy.
Ryan Foster ’07 investigated multiple soil parameters and their effects on stream bank stability.
Aaron Hartmann ’07 studied bacterial communities and nutrient levels and the role they play in algal blooms in Missisquoi Bay.
2007
Jeremy Matt ’02 created a computerized system to assess the transport of contaminants through building materials, and for the prediction of leaf wetness, a leading indicator of disease in crops.
Karen Sentoff ’08 collected detailed spatial data for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department to assess the impact of increased water temperature on cold-water fish species.
Peter Larson ’08 analyzed the roof structure of the historic Shelburne Farms Breeding Barn to assess
structural weaknesses that could cause the barn to collapse under heavy snows.
Iliana M. Vazquez-Spickers ’08 studied tailpipe emissions from light-duty vehicles and their impact on air quality.
Charles Farmer ’10 studied how bacteria affect the promotion of calcite precipitation, which can enhance the stability of soils and sequester pollutants such as toxic or radioactive metals.
2008
Andrew Cooper ’12 used multispectral imaging to detect leaf wetness.
Nathan Dagesse ’09 studied various formulas for cob, a sustainable earth building material made of clay and sand from areas in northern Vermont.
Joseph Krupa ’09 studied climate and stream-temperature data to develop a tool that would predict water temperature shifts that could impact Vermont fish populations.
Joseph Marri Jr. ’11 developed performance and emissions models to evaluate biodiesel fuels.
Caroline McManus ’09 studied techniques for identifying Legionella pneumophila, a bacterium found in manmade water systems and the primary cause of Legionnaire’s disease.
Nathan Robinson ’09 worked on a computer model designed to measure the impact of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on the regional transportation energy market.
Josh Tyler ’11 studied industrial agricultural practices that could improve the environmental quality of Lake Champlain, such as limiting the levels of nitrogen and phosphorous that result in algal blooms.
