JOR 221 Project 20
This past August Craver led a team of students, Students for Global Sustainability, to Guatemala. But this wasn’t Craver’s first time visiting the country. Since 2006 except 2008, Craver traveled to the same village with students, working to discover and create a simple design for a wastewater treatment plant.
After going so many years, Craver discovered the trip is more than just finding a design for a wastewater treatment plant. For the previous years visiting, it has been spent gaining the trust of the locals and creating relationships.
“I think that more than a social barrier it is a trust barrier,” Craver said. “It is the same type of barrier that you are going to have with somebody who is trying to give you advice that you don’t know. It is like, ‘why should I be trusting you if I don’t have any connection with you?’ In the way that I address that is that I try to stop being the front person in the community.”
Working to develop a simple way to get clean water has not been easy. Through working with her students, and teaching the locals, trying to get them to solve problems, Craver herself has learned that doing too much and doing too little can both cause problems.
“When we are there we always have educational activities for the teachers and the students,” Craver said. “These systems are going to be used by humans, and humans we are very complicated. We act individually in one way and socially in another way. So when we want to do these big implementations in the community, there is what I call ‘human factors.’”
For Craver, Guatemala has opened up a new line of research. It has allowed her and her students to mix both the social and engineering aspects of their lives. For these engineers, they gear the knowledge they have learned and break it down to help the less fortunate.
The groups of students that have gone have gained useful real world experience, while also improving the living conditions of the people in the country. Craver has found a way to take her love for water and for engineering to help people.
“What I have learned and what I hope that the students have learned, is that solving problems is more complicated then you think,” Craver said. “I think at least for engineers we usually think we have all this great technology, but who is going to use it? I think for most of the students they think the solution is so simple, but it is all learning and gaining a different perspective of problems.”
Craver plans on returning to Guatemala. The future holds building in the second phases of the project. After leaving this past summer the group stands at training and implementation. The area, inhabited mostly my Mayan people, as well as Craver hope to have an installation next summer.
Dr. Vinka Craver
By Emily Jacobs
Teaching and discovering new ways for developing countries to have a clean water source
Dr. Dawn Cardace
By Emily Jacobs
Being charmed by deep rocks in the Earth's mantle
Dawn Cardace works as an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island in the department of geosciences. She investigates problems in geobiology, blending expertise in biochemistry, mineralogy, and environmental microbiology to understand how geology and biology interact.
Cardace’s love of geology takes her all over the world. As her studies draw her to convergent margins, she has field research in Newfoundland, New Zealand, Turkey, the Philippines and Northern California.
Talking to Cardace, she has a great love for her line of work. She leaks passion and enthusiasm on what she studies, teaches and learns. Having been involved in research supported by the NASA Ames Research Center, it has taken her to the many different cool and dark sub surfaces on Earth.
This work, which is collaborated with the RITES project, Rhode Island Technology Enhanced Science Program, has allowed Cardace to blend her research with teaching projects. She has been able to use her field research to focus on her primary interest in teacher professional development opportunities.
“I was in California from 2008 to 2010,” Cardace said. “So it was a two and half almost three year block that I spent out there. The three sites that I had proposed to visit for my big project there, one was of course Northern California and Oregon where they have all kinds of old mantle rock exposed, because it is a convergent margin.”
For Cardace, Northern California has been where much of her research has taken place. Prior to being hired at the University of Rhode Island in 2010 Cardace was located there.
“I would say my main research site right now is in Northern California,” Cardace said. “I started some work there when won a small proposal to drill eight wells, in these blocks of mantel rock, just buried under a shallow soil cap. We monitor that, and try to go back seasonally.”
The proposal that Cardace won, was the grant given to her by NASA. This project has been a large part of her research in tying together mineralogy and habitability to be used in the ongoing search for life beyond Earth.
"What NASA does well is of course multifaceted," Cardace said. "My little experience there showed me that they're investing in astrobiology research, and they are trying to really see lots of projects that can work on Earth environments that are analogous to other planetary settings. It is the scientific community really getting curious."
Cardace goes and find Earth’s extreme environments, to better improve her investigating. As a passionate scientist she is “Charmed by deep rocks in the Earth’s mantel.”
As she continues her work teaching at the University of Rhode Island as well as her field research in Northern California, she focuses on what she hopes to find most. Pushing the boundaries of what we know about our planet and the universe.
Alli Farrelly
By Emily Jacobs
An aspiring journalist with a passion to investigate
All four years of attending North Kingstown High School, going out of state to school was the goal. While NKHS sends the most kids to URI than any other high school in Rhode Island, Alli thought that wouldn't be her.
But as usual, life works in mysterious ways, and while Alli got into 14 of the 15 schools she applied, URI became her future.
"It kind of just happened," Farrelly said. "I could go to a school out of state but be in a lot of debt when I graduated. After talking a lot with my parents it just seemed so smart to go to URI."
Alli has come to love URI, but growing up in Jamestown and continuing on to school at URI, her dream job comes as a surprise.
"I would love to work for a magazine, something like National Geographic," Farrelly said. "I have a hard time describing to people exactly what I want to do, I just know I want to be right in the action, like knee deep in mud somewhere interviewing someone."
For a small town kid, the want to travel and find the story may come from being the oldest of five kids. Having a big family, Alli has learned how to fend for herself and be independent. Never did Alli's parents ignore her, but with five children running around the house, fending yourself comes easy.
But, the passion for traveling may also come from Alli's love of finding the story first. Throughout her life people have always told her she has a "trustworthy face." People tell her things first. She wants to continue hearing the story first, but instead Alli wants to go out and find it.
"I have never been on a plane," Farrelly said. "I have been all around Rhode Island, and I have been to Canada, but never one a plane. I would love to get on a plane and travel all around and talk to people about what is going on, find out what's new."
The desire to travel and write for such a cultural magazine, such as National Geographic, sounds like a job for an experienced world traveler. Someone like Alli, with a fresh take and new ideas however, would be an exciting new addition to any magazine.