HANOVER, N.H.Six ERDC Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) researchers mentored nine Dartmouth College first-year students during 2012-2013. The annual poster event – the culmination of the Women in Science Project (WISP) internships – was recently held at the Karen E. Wetterhahn Science Symposium at Dartmouth.
The WISP is a multi-faceted program that promotes women’s access to and persistence in studies and careers in the sciences, math and engineering. The project, established in 1990, fosters a supportive academic climate and sense of community through a variety of programs and proven support intervention strategies.
CRREL researcher/mentors for this year include Research Physical Scientists Jay Clausen and Dr. Susan Taylor, Research Mechanical Engineer Dr. Zoe Courville, ORISE Contract Researcher Amy Burzynski and Physical Scientists Dr. Eli Deeb and Seth Campbell. These researchers represent a wide range of science programs at the laboratory, from remote sensing to munitions residue modeling.
The students, their mentor and poster topics:
· Esther Wu interned with Clausen, “Application of incremental sampling methodology to soils containing aqueous introduced metal contaminants”
· Katherine Bullion and Eileen Park interned with Taylor, “Three-dimensional structure of insensitive explosives”
· Sarah McGowan interned with Courville, “Microstructural variability in Greenland snow”
· Irene Cofie and Eliza Encherman also interned with Courville, “Determining snow grain sizes in Greenland and Antarctica”
· Alexandra Kraft interned with Burzynski and Deeb, “Crevasse analysis on the Greenland ice sheet”
· Jill Horing and Nancy Wu interned with Campbell, “Determining the extent of discontinuous permafrost in Alaska through geophysical characterization”
“I really learned a lot,” said Kraft. “I was apprehensive in the beginning about traveling the snowy roads to CRREL over the winter term, but I was very excited right from the beginning about the project. This internship has introduced me to a new world. This has given me an interest in climate/earth science and I’ve even signed up for a class next term. I want to continue this interest and one day I hope to go to Greenland.”
“Students bring energy to CRREL,” said Clausen. “These internships are a good opportunity for students. With my intern, I carve out a piece of the project and we plan from beginning to end. We start off with an outline, keeping the poster in mind, and information falls into pieces that the intern fills into the outline during the internship. The outline provides something for the student to refer back to.”
“Zoe [Courville] provided us with a good overall look at CRREL and how our project fit in,” said Encherman. “Learning about the organization and the different programs that CRREL works on helped me gain an understanding of the importance of all sciences. And, before my internship, I had never thought of snow and ice and the science of it.”
The symposium is named in memory of Dartmouth Chemistry Professor Karen E. Wetterhahn, 1948-1997. Wetterhahn specialized in toxic metal exposure and was accidentally poisoned in the lab by a few drops of the organic mercury compound, dimethylmercury. She co-founded the WISP when she served as the associate dean for the sciences to increase the levels of women in science majors.