09/01/2022
By Ed Brennen
After applying for the plastics engineering doctoral program at UMass Lowell, Becca Olanrewaju learned from her advisor, Prof. David Kazmer, about a new interdisciplinary program that the university was starting for graduate students interested in sustainability.
Called Sustainable Water Innovations in Materials – Mentoring, Education and Research, or SWIMMER for short, the two-year program brings together master’s and doctoral students from the Francis College of Engineering, the Kennedy College of Sciences and the Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences to develop sustainable materials and chemicals that will not harm water resources. The program is funded by a five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award.
“When I saw that it was interdisciplinary, that caught my eye,” says Olanrewaju, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in plastics engineering from Penn State Behrend in her hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. “When you’re in a specific industry, you get caught up in your own little world and you don’t necessarily realize that it affects other disciplines as well.”
This fall, Olanrewaju was among SWIMMER’s first cohort of 10 students. The program is led by Plastics Engineering Prof. Meg Sobkowicz-Kline and Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Assoc. Prof. Chris Hansen. Scott Langevin, former program manager for Tufts Global Education, was hired as SWIMMER program coordinator last spring.
The program was launched at a time when water resources are in a state of crisis around the world, with pollutants, including toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), contaminating drinking water supplies and droughts becoming more severe because of climate change.
“As we grapple with climate change, protecting every person’s access to clean water depends on our understanding of our water sources and cycles, and the transport of nutrients and contaminants in surface water and groundwater,” says Madelaine Griesel, an earth systems science Ph.D. student who joined the SWIMMER program this fall. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Griesel earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
Trainees spend the first year attending a biweekly seminar series focused on technical and professional development and community engagement. In Year 2, they take a two-semester interdisciplinary core course and complete team capstone projects. Trainees also have the opportunity to complete internships with partner organizations, such as the Merrimack River Watershed Council, or with a company affiliated with the Green Chemistry in Commerce Council.
Professional communications are a requirement of the grant, so science communications consultant Carol Lynn Alpert was brought on to help SWIMMER trainees learn how to talk about their research with a broad range of audiences. During a seminar at University Crossing this fall, Alpert had each student deliver an elevator pitch about their work tailored for a general audience, and then a longer, more technical version for those familiar with their field.
During her elevator pitch, Olanrewaju pretended she was telling her mom about her work designing coextrusion dyes for high-performance polymers by comparing it to pushing two colors of Play-Doh together.
“If I can explain this to my mom, I can explain it to anyone,” says Olanrewaju, who also appreciated the chance to work on her public speaking.
“How you communicate science to the public—the idea of using a Hollywood movie to tell that story—can have more impact than a lawyer or a state legislator doing the good work can,” Sobkowicz-Kline says.
After spending nearly a year developing curriculum and recruiting the first cohort, the SWIMMER team kicked off the program with a three-day orientation in late August called “Immersion Week.” It left Hansen feeling “energized.”
“Students were able to make genuine connections with people who have a similar passion,” he says.
Students created individual development plans and took part in diversity and bystander training, the latter through UML’s Making WAVES initiative, an NSF-funded program to increase the diversity of faculty in STEM fields. On a canal boat tour and visit to the Tsongas Industrial History Center, the students learned about the importance of the Merrimack River, which now provides drinking water to 700,000 people, in the founding of Lowell. They also met with environmental scientist (and former New Hampshire state representative) Mindi Messmer and toured UML’s Toxics Use Reduction Institute.
“They’re going to do a lot of community-based research, working with this water resource that everyone relies on, so one of the core goals of the program is to have the students learn how to communicate with the community,” Langevin says.
Looking ahead to the next recruitment cycle, Sobkowicz-Kline likened it to “building the house as you’re trying to live in it.” One of the challenges of creating an interdisciplinary graduate course for students representing six different departments from three colleges, she says, is that “those structures don’t exist at the university.”
“We see that as a really important piece of this grant—creating this institutional transformation and helping UML grow in terms of how we think about graduate programs,” she says.
To ensure that the program attracts students from underrepresented groups, Hansen expects recruiting efforts to extend to the minority-serving institutions Prairie View A&M University in Texas and the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, which are both academic partners in the award.
Olanrewaju looks forward to “diving deeper” into water safety topics specific to the Merrimack River. She appreciates the opportunity to think innovatively about plastics engineering—a field that she says is sometimes viewed negatively when it comes to sustainability.
“In the plastics industry, we tend to be more reactive to environmental problems that are arising instead of being proactive,” she says. “Hopefully, this program will help me be more proactive as my career progresses.”
In addition to Olanrewaju and Griesel, students enrolled in the program include Ph.D. students Kerry Candlen ’20, ’22 (polymer plastics engineering), Gustavo Salcedo (civil and environmental engineering), Alexandria Williams (chemical engineering), Targol Teymourian (civil and environmental engineering), Dylan Shuster (green and polymer chemistry), Saraswathy Vaidyanathan (applied biology) and Isabel Augustine (chemistry), as well as master’s student Sayeda Annama Reaz (public health).