ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Alexandria Boehm - Environmental
Engineer
Alexandria Boehm grew up in Oahu, Hawaii, immersed in
the ocean. “I spent a lot of time in the water,”
she recalls, “surfing, snorkeling, SCUBA diving.”
But when Boehm started college, “I didn’t
know I’d end up studying coastal waters,”
she says. “It just sort of developed that way.”
She does, however, remember what helped her decide to
take up environmental engineering. In her mom’s
backyard in Hawaii, there’s a canal. “We
used to swim in there,” she recalls. “But
now it’s so disgusting and polluted.”
Today, as an environmental engineering professor at
Stanford University, she brings groups of students back
to the ocean she grew up loving. While recently investigating
the microbes in coastal runoff that can sicken people
and animals like sea otters, Boehm enlisted students
to monitor the beach waters. But environmental engineers
not only work to solve the problems of polluted runoff
into ocean waters and wetlands, they also investigate
ways to make air cleaner, and develop new methods of
making water drinkable.
Throughout the course of their major, students at Penn
State-Harrisburg learn about the design aspects of water
treatment facilities by working in one and find out
about wetlands by gathering water samples. Field work,
says Charles Cole, the university’s environmental
engineering program director, “will hopefully
balance the mundane and tedious courses like calculus,
physics, and engineering graphics.”
Environmental engineering majors also have to be a
bit more familiar with biology and chemistry than the
average engineering major, says Ryan Dupont, director
of Utah State University’s environmental engineering
program. But, after four years of undergraduate coursework,
environmental engineering majors can embark on a wide
range of careers. One of Utah State’s grads now
works at Frito-Lay managing the waste that comes with
the production of millions of pounds of potato chips.
“He figures out how to make those products with
less waste,” Dupont says. Much of the work being
done in Iraq these days revolves around the challenges
of environmental engineering. Even the transmission
of the SARS virus is an environmental engineering problem.
“The sneezing and the coughing are symptoms, but
it also means that you’re contaminating surfaces,”
says Penn State’s Cole. Environmental engineers
study how disease can be transmitted in the air and
from surfaces.
Back in California, Boehm teaches students that environmental
engineering is an ever-changing discipline. One of the
hot fields of study is called bioremediation—the
process of using organisms to eat up, say, nasty oil
spills. “If you feed the organism molasses, it
will grow, and help to degrade waste products,”
Boehm explains. Environmental engineers are also just
beginning to learn that common drugs like aspirin, Prozac,
and ibuprofen are increasingly ending up in the ocean.
Engineers study their potential effects, especially
how they might interfere with the life cycles of marine
organisms.
Boehm recently enlisted the help of a group from a nearby
high school to collect water samples. She knows from
her own surfing days that direct contact with the environment
can help spark a lifelong interest in the subject. “You
can learn about the tides and the waves,” she
says, “but when you’re sitting on the beach
for six hours straight, you actually see the tide coming
up. That’s what really drives their curiosity
and their desire to learn more about it.”
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