By Elizabeth Heubeck ’91
Mark Marten, a professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, was recently selected to participate in I-Corps. His startup, MycoInnovation LLC, is working to develop an additive for chicken feed that would be cheaper and safer than antibiotics, which are currently used in the majority of chicken feed to make the animals grow more efficiently. (The startup also received a $100,000 award from the Maryland Innovation Initiative.)
Marten has been at the university for two decades. He describes I-Corps as “entrepreneurial boot camp,” and he credits the program for making it possible for him to even imagine starting a company. 'We have a lot to learn,” he adds. “We’re not business people.”
]]>Missed that news? It was not a real storm, but it might as well have been.
Philadelphia Water Department employees turned on a fire hydrant on West Girard Avenue for three hours, enough to fill up two longish ditches with 35,000 gallons of water - an experimental simulation of 3.5 inches of rain. Then they watched it disappear.
The ditches are rain gardens, brimming with grasses, flowers, and monitoring equipment, and they are part of an underground revolution.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of a consent agreement signed with state environmental regulators, and the city says it has met its target of keeping more than 600 million gallons of rain out of the aging sewer system each year.
It has done so with hundreds of water-absorbing "tools": plant-studded green roofs, parking lots made of permeable pavement, stormwater trenches, and rain gardens such as the two on West Girard.
The reason for the ambitious program? As in many older communities, most of the city is served by combined sewer systems, meaning that rainwater is directed into the same pipes that carry the flow from showers, sinks, and toilets.
That is OK in dry weather, but with any amount of significant rainfall, the combined stream of sewage and rainwater starts to overflow into creeks and rivers, running afoul of the federal Clean Water Act.
Some cities have opted to comply with the law by building giant underground tanks to hold stormwater temporarily before sending it off to sewage treatment plants. Philadelphia proposed, instead, to soak as much rain as possible into the ground, the way nature intended, said Christopher S. Crockett, a deputy commissioner for the water department.
"Instead of creating expressways for the stormwater to get into our system, we're trying to create little traffic jams for the stormwater to stay on the site and get into the ground," Crockett said.
But the job is less than 10 percent completed.
The city says it has exceeded its five-year pledge to "green" 744 acres, defined as acreage where the various rain gardens and other infiltration tools can absorb at least one inch of rain.
In the next five years, the agreement calls for the city to triple that amount. And by 2036, the target is 9,564 acres - the equivalent of keeping nearly eight billion gallons out of the sewer system each year. Even then, there would still be occasional sewage overflows.
How much is eight billion gallons? Imagine a giant tank covering JFK Plaza. That amount of liquid would fill such a tank more than a mile high.
Still, the water already being kept out the sewers, conservatively estimated at 600 million gallons a year, is more than a drop in the bucket. That amount would still fill an imaginary JFK Plaza tank more than 500 feet high.
"It's one of the largest-scale implementations of greened acres that we've seen in the nation," said Jon Capacasa, director of the water protection division for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's mid-Atlantic region.
The water department has water-pressure sensors deployed at dozens of sites to see how well it works. And at a handful of spots, scientists are busy gathering more detailed data.
At the West Girard location, among others, Villanova University researchers are measuring near-surface water pressure, temperature, humidity, and other indicators.
Readings are captured every five minutes, and Cara Albright, who is working on her doctorate in water resources engineering, comes by periodically to download it onto her laptop. Water-pressure readings are translated into rates of flow.
"We basically try to measure everything that's coming into the site and everything that's leaving the site," she said.
The gardens are planted with purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan, Shenandoah switchgrass, and other hardy species, said Chris Bergerson, a water resources engineer for the city water department.
"They have to be able to withstand periods of drought, and they have to be able to survive when inundated," he said.
Elsewhere, Swarthmore College is leading an effort to measure underground water pressure at various levels down to seven feet below the surface, in order to calculate how much water is getting to the water table. Measurements are taken beneath "greened" sites as well as under regular patches of grass.
It is too soon to report hard numbers, but the differences between greened and un-greened sites appear "dramatic," said team member Claire Welty, a groundwater hydrologist and engineering professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
"The whole country is looking to Philadelphia to see how to do it," she said.
Crockett said it also is too soon to see measurable improvements in the four water bodies into which the combined sewers discharge their flow: the Delaware River and Schuylkill, and the Cobbs and Tacony Creeks.
But the end result will be cleaner water as well as more natural, stable flow rates.
Currently, a heavy rain takes the Tacony from ankle-deep to more than 6 feet deep in some places, Crockett said. That leads to flooding and erosion, and it wreaks havoc on wildlife.
The benefits go beyond clean water, Crockett said. The added greenery keeps the city cooler in the summer, along with absorbing greenhouse gases that can contribute to climate change. Then there is the improved quality of life when a vacant lot is turned into an inviting urban oasis, he said.
It is not cheap, with an estimated long-term price tag of more than $2 billion. Some of that comes from business owners, who now pay sewer bills based in part on the amount of impervious cover on their sites - rather than the old method based strictly on water usage. Rates have soared for some.
The water department says the alternative to the green approach, building large underground holding tanks, would cost even more.
And such tanks likely would be built with outside labor, whereas the weeding, drain-clearing, and other maintenance required for the green approach is done by hiring city residents.
"You're really getting many, many benefits in one," said the EPA's Capacasa.
The tally of green installations changes from week to week, at www.phillywatersheds.org, but is well into the hundreds - some built by the city, others by private landowners.
That is because for all development on sites measuring more than 15,000 square feet, the builder is required to install enough rain gardens, green roofs, and the like to handle the first 1.5 inches of runoff.
Expect to see much more in the coming years. When a real tropical storm hits, rain gardens such as the one on West Girard will be ready.
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@TomAvril1
When Erin Lavik, professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, was pursuing her graduate degree, she was required to pursue a minor outside of her discipline, and she selected playwriting. Lavik found that teamwork was crucial to the success of theatre, and that it also translated well into the scientific field she was pursuing, she explained in her recent TEDx Broadway talk “Genius Is Created Through Collaboration.”
“Theatre is the greatest gift you can give an aspiring scientist because theatre is dreaming realized,” Lavik said. She shared that she watched people come together with big ideas about stories, lights, and sound, only to surpass their dreams and the dreams of others around them as they moved forward with the creative process.
Lavik discussed how collaboration is crucial in the scientific discovery process, just as it is essential to a successful production in theatre, and she described how teamwork has impacted her research. She also addressed common stereotypes about the personalities and tendencies of scientists, including that they are male, work in isolation late into the night, and are odd or strange, and said that these stereotypes need to be broken.
She points out that as young children we are all scientists, and, as we grow into adulthood and pursue careers, there is great value in continuing to support the intense curiosity and willingness to experiment and learn that children often demonstrate.
As a student interested in pursuing engineering, Lavik said, “Knowing that I could work with other people”—that science didn’t need to be a solitary enterprise—“made it a little less scary. And I went to college of be an engineer so that I could learn about science and apply it to big problems.”
The big problem that Lavik and her team are working on now is determining how to protect and repair the brain and spinal cord after injury, with a focus on stopping internal bleeding.
“I don’t know if our material will ultimately work in humans,” she said. “But I am absolutely and utterly sure that we wouldn’t have gotten to this point if it wasn’t for the fact that we have a whole team.”
Video available at this link
Sara “Cheli” Arussy ’16, chemical engineering
Travis Dennis ’16, chemical engineering
Ganesh Mysore ’16, chemical engineering and political science
Maryland Secretary of Commerce Mike Gill visited UMBC on April 7, 2016, for an afternoon focused on UMBC research and entrepreneurship.
While at UMBC, Secretary Gill met with President Freeman Hrabowski and UMBC leaders focused on research and technology commercialization, including Ellen Hemmerly, executive director of the bwtech@UMBC Research & Technology Park. He also toured the lab of Govind Rao, director of the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST) and professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering (CBEE).
CAST is known as an international leader in developing revolutionary technologies intended to scale up to impact lives across the globe. One tool currently under development is a portable, briefcase-sized bioreactor that rapidly manufactures medicines, replacing airdrops of pharmaceutical supplies to battlefields with point-of-care technology to manufacture specific drugs as they are needed. Rao’s lab has also developed an affordable incubator for vulnerable newborns in low-resource areas. With co-PI Yodan Kostov, CBEE research professor, and faculty collaborators from the College of Engineering and Information Technology, Rao is also working on a wearable system to track asthma triggers in pediatric patients, supported through a nearly $2 million award from NIH.
“We were proud to share with Secretary Gill the strong record of our faculty in launching new companies and contributing to the Maryland economy,” says Karl Steiner, vice president for research. “UMBC and bwtech have been partnering successfully for a long time on creating and attracting businesses that match our scientific strengths in cybersecurity, life sciences and environmental technologies.”
Secretary Gill began his service in the Maryland Department of Commerce in January 2015, after four decades as an entrepreneur, tech executive, and investment banker. His work with UMBC extends back over a decade, through his service on the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, 2004-2009.
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