Meet the Students
The UDP field studies offered a rare opportunity for hands-on training of future engineers and environmental scientists. During the March tests, Brookhaven’s Office of Educational Programs (OEP) partnered with Brooklyn’s New York City College of Technology (City Tech) and Medgar Evers College to recruit students to collect samples and assist in setting up equipment. Approximately 50 students from schools across the country were part of DOE-sponsored internship programs that included UDP fieldwork.
 |
|
Doniche Derrick |
 |
|
Princilla Francis |
City Tech’s Princilla Francis and Doniche Derrick from Medgar Evers College worked on both the winter and summer experiments. In March, both were stationed on street corners near the Madison Square Garden release points with handheld air samplers. At proscribed intervals, they would collect and record air samples. While both study periods featured extreme temperatures out on the Manhattan streets, most students who participated in both studies preferred the summer heat.
“March was beyond freezing,” said Francis. “Luckily there was a Chinese restaurant on my corner where I could warm up between sample periods.” Derrick, who grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, now hopes to earn a Ph.D in environmental chemistry.
“The Urban Dispersion Program helped me with my career goals because I see myself doing similar research in the future.”
”We really appreciated the assistance that the student volunteers provided, said Paul Kalb. “While it was a learning experience for them, their help in deploying and collecting samples enabled us to significantly enlarge the amount of data collected.”
 |
|
John Cornwell from Duke University with mentor Ray Edwards. |
One student in the summer internship program made a significant contribution to the refinement of the technology used in the study. John Cornwell of Duke University developed an enhanced base component for the Brookhaven Atmospheric Tracer Sampler (BATS), used to actively sample released perfluorocarbon tracer (PFT) by pumping air through adsorbent-fi lled tubes. Under the supervision of his mentors, John Heiser and Ray Edwards of the Environmental Sciences Department, Cornwell helped develop a cost-effective replacement for the electronic control system previously used in the BATS, an integral part of the Lab’s PFT technology.
Cornwell first discovered Brookhaven when he entered the Lab’s bridge building contest while a senior at Huntington High School. He began working on the BATS project as a summer intern at Brookhaven last year. An electrical engineering and computer science major, he plans a career in robotics, which uses similar control and feedback systems as the ones he designed for the BATS.
“At school, I build things but they’re all pretty trivial and have been done a thousand times,” Cornwell said. “It was nice to do something important.”
“One of our objectives at the Office of Educational Programs is to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers,” said OEP’s Noel Blackburn.
